Get used to waffling, myopia and general incompetence
Reader comment on item: The Next London Bombing

Submitted by Reuben Horne (Australia), Jul 11, 2005 at 19:31

I awoke a few days ago to the news of the London bombings on my radio and was horrified as I have a number of friends all of whom utilize public transport living in London. Thankfully none of them were hurt - this time. A short while after this I received an Email from another friend in the United States with a link to a halfway clever tasteless barb about a Democratic middle eastern coalition in 2154 declaring the United States to be dangerous rogue state and invading it. My friend - a devout member of the academic left apparently saw no need to deal with the particular sensitivities given the temporal proximity of this tragedy and retreated into the same tired old diatribes. It comes as no surprise that my friend's (Government funded) job as a sociologist revolves around endlessly flagellating the west (in particular Australia and the US) for their treatment of native peoples.

In fact this reaction characterised most of the reaction from the left. A far left Labor MP in Britain declared that there was a direct link between this incident and the British policy in Iraq and Afghanistan - at no time did he make any effort to explain the Madrid train bombings and how they fit his warped vision of the world. Spain after all did everything that the radical Imams wanted foriegn policywise and still got hit.

The most worrying trend that has come out of all of this is the habit (briefly touched upon by Mr Pipes above) of western governments starting to believe their own politically correct nonsense. They are behaving as though the propoganda so very deliberately fed to the public (to keep them docile in the face of the looming spectre of religious extremism and in a state of perpetual nonviolence to the muslim cooccupiers of their countries) were actually true - and making strategic national security decisions based upon it. As can be seen from the above example even their own dramatic underestimate of the level of extremist activity in England yields a figure that is unacceptably high.

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