Terror – Delingpole World

Keep Calm and Carry on in the Face of Muslim Terror? No Thanks

Whenever I’m trying to work out what I really think about another terrorist incident involving the Religion of Peace, the first place I always turn to is the BBC.

Whatever the BBC says I know for certain that the right view to take is the exact opposite.

And so it was last night on BBC News. A policeman had been stabbed to death; three passers-by had been deliberately mown down by a car on London’s Westminster Bridge, and another 29 injured, some very seriously. Clearly, this was yet another Islamic-State-inspired terrorist attack whose main aim was to inflict as much carnage as possible to as many innocent victims as possible until the perpetrator got shot.

Or so you might have thought, till you watched the BBC, which knew exactly what the real story was. Apparently, the tragedy of those dead and injured people, including at least one mother and several schoolchildren, was a relatively minor detail…

No, what the story was really about was that it was an assault on the heart of parliamentary democracy, a narrowly averted disaster which could have seen an actual MP get hurt and which, almost worst of all, meant that MPs and parliamentary staff and reporters and other inhabitants of the Westminster Bubble including the BBC’s own Laura Kuenssberg were forcibly cooped up inside the Parliament buildings for a few hours.

We knew this because one of the lead sections of the BBC’s coverage comprised amateurish footage that had been shot of Kuenssberg looking confused and trapped, wondering what was going outside. She was shown asking some other people trapped with her what was going on. They didn’t know, either.

But we did. That’s because by the time the news bulletin was broadcast at 10pm – seven hours after the incident – the story had moved on. We knew about the dead policeman. About the woman who’d jumped off the bridge into the river. About the poor chap who’d jumped over the parapet and fell 18 feet onto concrete. About the bearded assailant who’d died of his injuries not long after being shot by plain clothes police.

All of this was far more compelling and important and dramatic than anything Laura Kuenssberg might have experienced, hours earlier, during her unfortunate moment of temporary inconvenience under lockdown.

You could argue that this was simply a case of poor editorial judgement. Kuenssberg is, for better or worse, one of the BBC’s star reporters. Perhaps some cowed editor felt that her geographical proximity to the story – even though she hadn’t witnessed it or been able to do any useful reporting on it – justified giving her such prominence.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Islamist Terror Will Test Western Liberal Values to Destruction

A policeman is stabbed to death right outside the Houses of Parliament: one of the most secure, heavily guarded areas, with more armed police on stand-by than anywhere in London.

Whoever the terrorist turns out to be he knew exactly what he was doing. The signal he sent out to the British people (and all the tourists who have ever visited Britain or are planning to visit Britain) was a very clear one: if we can get you here we can get you anywhere.

The killings happened beneath one of the world’s most famous landmarks: the tower of Big Ben overlooking Westminster Bridge and Parliament Square.

How many of us have not walked beneath it and mused nervously what a prime terrorist target it would be?

Then, probably, we will have corrected ourselves: “No, they’d never try it here. Too many police. Too obvious.”

Well, sorry. But they just did.

And now, as per usual on these occasions, the bien-pensant twonks on Twitter are seizing the opportunity to virtue-signal and dodge the issue by pretending it’s all about something else and nothing to do with the Religion of Peace (TM).

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Ex-Times-Of-London Editor: ‘The Scariest Thing about Brussels Is Our Reaction to It.’

BBC/screengrab

“The scariest thing about Brussels is our reaction to it,” says respected British journalist and commentator and former editor of the (London) Times, Simon Jenkins.

Really?

Scarier than, say, being one of the two London businessmen now lying in a Brussels hospital with “life-changing injuries” having taken the full force of the airport nail bomb which killed at least 14 people and hideously shredded many more?

Scarier than being one of the passengers on the Brussels underground at 9.11 on a Tuesday morning hearing the olive-skinned man with the suicide belt yelling the last words you’ll ever hear: “Allahu Akbar”?

Sorry, Simon. I’m not buying it. You’re talking theory: this thing you’ve read in some dry-as-dust, surrender monkey textbook about how by reacting to “terror” we’re “doing what the terrorists want.”

Whereas I’m talking practice. Most of us — not you Simon, obviously, you’re above such trivial concerns — have a very simple wish. When we go to watch a marathon, or a rock concert, or out for dinner, or to a Christmas party, or to take a bus, or to catch a plane, or to a football match, or shopping, or to a hotel, what we’d like very much, if it’s all the same with you, Simon, is not to have lurking at the back of our minds the nagging worry that we might be blown up or shot or otherwise murdered by brutalised adherents of a religious death cult.

Sure it means we’re not as sophisticated as you. It makes us a bunch of scaredy-cat babies, possibly. But when we read you write a paragraph like the one I’m about to reproduce below, it inclines many of us to think — not for the first time in your writing career, it must be said — that you’ve utterly lost touch with the world inhabited by normal, sane people.

Textbooks on terrorism define its effects in four stages: first the horror, then the publicity, then the political grandstanding, and finally the climactic shift in policy. The initial act is banal. The atrocities in Brussels happen almost daily on the streets of Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus. Western missiles and Isis bombs kill more innocents in a week than die in Europe in a year. The difference is the media response. A dead Muslim is an unlucky mutt in the wrong place at the wrong time. A dead European is front-page news.

Just that short sentence “The initial act is banal” deserves you a “dhimmi loon of the year” award. In its lofty callousness it’s right up with “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” attitude of Stalinists who think “one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.”

As for this idea you have that because lots of people die violently every week in the Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus we therefore should suddenly feel OK about being slaughtered on the streets of Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Boston, London, San Bernardino or wherever, actually, Simon, no, this is bollocks of such cast-iron, weapons-grade quality I’m frankly amazed that as you typed it your keyboard didn’t dissolve in contempt and ridicule that such fifth-form fatuousness should have emerged from the supposedly educated brain of a St John’s, Oxford graduate.

Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus, Simon, are all in countries engaged in bloody sectarian civil wars where life, unfortunately, is cheap.

This is not the case in the U.S. and Europe.

Life is expensive where we are — and rightly so because our Judaeo-Christian civilisation, filtered through the Enlightenment, has fought hard over the centuries to make it more valuable. That’s why we have the rule of law and property rights and habeas corpus and politeness and a welfare safety net and freedom of expression and protection for minorities and all the civilised things they tend not to have in life-is-cheap places like Africa and the Middle East.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Salon: Paris Was Wearing a Short Skirt

We have only ourselves to blame for the Paris outrage, Salon has argued, again – just in case it failed to offend enough people the first time it salivated over the ISIS atrocity as payback time for the West and conservatives especially.

This time the preening apologist for terror is one Patrick L Smith, Salon’s “foreign affairs columnist” and a “longtime correspondent abroad, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker” as well as “an essayist, critic and editor”.

His piece is headlined:

We brought this on ourselves: After Paris, it is time to square our “values” with our history
The West’s behaved horrifically in Middle East for decades. We can’t be surprised by Paris. Let’s look in a mirror

Smith has certainly stared long and hard into the mirror. And it’s clear he’s infatuated with what he sees.

You can tell from the (cackhanded attempt at) grandiloquence of his opening sentence:

Another horrific attack emanates from the shattered, shredded Middle East into the beating hearts of Western civilization.

And from priceless passages like this:

“Is this a September 11 for the French?” my other half asked as we watched the news last night. “Let there be no question,” I replied.

Yep, because it’s all about you, isn’t it, Patrick? You’re kind of like Gore Vidal would have been had been wiser, better connected and more fantastically opinionated and pleased with himself.

Read the rest at Breitbart.