Osama's Useful Idiots

Funny how liberals believe the secret to having a safe society is keeping handguns from law-abiding citizens yet consider oppressive a check for bombs in bags owned by people fitting a particular description.

The recent shooting of a Brazilian mistaken for a possible suicide bomber in London has led to severe criticism of the Blair government’s response to the transit attacks by militant Islamists in London.

Though it is always regrettable when an innocent person is caught in “friendly fire” in any situation, the British anti-terrorism unit should not be totally be faulted for the tragic accident.

Imagine for a moment you are a police officer and you see someone who has been seen in an area that has been under supervision for potential links to Muslim radicals and whose physical features are closer to that of an Arab than to that of say, someone from Osaka, Japan, where Al Qaeda is not known to operate or recruit people to their cause.

Now all of a sudden you see this man curiously attired in winter clothes in the midst of the summer, a sign Israeli bus drivers look for when keeping an eye out for suicide bombers, since the layers of clothes can conceal a bomb vest.Naturally, you decide to check this person out ordering him not to move, but instead of freezing, the man begins to take off running towards the subway.

Once on board the train, the click of a button can kill dozens of people, forcing the police to make a split-second decision: shoot to kill and investigate later or gamble with the lives of the people on the subway, keeping in mind that a wounded terrorist could still activate the triggering mechanism. Since the signals indicated another terrorist attack, the police opted to do the former and have been catching hell for it.

Not surprisingly, some Londoners, not all of them Muslims, have gnashed their teeth over the shooting of the runaway Brazilian, even more so in some quarters than they did towards the perpetrators of the July bombings.

London is one of the world’s most liberal cities and the British people have a tradition of being rather thick-skinned and politically progressive to a fault. In many ways, London is like New York City with a San Francisco mentality. That Britain allowed the presence and vitriol of firebrand Islamic militants preaching hate and advocating jihad against the very country they reside in was almost a badge of honor for the country; proof of their civility and tolerance as a people.

But the days of living in a “la-la-land” have to come to an end for many with the bus and train bombings being their wake up call to the nation’s naiveté in its immigration policies and their failure to take the Al-Qaeda embracing imams seriously. But there are many self-loathing Anglos in London who pin the blame for what happened on Bush, Blair, transnational corporations, etc and not the radical Muslims who have been waging a war against the West primarily by going after civilians.

These misguided souls are probably in agreement with the nutty Colorado professor who called the victims of 9-11 (janitors excluded) “Little Eichmanns”. For them, demanding that the government bind its own hands in fighting the terrorists at home while militant Islamists happily whack at major cities like a giant piñata validates their status as true anti-establishment activists.

What is really scary is that this fringe considers George W. Bush and “Toady” Blair a greater threat to humanity than Osama Bin-Laden. Take a guess which of the aforementioned three has been tarnished in effigy the least by Britons? Western lunatics trying to out-“civil disobedience” each other by working themselves into a froth of outrage over the slightest mishap in a business (stopping all terrorist attacks) that is hardly an exact science will get more innocent people killed by Islamic militants than it will protect people who are not terrorists, but who are afraid of being detained by the police because they are in violation of another law.

The greater tragedy stemming from the death of Brazilian is that the backlash might cause the authorities to be unnecessarily cautious when attempting to stop an attack that turns out to be genuine, thus playing into Al Qaeda’s hands.