There's been so much in the news lately regarding the "terror suspects", the men suspected of trying to blow up London and Glasgow recently. Sometimes it all moves so quickly that there isn't really time to take it in properly, let alone try and think of some kind of relevant comment. However, I can try -- and if it looks rubbish? You people are just going to have to wait.
A major issue with the terror suspects (otherwise known as psychopathic nutjobs) -- at least a major angle for the tabloid press -- seems to be that they came to Britain as asylum seekers and refugees. Naturally, certain members of the press rubs their hands in glee at such a development -- evil asylum seekers and terrorists, if only there was some connection to Big Brother, too. Maybe I'm slow on the uptake, but it seems to me sometimes a point is being missed. The righteous who want our borders shut and bolted, among other things, cite this as good reason. It seems like we offer them refuge, and they bite the hand that feeds it -- as ever is the way, no good deed goes unpunished.
Many of the suspects were refugees from Somalia. I don't think many of us can even begin to imagine the horror of the civil war -- and what it is like to live through something like that, and for whatever reason to have to leave your home. I somehow doubt that these people fled Somalia, planning to commit mass murder in Britain. And so it follows, if they came to Britain as humbled, desperate people then where the changeover happened was within our own country. Sure, we can shut the doors for whatever reason and say that our nation is too much of a soft-touch -- this isn't a debate for today, my point is that there's something rotten within our own societies. I expect someone growing up in Mogadishu during the civil war could have a different perspective on life and a perceived value of life. So you have troubled men, displaced or confused, and then they're exposed to things like radical Islam and convinced the root of their problems lies outside themselves.
It could just be a coincidence, but maybe these men saw the large US oil corporations buying up land in Somalia before the president there was overthrown and the arrival of the US Marines -- perhaps they felt, or were led to believe, the US was an invading army -- taking their resources, taking their land. It could be I'm reading too much into it -- but perhaps they are reminded of it by Iraq. Or even if they aren't, perhaps there are people that have deliberately twisted these things in their minds. I really don't think this is an issue about refugees or immigration.
I don't have any easy answers, I tend to only have questions. If "radical Islamic clerics" are twisting the minds of angry or troubled men with false logic and false justifications in religion, what can we do? We pass laws against inciting racial hatred, among other things, and some people cry it's censorship -- or more often it's the same people that rail against political correctness are the same ones wanting to silence the hatemongers. Personally, I think it's the ideas that are the problem -- and stopping someone speaking them doesn't make them go away. But like I say, I don't have answers, only more questions.
Obviously, I expect 99.9% of refugees have no desire to blow up clubbers in London -- and I'm sure nobody is suggesting otherwise, not even the Daily Mail. And if these men bore no ill-will towards us when they came here, it's not a question of immigration. The fact that one or more of them lied about being from Somalia is a different matter -- yes, these things should be checked, this kind of thing is always a matter of concern, but I still don't think that is where the problem was.
There has been outcry more recently that these men attended some kind of "terror training camp" in the Lake District. Does it strike anyone else as odd that there are apparently terror training camps in the Lake District? Maybe they go hill-walking and have orienteering seminars in the driving rain? Perhaps I should be better read, then I would know exactly what is supposed to go on at these camps in the unlikely British countryside. Stranger still is that they were watched attending these camps by our security forces. This raises more questions about what exactly what's going on if our security services know these camps exist -- maybe there's more of them in places like Dartmoor and the Brecon Beacons, potential terrorists wearing cagoules, sleeping in tents and and trying to read a map as it disintegrates in the rain. Inbetween taking lessons on how to make bombs.
But I digress -- there's terrorist training camps in the British countryside? And our security forces follow and monitor suspects at these camps? Is it a question of at least they know where these camps are, and if they shut them down they might relocate somewhere else and not be able to find them again? Seems to me they should just have people infiltrate the camps, teaching them rubbish and leading the would-be terrorists off into the Dartmoor fog to get eaten by the big cats. Or just teaching them to windsurf instead of bomb making.
I read a columnist this week lamenting that we couldn't arrest the suspects sooner because people would complain they hadn't done anything wrong, yet. Unfortunate as it might seem to some, I think this is quite reasonable -- until perhaps someone sets out deliberately to commit a crime, should we really be arresting them? All that will do is fuel hatred.
It still seems to me the Glasgow bombers had a lucky escape -- it was unfortunate for them that their suicide attempt should have failed, as surely they knew what a mob of angry Glaswegians would do to them. And the mob of angry Glaswegians almost did live up to their reputation and tear them limb-from-limb...
I'm sure there's more to say, but I'm going to leave it there for today.
No comments:
Post a Comment