Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [350]
Britain has much experience in the field of terrorism, although not in the sense that the British themselves like to advertise. Although other countries have problems with murderous jihadis (notably Denmark and the Netherlands) Britain, according to a recent Europol report, is actually the epicentre of European jihadism. This news was buried in brief two-hundred-word accounts in the newspapers that bothered to notice it. In 2007 some 203 people were arrested in Britain on suspicion of terror offences; the figure for the whole of the rest of Europe was 201.33 A large number of terrorist cases, under investigation for several years, have also passed through British courts. They have included Dhiran Barot, the Hindu convert and Al Qaeda mastermind who conspired to blow up US targets. Several men were convicted in the wake of Operation Crevice for planning to kill shoppers at the Bluewater complex in Kent and ‘dancing slags’ in South London nightclubs. Also convicted was the cyber-jihadist Younis Tsouli, codenamed ‘Irhabi 007’, who graduated from assisting the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, by using the home movies of US soldiers to help Al Qaeda pinpoint attacks, to becoming Al Qaeda’s pre-eminent internet expert. Another was Pervez Khan, who with his accomplices sought to abduct a British Muslim soldier on leave in Birmingham, with a view to filming his decapitation in a garage so as to ‘give Young Tony [Blair] something to think about’. Further trials concern the supporting cast in the 7/7 and 21/7 bombings (after the failed bombers of 21/7 had been given long jail sentences), and last but not least, the eight men accused of plotting to blow up multiple transAtlantic flights with the aid of liquid explosives concealed in bottles of Lucozade. Pre-recorded suicide videos, and a lot of forensic evidence, will not help their case. Several prominent rabble-rousers, notably Abu ‘The Claw’ Hamza and Trevor ‘Abu Izzadeen’ Brooks, have also received jail sentences, with Hamza facing extradition to the US after he has completed his seven-year sentence. Among those yet to come to court is the Iraqi who survived the failed alleged attack on Glasgow airport using gas-cylinder bombs and Andrew Ibrahim, an alleged ‘lone wolf bomber’. These cases have confirmed that 70 per cent of conspiracies in Britain have links to Pakistan. The plotters invariably went to Pakistan with a view to waging armed jihad, only to be subtly redirected, because of their uselessness on a battlefield, to carrying out atrocities on home ground in operations that were subsequently green-lit from abroad.
There have been other revelations regarding the mentality of British jihadists. One case has revealed a video pre-recorded by 7/7 lead bomber Mohammed Siddique Khan in which he bade farewell to his infant daughter before leaving to fight in Afghanistan. This touching scene, which moved the more credulous or relativist sort of British columnist, was counterbalanced by evidence in the trial of Pervez Khan regarding his conversion of the living room in his Birmingham house into a replica mujaheddin encampment. MI5 recorded his attempts to indoctrinate his son. As a young man, Khan had shown no interest in religion. He drank, smoked, went clubbing and supported a local amateur soccer team. All changed when he visited Pakistan, after which he began shipping night-vision glasses and camouflage gear to jihadist fighters. Perhaps the most instructive aspects of the conversations MI5 bugged in his home (their code-name for Khan was ‘Motorway Madness’) were his efforts to beat his worldview into his five-year-old