Al-Qaeda my arse

Airport Fire

Back in the last century the IRA, a small militant republican movement from Northern Ireland undertook a bombing campaign in London. As I say, they were a small organisation with scant resources but even so they managed to carry out a large number of spectacular and disruptive attacks while killing relatively few people. Judging by the very informative timeline of London bombings over at NPR there were 29 attacks between 1971 and 2001, an average of about one a year, causing millions of pounds worth of damage and huge disruption but only murdering 27 people in the process.

In this century we have Al-Qaeda who, we are told, are a global ‘terror network’ with access to unlimited funding, training and equipment. We are shown videos of masked men in secret training camps doing karate chops in balaclava helmets and clambering under barbed wire dressed as Rambo. They aren’t ‘nice’ like the IRA, they don’t give warnings. They have learned to make ‘Improvised Explosive Devices’ in Iraq, they defeated the Russians in Afghanistan but now the three countries they hate the most in the world are Israel, the US and Britain. Surely we are doomed.

They have had their successes: In the US in 2001, in Spain in 2004 and in London in 2005 but their failures have been so useless and embarrassing. The shoe bomber, the castor oil poisoners, the chapati flour and hair dye bombers and now the Camping Gaz and petrol drive-by bombings. It’s like being attacked by ten year olds from a rough estate who’ve got their hands on The Anarchist Cookbook. We shouldn’t raise the threat alert to maximum, we should ignore them, like spam or graffiti. They’re hopeless, ignorant, sexually frustrated losers who think that if they nick an SUV and burn it out in Glasgow airport instead of in some car park somewhere they’ll get more attention and unfortunately they’re right. What they’re not is members of some shadowy international ‘terrorist’ organisation. No way.

9 thoughts on “Al-Qaeda my arse

  1. It’s the perfect franchise. You don’t even need to sign up to anything. You could set fire to a shopping trolley in SE London and suddenly you’re the “Penge Chapter of Al-Qeada”.

  2. Terrorists don’t have to kill people to succeed.

    If tourists stop visiting the country or people become affraid to travel to London or use the transport infrastructure then the terrorists are winning.

    Your response is right – at an individual level we should stick two fingers up to them and carry on doing whatever we do. Don’t be put off visiting London or catching a plane. Doing stuff now is no more dangerous than it was at this time last week, so let’s all get on with our lives.

  3. Awww Westy, that’s a bit trite isn’t it? A situation like this is also very good news for so-called ‘terrorism experts’ who make a living from making baseless pronouncements about Al-Queda on the telly, and good news for all those jobsworth security people and frustrated, authoritarian law enforcers, and let’s face it, it’s also very good news for hacks in newsrooms who hope that a scrolling Aston about Breaking News will get people tuning in. So we’re actually all winners, right? Plus all those people who couldn’t fly might go by train next time and I just saw some footage of the police pulling SUVs off the motorway. Where’s the downside?

    Anyway, you’ve inspired me to write something about what exactly the word ‘terrorist’ means. What definition are you using?

  4. This new “Al-Qaeda” tactic of setting yourself on fire, crashing your car and then punching people is a new one. I don’t suppose Special Branch saw that one coming. As long as the terrorists stick to this “ignite, crash, punch” strategy, then I will refuse to be intimidated.

    Meanwhile, a clarification on the IRA killing numbers. 27 in London, maybe, but the IRA also killed 21 people one one evening in the Birmingham pub bombings in 1974. And in many other places like Brighton, Warrington, and that’s not including all the deaths in Northern Ireland. Sometimes they gave effective warnings (Manchester), and sometimes they didn’t.

  5. Well, I wasn’t really looking to get into the “my terrorist is your freedom-fighter” thing. But I’d call people leaving car bombs outside nightclubs terrorists and I’d call people driving car bombs into airports terrorists.

    They’re using terror as a weapon, which was the point my original comment was trying to make. You can spread terror without killing. I have a couple of colleagues making the trip to London this week and I know they’ve been put off by what’s happened over the last few days. They’ll still go, but they’re not looking worward to it. They won’t be the only ones looking again at their travel plans.

  6. James – Unless there’s some huge fact that we don’t know, like for instance that these people did actually obtain some bombs which were in fact duds from MI5, these were not car bombs. I’m not talking about the freedom-fighter versus terrorist debate here, I’m suggesting that some people might actually aspire to being described as an Al-Qaeda cell when they’d be better described as anti-social, reckless yobs. It suits a lot of people very well to present the situation as that of constant and deadly attack. This wasn’t that.

    Peter – You’re quite right and I’m not at all trying to say that the IRA weren’t deadly. Quite the contrary, I’m trying to put the current situation into context by using them as an example of how a serious sustained threat can be posed by an organisation with much more limited resources that Al-Qaeda is supposed to have. In my mind I was also using them as an example of something closer to what the word ‘terrorist’ means to me in that they had a specific political objective. As far as I know these Islamic militants have no specific objective apart from a general desire for an imaginary medieval utopia in which there would be no blogging, or other naughty self-expression. We can but dream.

    Othermachines – If it’s not in the next issue of Private Eye they’re losing their touch.

  7. On Start The Week this week Eric Hobsbawm made a similar point rather more dryly. Good on you both.

    (this is a different James).

  8. Jon, having been a bit dim I do get your drift, and broadly agree with you.

    But just because the cars didn’t have a giant fuse coming out of the top and the word “Bomb” painted on the side in a cartoon style I don’t think it’s outrageous to call them car bombs. I’m commenting on a blog, not writing the news headlines. “Improvised explosive device” is a bit of a mouthful and “car filled with volatile fluids and a bag of nails in the hope it’ll go bang” is just silly.

    Post your style guide and I’ll try to stick to it 😉

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