Book burning

A nasty nutcase is convicted of terrorist offences.  His teenage son is convicted of possessing a book called the Anarchists Cookbook, available openly from Amazon.  And the judge says all copies of the book in the UK should be destroyed (link).

OK, if a man has been manufacturing ricin and intends using it to kill, then he needs to be locked up.  But the son is another story: he may have been complicit in a crime, but if so he should be put on trial for that.  Not for mere possession of a book!  His conviction is a grim reminder of how far we’ve slid into totalitarianism.

Perhaps someone should remind the powers-that-be that within living memory we were at total war with Nazi Germany, yet there were no restrictions on owning or reading Mein Kampf.  Once upon a time, Britain stood for freedom!

A sense of proportion

A week of ‘terrorist’ incidents: two cars in London (not exactly car bombs) that didn’t go off, and one driven into Glasgow airport. Now we’re on “critical” terrorist alert.

Three incidents. Not ‘professional’ terrorist incidents, but bumbling, ineffectual homebrew attacks: more Inspector Clouseau than anything else. Incidents on a level of sophistication (and danger) more akin to teenage ‘joyriders’ than to a serious terrorist organisation like the IRA or Al Qaeda[1].

Contrast the “nothing to worry about” attitude to equally (if not more) serious incidents such as this, which I find altogether more scary. And contrast the attitude to killer drivers, who are commonly given no more than a slap on the wrist, no matter how dangerous they are (and in this country, drivers kill more people in a week than terrorists have in total since the IRA stopped).

If there are serious terrorists out there, how likely are they to announce their intention to attack with a round of buffoonery like this?

Much more worrying: these were apparently completely off the police’s radar. At a guess, they really are just saddo kids, and have no affiliation at all to anyone the security forces are watching. Smells like the seeds of fear and distrust that The Liar has so abundantly scattered in recent years, coming home to roost.

[1] That is to say, the Al Qaeda of “9/11″. Nowadays the term seems to have become a general-purpose bogeyman for anything islamic and bad. Or indeed anyone we happen to kill in the occupied countries.