A terror so great we forgot it at once

06 December 2006

Dhiren Barot’s case faded because it revealed unbearable truths

Myth four is that British Islamist terrorists are merely disaffected local youths going in for a bit of copycat aggro. Yet Barot was an important al-Qa’eda figure who was reporting to terrorist masterminds. After he was jailed, a senior counter-terrorism official was reported as saying that he was one of al-Qa’eda’s most experienced terrorists and that his conviction was ‘one of the most significant steps in the fight against terrorism since September 11’.

Despite all this, and the fact that Barot was sent down for 40 years, the case attracted relatively little media attention. Certainly, the lurid details of the plot were fully reported, but there has been virtually no analysis of the significance of the Barot case. There’s been no discussion of what it tells us about the sheer scale of the threat to this country, or how best we should protect ourselves against it.

No one has pondered what it tells us about the true wellspring of Islamist terror and the particular fanaticism of converts. No one has asked how on earth we are to deal with such mass brainwashing of millions into a death cult in the name of a religion. There has been only near-universal silence.

Partly this is because Barot’s jailing coincided with the big story of the US mid-term elections. Partly it is because continuing reporting restrictions mean that there are aspects of this plot which still cannot be discussed. Partly it’s because the terrible atrocities being planned didn’t actually happen, unlike the murder of Alexander Litvinenko who died before our astonished eyes and left a poison trail round London.

But there is another reason for the silence. There is still widespread denial of the threat facing Britain. Hard on the heels of the Barot case came the statement by Dame Eliza that there were at least 200 terror networks, 1,600 terrorist suspects and 30 top priority terrorist plots currently active in the UK, and that future threats would involve chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear attacks.

Reaction to this was also muted, because of the climate of cynicism and puerile conspiracy theories which treats such warnings as an attempt by politically compromised officials to shore up ‘Blair’s lies’, or to get more funding for the security service, or to grab our liberties.

People also continue to regard British Islamists as essentially amateurs because they don’t fit into a recognisable category of threat. The KGB are understood as ruthless state apparatchiks. IRA terrorism was understood as promoting a realisable cause. But restoration of the mediaeval caliphate? Give us a break!

So the pragmatic British simply don’t grasp that what they are facing is totally irrational and non-negotiable. They insist instead on viewing the jihad as caused by negotiable issues, such as the war in Iraq.

That’s why it was indeed fitting that the Barot case was knocked off the front pages by Bush’s reverses in the mid-term elections. Instead of tiresome facts about the dire threat to Britain, the country could rejoice that Bush and his war on terror had been derailed, and we could all get down to the worthy cause of surrendering in Iraq.

You see, people really do believe that the greatest threat to the world is not al-Qa’eda, not Ahmadinejad, but George W. Bush. And that is the most terrifying thing of all.

Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist.