Having had their fun in the Middle East, 250 British-based (or born) jihadists are coming home.
If you tied a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree when they left for their terror camps, you can untie it now. Our bearded warriors are back – not exactly to heroes’ welcome, but at least to utterly craven complacency on the part of HMG.
These are all highly trained terrorists and guerillas, some of them battle-hardened in Syria and Afghanistan. Don’t know about you, but I’m scared. Well, not exactly scared, but apprehensive. Wary, at any rate.
So is Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan police commissioner: “Our biggest worry is when they return they are radicalised, they may be militarised, they may have a network of people that train them to use weapons.”
Stoutly spoken and acutely observed, Sir Bernard. So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to ban them from entering Britain? Take their passports away? Arrest all those Darren Ali-Jabbars and Wayne Abu-Akbars on arrival?
Perish the thought. Neither Sir Bernard nor any other government officials are going to do anything of the sort. Oh yes, they promise to keep an eye on the murderous thugs as best they can. Other than that – nothing, and we know how easy it is to keep track of those enjoying the support of their large communities.
But not to worry: not all returnees are a threat, says one official. If you’re planning for a career in public service, this is how you talk when you get the job: “This doesn’t mean that all the individuals who have come back are planning attacks. Many will have returned and want nothing more to do with it. Others may be arranging training or simply moving money.”
Phwoa. For a second there I was worried. Silly me. Some of the trained murderers who hate Britain have had their jollies and now, as the American jingle goes, it’s Miller time. Or, in deference to Darren’s and Wayne’s heart-felt religious convictions, orange juice time.
By inference others (most?) haven’t quite got murder out of their system. They’ll “be arranging training”, i.e. teaching others how to blow up our crowded places, and “moving money”, i.e. laundering the funds needed to buy the wherewithal to blow up our public places.
Of course doing anything preventive about our Muslim Waynes and Darrens is impossible. After they’ve blown up a public place, perhaps – provided they didn’t go for the suicide-bombing option, in which case there wouldn’t be enough of them left to arrest. But certainly not before, and shame on you for even suggesting it.
What, lock up British subjects on suspicion alone? Preventively? Without due process? You must be out of your mind, old boy.
Can you imagine the ensuing shrill screams coming from our ‘liberal’ press? Human rights groups? The E bloody U? Really, you must have taken leave of your senses. Why, we’d be hit with fines, sanctions and lawsuits faster than you can say ‘racial and/or religious discrimination against socioeconomically disadvantaged persons’ (sorry, my EU isn’t very fluent).
Far be it from me to imply any criticism of the rule of law. No substitute for it exists in any country perceiving herself as civilized, and especially not in England, which more or less reinvented the concept after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
But wonderful things like the rule of law, democracy and human rights aren’t a suicide pact. At a time when the realm and its subjects’ lives are threatened, even countries perceiving themselves as civilised have been known to suspend some liberties for a while, the better to protect them in perpetuity.
In wartime even the most legally minded nations tend to put their legal minds on the back burner. When survival is the order of the day, Americans elbow their Constitution aside to put 110,000 Nisei Americans into internment camps. And HMG kicks 2,000 years of legal tradition into touch to intern all German and Italian nationals on the Isle of Man – including, incidentally, German Jewish refugees from Hitler who were unlikely to be pro-Nazi.
Few of the internees hated Britain with the fervour of all those Muslim Waynes, Darrens and Lees. But that didn’t matter: presumption of innocence was suspended because the nation’s security was at stake.
Going further back, let’s indulge the wild fantasy of imagining how Lord Palmerston or any other nineteenth-century British PM would have handled a similar situation. One suspects that, say, Barbary pirates or other trouble makers wishing to settle here would have been stopped by every imaginable means. Even if they were born in Britain.
If British blood is spilled, it’ll fall not only on the returnees’ hands, but also on those of our government officials who are ready to sacrifice our lives at their altar of political correctness. For it’s PC rectitude that drives them, not any excessive concern for the rights of Englishmen.
Witness the cavalier disregard with which they treat, say, freedom of speech, of conscience, of religion (unless of course it’s anti-Christian) or the very sovereignty of the realm. Any of those can be curtailed with nary a thought.
But any transgression against PC dicta is unthinkable. In this instance, those who wish us ill have to be treated with kid gloves, rather than the boxing variety. They are minorities, aren’t they? So they can never wrong anyone; they can only ever be wronged.
By the same token our police will soon lose the critical prevention tool of being able to stop and search suspicious representatives of the groups most likely to commit crimes. Search everyone or no one, screams the inner PC voice whose commands HMG obeys. What, it’s impossible to search everyone? Fine. No one it is.
Nations who have lost the will to protect themselves don’t deserve to survive. Britain is rapidly falling into that category, as we meekly watch our country being transformed into a large province (in future, many small ones) of the EU, our police being rendered helpless to prevent crime – and our government welcoming back those who bray for our blood.