Liddle America

Are biscuits a terrorist threat?

19 August 2006

Why can’t you take biscuits on board at JFK, when computer games are fine at La Guardia? Rod Liddle, in the US, is mystified

Both over here and at home, the Muslim leaders have been doing their usual thing of denouncing terrorism and then, in the next breath, sort of justifying it. The subtext of their statements (and of the egregious letter signed by the various self-appointed panjandrums of the British Muslim world) is always the same: it is wrong to kill innocent people, obviously, but if you lot continue to pro-secute a war in Iraq and don’t smack Israel about a bit then you can expect to be blown up when you next board a plane. We’d rather you weren’t blown up, but it’s likely to happen. And while one might excuse the panic and confusion on the part of the British and US governments as being the best that they can do in response to a threat which is sometimes real, sometimes non-existent, is forever changing shape and strategy and right now lives among us, they might at least see that here is a nettle which they can grasp. Britain’s Muslims — and especially their ‘leaders’ — simply do not get it. There has to be no equivocation over acts of terror; no weasel words which will give succour to the adolescent Muslim strapping on the Semtex in his Birmingham bedsit. There should be no equivocation over suicide bombing against Israeli civilians, either. If (which I doubt) Islam is truly peaceable and finds such actions ‘haram’, then be steadfast about it and say as much.

It is a problem, in the end, of our own making — by which I do not mean the decision to invade Iraq. Unquestionably that decision has left us open to more terrorist attacks than would otherwise have been the case — but this does not mean we should necessarily have refrained from overthrowing Saddam. (I think the invasion was wrong, but that’s another issue.)

The problem is of our own making because, through following a multicultural agenda, we first allowed into the country too large a number of immigrants possessed of a culture and beliefs which are antithetical to our own. And then we encouraged them to keep those beliefs rather than integrate.