There is some good news and some bad news on the illiberal fuckwits score today.
Firstly, the bad news.
A radical Islamist group that planned a march through Wootton Bassett will be banned under counter-terrorism laws, Home Secretary Alan Johnson has said.
Alan Johnson is a fuckwit of the highest order. Unable – or unwilling – to fight the battle of ideas head on, he takes the coward’s way out and bans that which he doesn’t like and cannot confront openly. In so doing, he uses terrorism as the usual, tired, risible excuse. The man is unfit for his office, frankly – although typical of the New Labour authoritarian idiocy.
A spokesman for Islam4UK told the BBC it was an “ideological and political organisation”, and not a violent one.
Unless proven otherwise, this is the line that the government should take. Does Johnson think these people will just go away? Does he think the ideology will just disappear? Does he think that he has won a great battle against terror? If he does, he is deluded. What he has done is make the ideology that much more alluring. Those who might otherwise not be swayed will ask themselves what is the government so scared of? What does Islam4UK have that is so dangerous to the UK? It is about to become exciting to those of a particular bent. They might be curious enough to want to find out more. Something that could be found out simply enough by exposure to daylight, by allowing this bunch of clowns to posture out in the open. Johnson, illiberal fuckwit that he is, has demonstrated that he has failed to learn anything from history.
Proscription is a tough but necessary power to tackle terrorism and is not a course we take lightly.
Utter bollocks, frankly. There is no necessity whatsoever. The last word on this goes to Anjem Choudary, who appears positively reasonable compared to Johnson – which sort of makes my point:
What the people will see is if you don’t agree with the government and you want to expose their foreign policy, then freedom quickly dissipates and turns into dictatorship.
That’s about the long and short of it. When a radical nutjob like Choudary sounds like a champion for our freedoms, something has gone seriously wrong…
And the good news:
Police powers to use terror laws to stop and search people without grounds for suspicion are illegal, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.
This is excellent news. The stop and search did nothing to combat terrorism and merely gave the police an excuse to harass innocent citizens. Naturally, HMG doesn’t like it (the ruling, not the harassing innocent citizens – it likes that).
Home Office Minister David Hanson MP said he was “disappointed” and would considering whether to appeal.
Well, I’m not disappointed. I’m well pleased.
Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows the home secretary to authorise police to make random searches in certain circumstances.
Those circumstances seem to be “travelling by train”. Lord Carlisle on the other hand seems to be hinting that things have been getting out of hand:
In my view, section 44 is being used far too often on a random basis without any reasoning behind its use.
Indeed so.
On the other hand, we have to be safe against terrorism. There is therefore a very difficult balancing exercise to be done and I’m sure Section 44 will come under intelligent scrutiny in the coming months.
I’d have thought that fairly straightforward – the police should need reasonable cause to suspect. They would then have to use their little grey cells, rather than choose any old soft target in order to get their stats in. Oh, and terrorism is vastly overstated and we can never be safe from it. Let’s be clear here, the risk to any one of us is far smaller than, say, an accident in the home. A sense of proportion would be nice. I for one, do not want the government protecting me from the bad men, because when they do, they become a bigger threat than that against which they are proposing to protect me. I’ll take my chances, thank you very much.
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Update: Inayat Bunglawala agrees with me in a fairly sensible article on CiF. Yes, really…
Proscription is a nasty word.
Agree with you on Alan Johnson. The man epitomises the whole operation, down to his employment history.
.-= My last blog ..Get with the times… =-.
Outfits like Islam4UK and other gaggles of (mostly student) Islamic radicals are carbon copies of old-style Leftist Stalin worshippers with the added spice of brainwashed religious fanaticism. What they seek is cheap publicity, and banning them plays right into their hands. It is also futile, as they will simply regroup under another name.
Like all such movements they are politically irrelevant. Surely the best way to deal with them is to let them blether away to their heart’s content, and expose themselves to the chill wind of public opinion.
In the last resort the Muslim public opinion that matters is that of the largely voicelss army of ‘moderates’, which so far is as silent as the dog which didn’t bark in the night. Until this presumed majority speaks out loudly, the fanatics will continue to be a squalid nuisance but I very much doubt that they will ever be seriously dangerous.
Some light relief from the internet:
Notice of Industrial Action by the British Organisation of Occupational Martyrs:
Suicide bombers in Britain are set to begin a three-day strike on Monday in a dispute over the number of virgins they are entitled to in the afterlife. Emergency talks with Al Qaeda management have so far failed to produce an agreement.
