See no evil

People depress me. I'm so very sick of seeing the same sentiments trotted out to order when something like this happens. A large group of people get arrested, here and in Pakistan. The claim is they were going to board at least ten passenger jets and blow them up over major US cities. Thousands would have been killed, thousands more would have been injured.

And what do we get? We get passengers at airports being interviewed asked if they think this is the fault of British foreign policy. People writing letters to the Guardian saying that this is all a set-up, staged to distract from matters in the Middle East. Comments in blog posts from British lefties telling us that if they were Muslim they'd probably do it too.

And today we had a smarmy man in a suit, being interviewed by ITN lunchtime news, who told us calmly that there can be no surprise that Muslims are trying to do this to us. It is obvious, he explained casually, and the fault is entirely our own. It is totally normal behaviour to plan to commit mass murder because you disagree with government policy. Totally normal to kill yourself and others because of events that are happening to people you don't know in countries you have never been to. And all the while he spoke as if he were verbally shrugging his shoulders at the idea of thousands of people being ripped apart in our skys.

And this is where I get angry. The idea of committing such large scale violence upon innocent people seems to me to be at such an extreme end of behaviour that it almost isn't human. It is unnatural. Something so devoid of pity that it ranks outside humanity. And yet people talk as if it is entirely normal. As if it is normal that young men who have lived supposedly happy care-free lives should identify with a cause so strongly they will not just die for it, but rid themselves of all normal human feeling and reason and wilfully and indiscriminately kill innocent men, women and children.

As if it is an easy and logical step to go from being upset and angry to becoming a mass murderer. Fully reasonable and only to be expected.

And some people take these criminals seriously. They listen to them explain why they want to kill us and think they've got a point. They think they act out of love. But I don't believe for one second that these bastards truly feel anything in their hearts for the Muslims they claim to carry out these acts for. These self-appointed avengers are nothing but deluded fanatics, fuelled by narcissism and motivated by fairy stories. When people call for us to understand why they do what they do, they think it will offer some useful clue as to how we can stop it all happening. But it won’t. It will only show us the murky slop of a damaged mind. It won’t offer us the truth.

And the truth is that they do what they do because the well of Islam has been poisoned. British foreign policy could be the same and there would be no attempted acts of mass murder from any British Muslim if Islam had not been so contaminated. A strain of political Islam is capturing youthful energy, channelling thoughts and acting as a conduit into violence and that is the problem.

The Tipton four. Ordinary Midland lads, picking out a life in a small, poor Midlands town. I know Tipton. It’s the town next to the one I grew up in. I know too the crushing boredom of living in such a town, of having no money, of being young and directionless. I know the yearning for adventure, born out of the distress in seeing a life spread out before you that appears to offer nothing but hard work and low pay. And yet those lads end up in a war zone and then incarcerated in the world famous Guantanamo Bay. How does something like that happen to kids living in a boring little town where nothing ever happens? The answer lies in the plain terraced house on Wellington Street in which Imams from Pakistan infested young minds with talk of Jihad.

If that imam, or imams, had not been allowed to preach sermons of ignorance and hate, those Tipton lads would never have felt the impulse to go into Afghanistan.

That is what is missing from the discussion here. It’s not one easy step from being angry about British foreign policy to killing thousands of people, it’s a long journey and the road is laid by the islamofascists that swell the ranks of Islam. And we let them lay that road right under our bloody noses. We are a free country, at ease with allowing other cultures and religions to imbed and flourish. And the islamofacsists have used that against us. They have abused our trust and misused our freedoms. It constitutes just about the worst betrayal that it is possible to commit against this country.

And not content with allowing them to betray us, we then go on to reason away their lust for blood. We normalise their completely abnormal behaviour. We even take the blame for what they do. There really is no end to our desire to accommodate them and their sick ideology. People wonder at Britain’s fecundity when it comes to producing terrorists, but is it any wonder when we willing provide such fertile ground?

And, you know I’m not sure how much longer I can keep doing this. I really don’t think that it would have mattered to some people if this plot had not been foiled. If the attacks had gone ahead as planned and hell had opened up above the cities of America, they would still be doing it. Still shrugging their shoulders, still making excuses, still blaming Tony Blair. Because that’s what they are like these people. Devoid of any heartfelt compassion, lacking in any sense of reality. When that man was pontificating today on the ITN news I started shaking with anger. Literally. And when he had finished his easy delivery of his world-view in which guilt attaches to the innocent and murder is standard, I burst into tears. I had to spend the rest of the afternoon trying to distract myself from the pure fury that was burning me up. His complete nonchalance at what violence on a mass scale is, at the idea of it, at the threat of it, was just unbearable to me. If he knew, I kept thinking, what he was being so casual about, if he knew just what he was shrugging his shoulders at, he wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it.

We are still ignorant. Planes smash into buildings, trains explode, roofs get blown off London buses. Thousands die, hundreds die, fifty two people die. And yet still they don’t understand. And I don’t think I can bear to see, read or hear their ignorance anymore.