Kitchen Table Extremism

Imagine yourself as a Muslim child growing up in the east end of London. Your immigrant parents are hard working and your home is warm. Everything in your life is normal and safe except for one strange thing. Each day your dad tells you that the western world is conspiring against Islam. That America and Britain are attempting to destroy your religion, your community, your identity. He then tells you that Islam is a peaceful religion.

Your childhood is happy. You do well at school. By the time you reach your teens, you are expected to go to university and achieve far more than your parents ever could. Again, each day, your dad tells you that the west wants to destroy Islam. It’s hurtful to know that the white people around you pretend to be friendly but in fact are duplicitous.

At the age of 15 you discover ISIS videos on the internet. They also tell you that the west wants to destroy Islam, but they tell you that your father is wrong. Islam knows how to fight back. You are inspired. You steal your brothers passport and credit card and you go to Syria with the intention of joining them. When your parents discover this, they are furious that the police did nothing to stop it. They blame the local mosque for radicalising their child.

What would a jury make of Assad?

Sarin is invisible, odourless and deadly in tiny amounts. The best way to detect it in your surroundings is to note that you’ve have just shit and pissed yourself, and are now choking to death as your own throat muscles contract.

If a terrorist group decided to crop dust London, they might consider that in agriculture, a crop duster would cover an area of about 1.5 square miles per day. Since London is 700 square miles, that would require 467 crop dusters. This is not such a brilliant terrorist plot since the planes could easily be shot down.

However, since Sarin is heavier than air, it naturally falls to ground level, so the terrorists could fly far higher and rely on gravity to take the poison to the quarry. Therefore we could crop dust London using jumbo jets to deliver nerve agent in industrial quantities, and wipe out 8 million people. This may be possible with as few as a dozen aircraft covering the capital in a vector grid.

We should only arm Syria with embedded personnel

If the UK government is considering arming Syrian rebels, it should also consider embedding British personnel with rebel forces.

This arms supply method was developed by Fitzroy MacLean in his dealings with the Partisans in WW2. It is accounted for in MacLean’s famous book Eastern Approaches.

Make Gas Not War

As the British question whether they could mount another Falklands war, the sabre-rattling in Buenos Aires intensifies, and spreads to the other Latin American countries.

Mercosur, the South American free trade zone, has closed its ports to ships flying the Falkland Islands flag. Now Argentine President Cristina Fernandez is accusing the British of ‘militarising the South Atlantic, one more time’. David Cameron calls the attitude of the Argentinians ‘colonialism’, but it’s not about that. This is about big business. This is about mineral extraction on a massive scale and the Argentinians are bitter that 3,000 Falkland Islanders should be entitled to the whole prize.

Make Gas not War!

As the British question whether they could mount another Falklands war, the sabre-rattling in Buenos Aires intensifies, and spreads to the other Latin American countries.

Cameron the Clueless, Merkel the Merciless

Speaking at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in London, Mr Cameron’s fiery rhetoric on Europe appeared to be in contrast to the concrete policies being hammered out at Ms Merkel’s party conference in Germany.

Mr Cameron complained: “How out of touch the EU has become, when its institutions are demanding budget increases, while Europe’s citizens tighten their belts.” Mr Cameron was complaining about the cost of the capital transfers that pay for roads and bridges in Eastern Europe, building their productivity and sustaining their economies during these difficult times. If he thinks that the political trend in the EU is to have less government and less intervention, then he should listen to the Germans and think again.

On the same day, Ms Merkel told her party, “The task of our generation now, is to complete the economic and currency union in Europe and, step by step, create a political union. It’s time for a breakthrough to a new Europe”.

Coulson’s Access to State Secrets

So get this. Andy Coulson was given the very highest security clearance when he was appointed Head of Communications for Downing Street. That means every that every state secret, every military secret, all espionage and terrorism secrets, and every secret about how the spooks gather those secrets. This man was given a level of security clearance equal to the Prime Minister, Home Secretary and the Queen.

But it’s worse than that. Ask yourself who is our greatest ally, in terms of military, espionage and terrorism. The United States of America. What is the level of security clearance that the American government shares with the British government? Just about the highest level of clearance that it would be possible for a foreign ally to have. The British have near total clearance of American state secrets. Therefore, Andy Coulson was given, by David Cameron, near total clearance for American state secrets.

War for Oil?

When I look back at the wars that Britain has fought in my lifetime, from The Falklands through to Libya, four out of six were in oil rich territories.

The reason this is interesting is because when the left are often dismissed when they argue that a conflict is “about oil”. But how can we dismiss such a striking statistic? I was born before the oil-spikes of the 70s, by the way.

The Falklands (1982) has massive reserves of oil and gas. Although it is remote and difficult to reach, the high oil price has recently made it commercially viable and there is now a North Sea rig, which had been towed down to the South Atlantic at a cost of $250,000 a day, just in the hire charges alone. They are drilling as we speak.

Prime Minister Thatcher told us that the war was fought purely on a point of principle; to take a stand against an aggressive military dictator. I don’t dispute that there was a principle, but it is curious that massive mineral wealth happened to exist in exactly the place that this point of principle was to be made.

Execution, Regime Change, The Arab Spring

One was defiant as the noose was tightened around his neck. The other was shot in the face while still in his pyjamas. Comparing the execution of Osama Bin Laden with that of Saddam Hussein, we learn something about ourselves, and our wider attitude towards the policy of regime change.

Credit: flickr.com/photos/farshadebrahimi

There’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein was one of the great monsters of history. However, he was a conventional enemy and was treated with the conventional respect to a captured leader. He was arrested without a bullet being fired, put on trial by an Iraqi court, then hung by an Iraqi rope.

Although legally in the custody of Iraq, he was held by American guards who allowed him to tend a small garden in detention, and to write a letter to the Iraqi people before his execution. There was never any doubt that he was a fearless man, and his anger as he was physically dragged to the noose demonstrates this well.

Credit: flickr.com/photos/swanksalot

Osama bin Laden on the other hand was in his pyjamas when he was shot in the face, leaving him so disfigured that the photo could not be released. He was unarmed. The crime of Sept 11th happened on American soil, so there is no legal reason why a trial couldn’t happen in America. But there was no need of a trial. It was a summary execution. They wanted it that way.

Analysis: The Execution of Bin Laden

The problem was that he had got away with it. The world’s most notorious terrorist had slipped happily into relaxed retirement, and by doing so, had demonstrated the weakness of the western world and their inability to achieve justice.

Abbottabad

It was overdue, since the Arab spring marks a new era to that of Jihad. In many ways, Al-Qaeda have already defeated themselves. Killing the inspiration will add little to a war on terror, that is mostly over and done with.

However, it matters to history. The western weakness that his freedom demonstrated lay in the inability of massive science and technology to win against a single Muslim, Insha’Allah.