The unrest began last Tuesday when Al Qaeda announced that the number of virgins a suicide bomber would receive after his death will be cut by 25% from January from 72 to only 54. The rationale for the cut was the increase in recent years of the number of suicide bombings and a subsequent shortage of virgins in the afterlife.
The suicide bombers’ union, the British Organisation of Occupational Martyrs (or B.O.O.M.) responded with a statement that this was unacceptable to its members and immediately balloted for strike action. General Secretary Abdullah Amir told the press, “Our members are literally working themselves to death in the cause of jihad. We don’t ask for much in return but to be treated like this by management is a kick in the teeth.”
Amir accepted the limited availability of virgins but pointed out that the cutbacks were expected to be borne entirely by the workforce and not by management. “Last Christmas Abu Hamza alone was awarded an annual bonus of 250,000 virgins,” complains Amir. “And you can be sure they’ll all be pretty ones too. How can Al Qaeda afford that for members of the management but not 72 for the people who do the real work?”
Speaking from the shed in the West Midlands where he currently resides, Al Qaeda chief executive Osama bin Laden explained, “We sympathise with our workers’ concerns but Al Qaeda is simply not in a position to meet their demands. They are simply not accepting the realities of modern-day jihad, in a competitive marketplace. Thanks to Western depravity, there is now a chronic shortage of virgins in the afterlife. It’s a straight choice between reducing expenditure and laying people off. I don’t like cutting wages but I’d hate to have to tell 3,000 of my staff that they won’t be able to blow themselves up.” He defended management bonuses by claiming these were necessary to attract good fanatical clerics. “How am I supposed to attract the best people if I can’t compete with the private sector?” asked Mr. Bin-Laden.
Talks broke down this morning after management’s last-ditch proposal of a virgin-sharing scheme was rejected outright after a failure to agree on orifice allocation quotas. One virgin, who refused to be named, was quoted as saying “I’ll be buggered if I’m agreeing to anything like that………it’s too much of a mouthful to swallow”.
Unless some sort of agreement is reached over the weekend, suicide bombers will down explosives at midday on Monday. Most branches are supporting the strike. Only the North London branch, which has a different union, is likely to continue working. However, some members of that branch will only be using waist-down explosives in order to express solidarity with their striking brethren.
Great post anticant
but about the main thread- we can’t afford to appeal, the country is broke.
Surely the headline should be “liberal Europe saves us again”? 😉
100% agreed on both pieces. Can’t quite work out whether the government are too stupid to realise that a c*** like Choudary is no threat, or whether they don’t care as long as they reckon they can win idiots’ votes of the Other Idiot Party.
.-= My last blog ..What I’ve been up to, week ending 2010-01-10 =-.
Groups like Islam4UK are useful in setting precedents. If they can ban this group, they can ban other groups. Using terms such as ‘extremism’ they can label anyone who opposes them as a threat, especially with the press happy to play the part of a baying mob. We see this in America, where the machinery of oppression, ostensibly created to deal with Al Qaida, has been turned round to face ‘right-wing extremists’, ‘radical libertarians’, ‘people who talk about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights’ and the like.
We don’t need any more examples of how monstrously fascistic this criminal gang of fabian scum. We just need rid of them.
.-= My last blog .."One of the greatest medical scandals of the century" =-.
Remember that neither Alan Johnson, nor any of his similarly creepy, authoritarian, yet incompetent NuLabour predecessors has ever bothered Proscribe or ban the Taliban !
Look at the official list:
http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/legislation/current-legislation/terrorism-act-2000/proscribed-groups.html
Anticant – very amusing 😀
John B – If that is their strategy, I suspect that it is doomed to fail. Certainly, their track record suggests a high level stupidity.
TT – Yes, this was satirised in The Thick of It when they wanted to stifle the opinions of a mother campaigning for justice for her dead son. Malcolm Tucker suggested that she was removed from the party conference for expressing “extreme views”. Many a true word is spoken in jest. TTOI is very close to the bone, I think.
WTWU – Indeed.
Unlike the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights has difficulties enforcing its judgements in the UK: in other words it can be ignored. In this case, as in this case, I wonder what our rulers will decide. Also in which court can Home Office Minister David Hanson MP launch his appeal?