Growing terror threat in the UK from Muslim religious bigots

Melanie Phillips:

The ending of the Al Qaeda fertiliser bomb plot trial has posed crucial questions about the competence of MI5.

In particular, the assurances we were given after the 7/7 bombings, that the perpetrators had been unknown to the security service, have been shown to be utterly false.

Disturbing as that is by itself, the case also raises yet more pressing questions about whether Britain is even now acting effectively enough against the threat to this country from Islamist terrorism.

The fact is that Al Qaeda now sees Britain as both its principal target and its principal recruiting ground.

By its own admission, MI5 is monitoring no fewer than 200 terrorist networks, 1,600 identified individual terrorists and 30 known terrorist plots.

It says British Muslims are being indoctrinated with horrifying speed, and more terrorists are being recruited every day.

In truth, as our leading counterterrorist police officer, Peter Clarke, said last week, this country is facing a terrorist threat of a nature and scale it has simply never seen before.

This terrorism is part of a global holy war - and the dreadful thing is that it is recruiting British-born boys as its foot-soldiers against their own fellow citizens.

When my book Londonistan was published a year ago, my claim that we were in a state of denial about the unprecedented emergency we were facing from home-grown terrorism and extremism was dismissed in some quarters as unwarranted alarmism.

Since then, public opinion has shifted. Many have realised that what I wrote was, if anything, an understatement of the true position.

But our official class is still failing to take the action that is necessary to defeat this threat to our whole way of life.

Certainly, it is now aware of the enormous scale of the terror threat.

But it is still fighting it with both hands tied behind its back.

In particular, the Human Rights Act continues to make effective anti-terror policy almost impossible.

Only last week, the Government was prevented from deporting two Libyan terrorist suspects, even though they came here illegally and are deemed to pose a serious threat to our lives, because our judges have said no one can be sent anywhere that might not uphold their human rights.

The Government was originally begged by our security services not to pass the Human Rights Act precisely because of the danger it would pose to national security by tying us in such knots.

Ministers merely dismissed their concerns.

Now the same security services face the nightmare that Islamist terrorists will obtain a nuclear or other dirty bomb to use against Britain, with a human rights law that makes it more difficult to thwart such a terrible outcome.

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There is much more an it is well worth reading.

The UK is making the mistake of fighting the terrorist with lawfare rather than warfare. They are allowing the enemy to tie them into procedural knots while they game the system. They are also making the mistake that President Eisenhower described as chasing the tail of the snake rather than the head. We all know that these attacks are emanating out of the tribal area of Pakistan. The civilized world needs to converge on that area and cleanse it of al Qaeda and Taliban infestation with a military operation and any detainees need to be taken to a Gitmo like facility. We are facing an enemy who targets non combatants and we are not targeting their combatants in Pakistan.