Home > The Magazine > Features

Friday 4 July 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Liz Anderson

Liz suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

The public know how these attacks happen — unlike the politicians

Rod Liddle

Wednesday, 4th July 2007

Rod Liddle says that the car-bomb plot was the predictable consequence of multiculturalism, lax immigration, mad human rights laws and neocon aggression. Shame the government can’t see this

‘Al-Qa’eda brain surgeons fail to blow up large car full of petrol’ has an agreeable ring to it, as a sort of taunt at our enemies and as a comfort blanket while we’re standing in the mile-long queue at Heathrow with a sniffer-dog’s snout in our groins. There is a certain truth to it, too — and one not yet remarked upon, in public at least, perhaps for superstitious reasons: they’re pretty useless, aren’t they? And have been for some time, now. Useless either with cool, state-of-the-art plastic explosives on the Underground, cunning toothpaste tube bomblets at the airport or, the new cruder approach — cars full of petrol to which they apparently forget to apply a cigarette lighter. Almost nothing they do works, usually as a result of their own incompetence and stupidity. Imagine: you join al-Qa’eda, take your medical exams, get a job in a British provincial hospital and spend years patiently plotting, awaiting the right moment and painstakingly growing your beard. An enormous investment of time, money and effort. And then you fill the car full of gasoline and propane and succeed only in setting yourself alight and incurring a few parking fines. Suicide bombers are, by definition, an evolutionary anomaly, a strictly counter-Darwinian development. Maybe the good gene pool has already been blown to smithereens and only the thickoes remain. We may have been left with the jihadist equivalent of Norman Wisdom, squeaking ‘Allah u-Akhbar, Mr Grimshaw!’ shortly before being arrested near Sandbach.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 Next page

More articles from: Rod Liddle | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

A portrait of the artist as a tennis champion

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite meets Martina Navratilova, nine times Wimbledon singles champion and now pioneer of ‘tennising’ — an artistic technique that creates Jackson Pollock-style patterns

Et tu, Scott? Bush’s press aide turns on his boss

James Forsyth

James Forsyth talks to Scott McClellan, former press secretary to the President, about his new book attacking the Bush administration, its methods and its deceits

The Law Lords are right to resist the government

Lord Lloyd of Berwick

Lord Lloyd of Berwick says that the government’s emergency legislation to overturn their lordships’ ruling on witness anonymity is part of a ‘gradual usurpation’ of our liberties

I was starstuck by David Cameron

Steven Berkoff

In the week of the Spectator Summer Party, Steven Berkoff recalls another of our celebrations at which he sought out the Tory leader and forgave his confusion of Brando and Dean

How to get stabbed: you, too, can be knifed in a public place

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says that it helps to be aged between 14 and 30, white and male. Being drunk and argumentative speeds things along. And no public policy seems to dissuade those who do the stabbing

McCain is in for a terrible shock if he wins

Reihan Salam

Reihan Salam says that most Republicans have no idea how much the American social landscape has changed. They should learn from Obama’s Google-like appeal

Forward to the past

James Forsyth

James Forsyth on Robert Kagan's new book

The soft diplomacy of Belgian chocolates

Emily Maitlis

Emily Maitlis reports from Libya on a land newly entranced by our brands — even M&S — where the West tolerates Gaddafi for fear of the insurgent alternative

To bring peace to the Afghans, talk to the Taleban

Adam Holloway

Adam Holloway says that Britain’s strategy in Afghanistan is misconceived. Nato’s military presence should be reduced and the battle for hearts and minds fought more imaginatively