The police are treating it as a ‘terrorist incident’. I treat it as a personal attack.
For Parson’s Green is my tube station, a five minutes’ walk from where I live. The District Line train incinerated by an “improvised explosive device” at 8.20 yesterday, is one I or, even worse, my wife could have been on.
The explosive device, wrapped in a Lidl shopping bag and hidden in a bucket, wasn’t improvised very well. It exploded only partially and, while it sent a wall of fire through the train, the blast wasn’t of murderous power.
So far no fatalities have been reported, although some people were badly injured. One woman had all the skin on her legs burnt off, 28 others suffered similar injuries.
The police are looking for the suspect, who is believed to have planted several other similar devices. The suspect’s identity hasn’t been divulged yet, and we don’t know who he is. But we can take a wild guess at what he is.
It starts with an ‘M’ and describes his religion. I’ll give you a clue: he’s not a Methodist, Mormon, Mennonite, Molokan or Mithraist.
The device is similar to those previously used in London, some to greater effect, especially those triggered by suicide bombers screaming “Allahu Akbar!!!” (there, I’ve given you another clue).
The most successful of such attacks were the four staged on 7 July, 2005, that murdered 52 people. The leader of the suicide bombers was named Sidique Khan, not to be confused with the London mayor Sadiq Khan.
Mayor Sadiq Khan, not to be confused with the murderer Sidique Khan, promised that London “will never be intimidated or defeated by terrorism”. Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean the ‘M’ persons will stop trying.
Prime Minister Tessa also had a comment: “My thoughts are with those injured at Parsons Green…” She got the cliché wrong. It’s supposed to be “my thoughts and prayers…”, MTAP for short.
I don’t know if her leaving prayers out is significant, perhaps testifying to the PM’s incipient atheism. Or else she shares Richard Dawkins’s view that mass murders committed in the name of the ‘M’ faith tar all religions with the same brush.
I also wonder if the choice of a Lidl plastic bag, in preference to one from, say, Sainsbury’s, is a political statement, in this case pro-EU. Why else would an ‘M’ person use a bag from a German-owned supermarket chain?
Don’t be misled by the note of levity you may detect in my prose. This is but a defence mechanism designed to mitigate the shock, and I don’t shock easily.
Terrorist attacks striking elsewhere have a certain impersonal, abstract quality. Hence one’s outrage isn’t concrete but general.
Around the corner from where one lives is different. Call me an egoist, but it feels as if my home has been defiled. If my home is my castle, then its walls have been breached, and the enemy is rushing through the hole.
Bastards! is the first exclamation that comes out; what are we going to do about it, the first question. The exclamation is emotional; the question, rational.
I’m sick and tired of hearing comments such as those above every time ‘M’ persons commit yet another atrocity. The comments are solicitous and sympathetic, such as “MTAP go to… [fill the blank]”, or else defiant, such as that made by Mayor Sadiq Khan, not to be confused with the murderer Sidique Khan, along the lines of we “will never be defeated by terrorism.”
Yes, but what are we doing to defeat terrorism? Reassuring those who crave our blood that we don’t for a second believe all persons espousing the ‘M’ religion are terrorists? What, not every one of the 1.5 billion of them? Crikey. Who could have thought.
But it doesn’t take that many. A few thousand will suffice to turn every great European city into hell, every nice European neighbourhood into a combat zone ruled by fear. Few are nicer than Parsons Green, at the western end of Central London, 3.5 miles from Piccadilly.
You’d never guess it’s that close. It feels as parochial as a neighbourhood can possibly feel so close to the city’s geometrical centre.
Parsons Green is expensive, which keeps riffraff at bay. It’s also monochrome and no ‘M’ religions are practised in the vicinity. All the churches at and around Parsons Green are either Anglican or Catholic, and if a language other than English is ever heard in the streets, it’s usually French. Merde alors is possible; allahu akbar, unlikely.
I realise that describing my home patch in such terms is unfashionable to the point of being almost illegal. I’m risking a charge of racism, xenophobia and bigotry only to impress on you how nice my neighbourhood is – and how violated I feel.
So what are you going to do about this, Mrs May? And you, Mayor Sadiq Khan, not to be confused with the murderer Sidique Khan? Other than offering your sympathies and condolences?
It’s not as if nothing could be done. These people talk about ‘M’ terrorism as if it were force majeure, like one of those Caribbean hurricanes. It isn’t. Terrorism is an act not of God but of people. And people can be either prevented by police work fortified by government decree or, that failing, deterred by indiscriminate punishment.
But first we must acknowledge we’re at war – and not just with those few thousand terrorists, fundamentalists, extremists, call them what you like. They are but the vanguard, those ordered to punch a hole in that wall.
Supporting them physically are tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands manning the infrastructure of terrorism. And then there are millions, possibly hundreds of them, supporting terrorism morally and waiting for the vanguard to succeed so that they could all rush through the breach.
Hence we must wage war against all of them, recognising that, like in any war, there may occur unfortunate collateral damage. And once war has been declared, specific actions will suggest themselves.
They may include mass deportations and internments, stopping all immigration from ‘M’ countries, shutting down every mosque in which one word of sympathy for terrorism has ever been uttered, exacting awful punishment on countries sponsoring, arming and training terrorists.
I’m not an expert in such measures, but I’d like to believe we have enough people who are. They’re the dogs of war, and we must all cry havoc and let them slip. Meanwhile, I hope Parsons Green will recover its irenic charm. But I fear it might not.
No matter what the terrorists do, nowt seems to change, at least officially. Maybe MI5 get supercharged on the quiet. But really, I’m amazed there aren’t far more attacks, I mean, what are they waiting for?
We have been down a similar path before in French revolutionary and Napoleonic periods when you had to be very careful of what you said and even a mildly cynical remark could result in a doddery old fool being hauled before the courts. And newspapers were required to pay for an expensive stamp of approval intended to restrict circulation to the well-to-do. In the USA the definition of sedition has been through draconian changes at times. Did these measures work? Well according to the famous junior senator from Wisconsin they didn’t because he maintained that the place was crawling with commies and their supporters long after WW2 was over. And later it became embarrassingly clear that the US nuclear program was compromised by native-born Americans acting for the USSR. So perhaps we should give it a go, but watch your language squires because Hallelujah sounds very like that other exclamation and means very much the same thing.
In a detached moment I ask how much this costs ( I am well aware that causing the enemy every sort of cost possible is part of jihad, so you don’t need to point that out )
Their cost = a train fare. Lidle bag. Fertiliser. Fairy lights.
Our cost = enormous security, police time ,closed stations. Disruption, hospital wasted time. Us having to listen to a pack of lies about the perpetrator while totally ignoring the ideology that supports his actions.
“They may include mass deportations and internments, stopping all immigration from ‘M’ countries, shutting down every mosque in which one word of sympathy for terrorism has ever been uttered, exacting awful punishment on countries sponsoring, arming and training terrorists.”
Almost sounds like something Don [Trump] would say. And catch holy hell for saying it too.
NO need to hurt even one person to terrorize a community. IRA bomb one time destroyed windows in London causing $1 billion dollars worth of damage. Insurance rates go sky high and all businesses of the place suffer.
I have been so stupid! I have been deluding myself by supposing that if I can just inform the politicians of how deceptive Islam is then they will wake-up and respond for the good of the people. Whereas the facts show that politicians use Islam as a deliberate ram to crush our identity, culture, Christian religion and national states in the name of globalism, and have done so for a long time.
Back in December 15, 1973, the EC held a summit meeting in Copenhagen with Arab foreign ministers to bargain for reasonable oil prices after the quadrupling of prices. It seems that the EEC-leaders had to agree on a substantial intake of Muslim migrant workers back then. This was followed in 1995 when the EU initiated the Barcelona Declaration which was designed to have the Muslim-multicultural influx into Europe stated clearer. A decade later EU commissioner Louis Michel said the EU was to include North Africa, and former EU Commissioner, Italian Foreign Minister Frattini, insisted that it stretches further to Saudi Arabia. The plan for the Islamisation of Europe was strengthened in 2005 by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in cooperation with UNESCO, the Arab League and the imperialistic Islamic ISESCO in the “Rabat Commitment.” Politicians have embraced the changes, such as in 2006 when Tony Blair stated the famous “A Muslim could one day be prime minister.” He showed his agenda with his shocking “A Global Alliance for Global Values” speech where he extoled the values of Islam; with such statements as “Islam has been leading the world in discovery, art and culture. We look back to the early Middle Ages, the standard bearers of tolerance at that time were far more likely to be found in Muslim lands than in Christian.” Angela Merkel beamed this year as she received the Eugen-Bolz-Award for her so-called “open door” policy where she was praised for her “humanitarian attitude in refugee policy” and her “civil courage” over the handling of the crisis in the EU and Germany.
Politicians it seems will not change the agenda even when learned people speak such as Prof. Abdessamad Belhaj. He has warned the west that for the Muslim “state law has no weight compared to the law of God. For Muslims, Islamic moral economy relies on exhaustion of resources, is uncontrollable, ruins the society, and causes decay and eventually collapse. Secondly, that Jihad is an integral part of Islam’s moral economy, which shows very clearly that violence is an indispensable means of sustenance. The neo-liberals underestimate these risks and embrace the momentary market advantage brought by redistributive, isolationist, minimum-wage communities, which after the termination of social benefits will be financed from Malaysia to the United States”.
Thus, mass Muslim immigration was designed and politicians support it. Europe’s 20 million Muslims will not be deported, instead the demographic facts of their high birthrate alone suggest a continent ripe to advance the Islamist agenda.