Tuesday, July 18, 2006

But Who Would Be A Bomber ?

It’s always a good rule of thumb that when Liberals are enraged, but won’t go into details, they’re up to no good. Consider the case of St Jean the Martyr.

Liberals are indignant that the police officers who shot St Jean won’t be prosecuted. Actually, to listen to Liberal rhetoric, you could think this is the case that finally gets them to rethink their opposition to capital punishment. Yes, indeed, Liberals are worried that the CPS is letting the guilty go free. If humbuggery was explosive, the BBC would be a smoking crater right about now.

Hearing Liberals moralise always has a certain comedy value – kind of like an anti-drugs message from Kate Moss – but when the side of the spectrum that normally needs sedation to stop banging on about the letter of the law suddenly starts rooting its arguments firmly in the abstract, then you know they’re on dodgy ground.

The police officers who shot St Jean the Fraudster Martyr were exercising their common law right to self-defence using reasonable force. They were briefed that the target was a fanatical human bomb, just like eight previous attackers that month, so they used the force appropriate to deal with the perceived threat.

Bottom line: forget all these dark hints about secret policies and the like. It’s the same right that applies to every citizen. If Mr FM was helping protect civilsation from the fox menace when a deranged animal rights nut with a dynamite waistcoat charged him, he would be well within his rights to shoot the hippy – although subsequent stuffing and mounting may prove legally problematic. The only unusual feature of the Menzies case was that the cops actually chose to go in harm’s way by closing to short range on a man loaded with explosive (or so they thought). This is not normally the type of conduct that draws criticism.

Hence why Liberals rely on either absurd moralising of the ‘shooting people is bad’ sort, or they resort to dippy conspiracy theories. As it happens, there are questions to be asked about an operation which fell apart so easily and (worse) so irretrievably. The only trouble is that the Left won’t ask. Why might that be ?

Needless to say, missing from all that Liberal blather was any actual suggestions as to what the police should be doing. Just as long as the police are required to trail a terrorist around right up until his finger is poised over the trigger, they’ll be required to render split-second judgements, with the inevitable corollary of more Stockwells.

On the other hand, Liberals don’t want the police to act any earlier – at least to judge by their reaction to the raid on the Forest Gate Kittens. Known Islamoloons, with a sheet load of previous, a firearm somewhere round plus a wodge of unaccounted for cash, but hey – that’s hardly grounds for suspicion.

So, I guess Liberals prefered policy is to wait until the police have absolute proof a primed bomb is on the premises, then strike before the terrorists can arm it, so the police can stroll leisurely through the house without having to make any hasty decisions. Call it the Goldilocks’ strategy: not too early and not too late. What could possibly go wrong ?

Well, actually, we know exactly what could go wrong. We had a perfect demonstration on July 7. Of course, things were a little different after that. While Liberals are busily strip-mining the statute books to find some way – any way – to screw the police, they’re a little more generous to members of the peaceful death cult. Liberals weren’t even sure we could call them ‘bombers’. Maybe they were just extreme demonstrators ? Besides, they were driven to it by the system, man (apparently, the system also made them record final messages claiming that it was the teachings of a well-known paedophile that made them do it). That’s the other thing, of course, as fervent as Liberals are that the shooting of St Jean proves that the police are collectively guilty, they were equally sure that there were no wider lessons to be learned from the tendency of members of a certain death cult to spontaneously explode. We faced a tsunami of flatulent articles on the completely mysterious question of what could have motivated the killers.

That the final question right there. How come it’s always the Brazilian St Jean ? How come it’s self-evidently absurd that there could be a suicide bomber from Sao Paulo ? Are Liberals trying to claim that we can somehow, to coin a phrase, ‘profile’ terrorists ?

Since at least September 11 Liberals have been insisting that terrorists could be just anyone, 80 year old Jamaicans, Chinese schoolgirls, Welsh paraplegics… there was just no way to tell (and Liberal’s legal ninjas were ready to swoop on anyone who said otherwise). If Liberals insist on this Goldilocks’ policing, then the least they can do is stop hobbling the intelligence effort by insisting that no one admit that the threat is unlikely to come from militant Mormons.

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