Robert Fisk: If you want the roots of terror, try here

If you want the roots of terror, try here

I would love to have the Met in Beirut to counter terror in my part of the world

By Robert Fisk


"The Independent" -- -- When my electricity returned at around 3am yesterday, I turned on the BBC World Service television. There were a series of powerful explosions which shook the house - just as they vibrated across all of Beirut - as the latest Israeli air raids blasted over the city. And then up came the World Service headline: "Terror Plot". Terror what, I asked myself? And there was my favorite cop, Paul Stephenson, explaining how my favorite police force - the ones who bravely executed an innocent young Brazilian on the Tube, taking 30 seconds to fire six bullets into him - had saved the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians from suicide bombers on airliners.

I'm sure Independent readers will join me in watching how many of the suspects - or "British-born Muslims" as the BBC defined them in its special form of "soft" racism (they are surely Muslim Britons or British Muslims, are they not?) - are still in custody in a couple of weeks' time.

And I'm sure it's quite by chance that the lads in blue chose yesterday - with anger at Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara's shameful failure over Lebanon at its peak - to save the world. After all, it's scarcely three years since the other great Terror Plot had British armoured vehicles surrounding Heathrow on the very day - again quite by chance, of course - that hundreds of thousands of Britons were demonstrating against Lord Blair's intended invasion of Iraq.

So I sat on the carpet in my living room and watched all these heavily armed chaps at Heathrow protecting the British people from annihilation and then on came President George Bush to tell us that we were all fighting "Islamic fascism". There were more thumps in the darkness across Beirut where an awful lot of people are suffering from terror - although I can assure George W that while the pilots of the aircraft dropping bombs across the city in which I have lived for 30 years may or may not be fascists, they are definitely not Islamic.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14516.htm

indeed

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Could there be a connection, I wonder? Dare we look for a motive for the crime, or rather the "alleged crime"? The Met used to be pretty good at looking for motives. But not, of course, in the "war on terror", where - if he really searched for real motives - my favourite policeman would swiftly be back on the beat as Constable Paul Stephenson.

Take yesterday morning. On day 31of the Israeli version of the "war on terror" - a conflict to which Paul and the lads in blue apparently subscribe by proxy - an Israeli aircraft blew up the only remaining bridge to the Syrian frontier in northern Lebanon, in the mountainous and beautiful Akka district above the Mediterranean. With their usual sensitivity, the pilots who bombed the bridge - no terrorists they, mark you - chose to destroy the bridge when ordinary cars were crossing. So they massacred the 12 civilians who happened to be on the bridge. In the real world, we call that a war crime. Indeed, it's a crime worthy of the attention of Paul and his lads. But alas, Stephenson's job is to frighten the British people, not to stop the crimes that are the real reason for the British to be frightened.

Personally, I'm all for arresting criminals, be they of the "Islamic fascist" variety or the Bin Laden variety or the Israeli variety - their warriors of the air really should be arrested next time they drop into Heathrow - or the American variety (Abu Ghraib cum laude) and indeed of the kind that blow out the brains of Tube train passengers. But I don't think Paul Stephenson is. I think he huffs and he puffs but I do not think he stands for law and order. He works for the Ministry of Fear which, by its very nature, is not interested in motives or injustice. And I have to say, watching his performance before the next power cut last night, I thought he was doing a pretty good job for his masters.

:thumbsup:
I really surprised that more people don't " get it !"