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No war, no terror, just a group of misfits
Published 12 July 2007
The first statement to fall from the lips of Sir Alan West stated that this battle against jihadists would last 15 years. Where did that figure come from?
Allow me to blow my own trumpet, if only briefly. Recently, on these pages, I challenged the simpleton's notion that we, the citizens of the UK, were involved in a war against terror. I suggested this was an exaggeration. I put forward a dissenting slogan: no war, no terror. This was simply an engagement with a handful of confused, ill-trained and socially dislocated young men.
To illustrate this view, I harked back to February 1943 when my mother was in labour. British and American pilots were unleashing a bombing spree on the German population that continued until the end of the war. During this period, normal life was suspended; civilians were shifted in large numbers from London to the countryside. Those who remained passed much of their time in bunkers. Our present situation bears no resemblance to this great historical time. Now a handful of jihadists, confused and twisted in the mind, have come across our skies like comets and will soon vanish. No war, no terror.
I am pleased that our new set of leaders have accepted this. Their predecessors who triggered this alarm set themselves up as military leaders. But, unlike previous cabinet members who had participated in war and received military training, Tony Blair and his type had barely been involved in a fight in the school playground. Having recognised these deficiencies, Gordon Brown has employed a First Sea Lord to advise him on security. The first statement to fall from the lips of Sir Alan West stated that this battle against jihadists would last 15 years. Where did that figure come from? Why not 12 years and three months?
From a military point of view, the enemy, with barely a successful engagement to its name, is on the run - literally. The 21/7 wild bunch failed to detonate their chapatti bombs which they manufactured in a dingy flat in north London. When the bombs failed to go off, because of their incompetence, CCTV caught them hotfooting it up the escalator at Warren Street station or stumbling and trembling in another mad run through Shepherd's Bush after being confronted by untrained citizens. A comedy of errors. Not an ounce of military training there. The Pakistani and Arab populations in the UK will not, I suspect, accommodate or conceal these misguided youths. No hiding place. I would speculate that this new caste of overseas doctors was called in to celebrate the anniversary of bombings past because their minders no longer have any locus within the indigenous communities of Islamists. Fifteen years? I say two to five.
I must admit to being confounded by the use of hospitals as a hiding place for jihadist sleepers, more so because I was a patient at King's College Hospital in south London at the time when doctors in Glasgow are alleged to have been engaged in another type of operation than the one they were sworn by the Hippocratic Oath to pursue.
At King's there exists a group of men and women, from orderlies to surgeons, from nurses to consultants, in laudable pursuit of treating the working classes of Southwark, Lewisham and Lambeth. I met Bella from Kerala, Raj from south India, Philippe, from France, Om from Pakistan and more. They all would have exposed those medical frauds whose aim was to take life - the very opposite of their stated purpose.
The medical jihadists will not last. One of the alleged terrorists was so incompetent, he was about to be disciplined at work for spending too much time on the internet and a suspicious co-worker was considering reporting him to the authorities. Had she followed her instincts, the plot would have bitten the dust. The rhetoric from our political leaders that we should expose the jihadists within our midst is already in train. It is being pursued with a care, caution and intensity way beyond what the authorities can imagine.
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