On 18th August 2006, 20-odd jihadis planned to blow up a batch of airliners flying over the Atlantic. The subsequent alert on 10th August caused chaos with pretty much everyone having something to say. With that in mind, I guess it's time to try and get...
INSIDE THE HEADS OF THE NOISEMAKERS
(Image taken from BBC)
First theory I want to throw up is just for laughs. Various Yanks seem to have come up with this idea:
>The airline plot is a fraud cooked up by the Bush administration to distract attention from Ned Lamont's win in Conneticut over Lieberman.
In summary, in a local US Senate Democratic primary in Conneticut early last week, Joe Lieberman, Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 and supporter of the Iraq war got beaten by anti-war nobody Ned Lamont. And Bush is supposed to be so worried about this event that...right...now everyone's picked themselves up off the floor...let's move on to noises that might be taken relatively seriously.
>The way to prevent terrorist attacks is to change British foreign policy so the terrorists will have no reason to attack.
Well I've certainly burnt this argument before but now a group of Muslim MPs are yelling this sort of stuff at Tony Blair. So why exactly would they want the UK to take what is surely the coward's way out of the 'war on terror'?
Well first up, they're probably wanting to cut their fellow Muslims some slack and secondly, getting caught up in one of their attacks would be an emotional headache. Understandable but no reason for the Prime Minister to give up ground to people who don't deserve any.
The next line shares a similar sentiment.
>If we distanced ourselves from America, we wouldn't be attacked by these people.
Well, yes we are known as an ally of the US, it's one the main reasons I expected an Al Queda attack ever since 9/11 and from what I now hear, there was supposed to be a planned attack in Birmingham circa 2000 anyway.
This line comes from non-Muslims as much as Muslims so...is there any other reason for it other than cowardice?
Well...a couple of weeks ago I came accross the following line on a message board:
"The only connections between Britain and the US are commercial and financial"
Even if they were to dismiss netheads like me and most of my British online friends as 'losers' I'd love to know what such people would make of various UK-US couples I know and other UK-US friendships between individuals.
In short, the only reason the "ditch America" chant has any following is because it's chanters mistakenly believe it's a(socially) cheap way of getting the jihadis off our backs.
While as far as I'm concerned, my grandparent's generation butted heads with Nazism, my father's generation butted heads with Communism...so my generation has to butt heads with Jihadism. So be it.
Anyway...shifting angles...
>There was no plot to blow up planes in August 2006, it was just a Blair publicity stunt
Hmmm...this level of cynicism is crass but there's some half-decent reasoning behind it.
Saddam Hussein's Iraq was supposed to have WMD. Jean Charles de Menezes was supposed to be an Al Queda operative. There was supposed to be an jihadi cell operating out of Forest Gate. All statements made by the powers that be that proved to be wrong.
A lot of people have no faith in the powers that be and to an extent have trouble believing that seemingly average people could be morally capable of blowing up aeroplanes mid-Atlantic. Furthermore, these are supposed to be people born and raised in the UK. People want to believe such people are innocent.
Why? Well if someone I knew, or thought of as a friend turned out to be a jihadi then I'd certainly feel like the biggest moron of all time!
On the other hand, governments have power, the police have power and the military have power. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" so the cliche goes and so as a result corruption is expected from the powers that be and so they are seen as having an obligation to be whiter than white because of previous failings that resulted in injustice or death.
Thing is, that attitude requires a faith in humanity as a whole that I don't share. All being a human gives you is the best brain model on the planet along with some form of emotions. Intelligence and emotions have no bearing on whether you're good or 'evil'.
And such seeminly average people as the UK based jihadis are the scum of the Earth!
Given that situation, I feel there has to be 'some' faith in TPTB. I'm not naive enough to be a bootlicker, I just recognise that near-automatically assuming the government to be corrupt just because of recent failings is simply another form of naivety.
It's probably the lack of faith in the government that makes people believe we can't beat the jihadis - after all you need a government you can have faith in to believe this sort of enemy can be beaten.
In some ways it's not hard to connect all of the statements mentioned in that some people think that the US influences the UK too much and so if a group of Brits carry out an act while publicly waving a banner that a ton of ordinary Brits marched under a couple of years previously then of course a lot of Brits are going to want to distance their compatriots from say, 9/11(an attack carried out on the US by Saudi citizens) or try to cu the seeming underdog some slack usint the argument that "these are our people".
However no jihadi, Brit or otherwise, should be able to get off that easily. If they were 'our people' then they wouldn't use the sickening tactics that they do. In World War II London, my grandfather and great aunts knew where the threat was, in the sky from German bombers. Their equivilients in Berlin knew where the threat was - in the sky. In the Middle East and Afghanistan recently, they surely got to know where the threat was - in the sky. Air bombing is not a strategy that undermines trust in the guy next to you.
However with suicide bombing the threat comes from...where? The guy in the seat next to you? The guy accross the road? The loving parents boarding a plane? Who in their right mind would want this sort of strategy to become seen as the regular strategy for any kind of war? And yet the fact that the jihadis use this strategy is another reason why people think that they cannot be beaten, why it's not worth fighting them.
However, all I really know is, this isn't a force of nature we're dealing with, like a hurricane where the only option is to run. These are human beings that are simply kidding themselves that they are a force of God.
And human beings, not matter how good, corrupt or crazy, can always be beaten one way or another.
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