especially MPs discussing laptops from Turkey whilst the loonies are outside in a car.

Unusual post - although I'm commuting home, and don't know the full facts

People were killed in our Capital?


Or am I missing something...

I think it is very generous of you to define mental illness as outside of the house of commons...

My head hurts...

Without diminishing the sadness for the dead, what a hapless and useless attack by the pathetic loony - one assumes. More are killed every day on a single motorway. Good for our security services. But let's take a longer view. We pray this wasn't a cunning start for a more intelligent attempt. Remember the Paris attack, which sort of posed as an attack on a football stadium but was actually one on a music venue. Am I correct? The first was, if I remember, a diversion.

If this had not been a lone loony but a way to occupy attention - even now, there could be a dozen killers dressed as cops or military entering Westminster in a duplicate van, armed, disguised and wearing passes, carrying grenades and machine guns, posed outside chambers in helmets and shades, accepted as security, just waiting for the right moment to launch a truly dreadful second attack.

That's what a film maker or script writer would do. Thank God terrorists are less bright or imaginative.

I may be proven wrong, but I suspect that we may well find in the fullness of time that this twisted villain was a weed-addled, low-life petty criminal thug, as many of the other "terrorists" who mowed down defenceless people turned out to be. Peter Hitchens has been consistently right about this. I also suspect that there will be further security crackdowns and intrusions.

Whatever the vacuous rhetoric coming from Chairman May might say, I wouldn't mind betting that we can anticipate further erosions of liberty and free speech following this nasty, odious outburst from a dangerously deranged fruitcake. Whenever a prominent contemporary politician brays about the defence of liberty, you can be fairly sure that he or she is planning to restrict it further.

I'm becoming the Eeyore of the forum, aren't I?

Spee wrote:
My head hurts...




Just wait for the closing bell.

How's the stock market today ?

I seem to remember the late Christopher Hitchens taking issue with the belief in the heavenly reward of 72 virgins that these bloodthirsty maniacs embrace. There is apparently, some dispute over the word that is commonly translated into English as "virgin". It could also mean "raisin," apparently.

If there is an afterlife, I wonder what this foul murderer makes of his handful of dried fruit?

Brendan O'Neill gets to the heart of the matter in an excellent piece for today's spiked-online:

www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/le...e/19594#.WNPVY4XXLDc

JK2006 wrote:
But let's take a longer view. We pray this wasn't a cunning start for a more intelligent attempt. Remember the Paris attack, which sort of posed as an attack on a football stadium but was actually one on a music venue. Am I correct? The first was, if I remember, a diversion.

If this had not been a lone loony but a way to occupy attention - even now, there could be a dozen killers dressed as cops or military entering Westminster in a duplicate van, armed, disguised and wearing passes, carrying grenades and machine guns, posed outside chambers in helmets and shades, accepted as security, just waiting for the right moment to launch a truly dreadful second attack.

I am reminded of this quote from Alan Clark in his diaries after the Brighton Hotel bombing in 1984:

"Quite a coup for the Paddies. It has the whiff of the Tet Offensive about it. If only they had the wit to press their advantage, they would have had a team of snipers outside the hotel to pick off the survivors."

pete wrote:
Brendan O'Neill gets to the heart of the matter in an excellent piece for today's spiked-online:

www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/le...e/19594#.WNPVY4XXLDc

I don't agree with him. I would have at one point but not any more, not since Charlie Hebdo and similar. Unfortunately the commenter 'Aquinas' is on the ball:-

By its very nature, a terrorist attack has a profound impact in a society. It tells us how vulnerable we are to evil and how anyone in any place can be a target. On top of that, Islamists use particularly gruesome methods of killing people which contribute greatly to a sense of horror. To recognise these facts is not to play the terrorists’ game, it is to tell the truth. There is no shame in fear when the threat is real and it is absurd to act as if nothing had happened. Something has happened and we have to deal with it. To pretend otherwise is immature and cowardly.

Yes, Aquinas makes a good and valuable point that merits further thought, tdf.

I’m not sure that O’Neill was arguing for doing nothing. In some respects, he was simply saying what Theresa May said earlier today: this bloodthirsty religious maniac will not prevent free people from going about their business as normal. This seems to me to be quietly heroic, not timidly passive or cowardly.

I’ve become sceptical about knee-jerk “something must be done” reactions. It seems to me that when any of us make immediate decisions in impetuous or panic-stricken reaction to an atrocity (or even a question – Brexit, yes or no?), without being fully availed of the facts and without extended debate, all manner of unintended consequences will inevitably ensue. Like huge increases in mass surveillance, a form of covert snooping on innocent people that alters the relationship between the free citizen and the State in a manner reminiscent of totalitarian regimes.

If terrorists push us further down that path, they’re being highly effective in their obscene violence.

I’m inclined to concur with Peter Hitchens:

The self-styled ‘security’ agencies have large budgets to justify and are given to uncheckable boasts about how effective they are. I am a journalist, trained to doubt such claims, and persuaded by decades of experience that such doubts are justified - and I do not like such bodies becoming too powerful. Forgive me if I remain sceptical about any demands from them, either for more power to snoop on the innocent, or more money.

I am told that this incident is an argument for the squadrons of heavily-armed police officers who now stand around in various parts of big cities. Is it? I am not sure. The Houses of Parliament are obviously full of, and surrounded by, armed officers, as anyone with eyes to see would have noted at any time over the past ten years, and perhaps longer. Yet Wednesday’s culprit, even so, made a murderous attack on a police officer in these precincts. If he was capable of reason at all at the time, he either did not care what happened to him or actively expected to be shot. And so he was. In either case, he was not deterred by armed police officers.

In any case, the purpose of the police is not to act as sentries for state buildings. That is a job for the Army, and if things have got as serious as is claimed, then soldiers should be deployed in such roles (as they are now in France) rather than being despatched to Estonia.

hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/

In the article Hitchens links to, Simon Jenkins makes the following point, which strikes me as entirely sound:

Our response to these incidents must not be to overreact. This week is the anniversary of the Islamic State outrage at Brussels airport, when 32 people lost their lives in a coordinated assault on Belgium’s transport system. It followed earlier attacks in Paris.

The reaction then was extraordinary. Europe’s media and politicians were close to hysterical. For days, BBC reporters on the spot repeated the words panic, threat and menace by the hour. France’s President François Hollande declared that “all of Europe has been attacked”. Prime minister David Cameron announced that “the UK faces a very real terror threat”. Donald Trump declared to cheering supporters that “Belgium and France are literally disintegrating”. Isis could not have asked for a greater megaphone.

The terrorist is helpless without the assistance of the media and those who feed it with words and deeds.
…
We should recall that Theresa May as home secretary used the Paris and Belgium attacks to champion her “snooper’s charter”, the most severe intrusion on personal privacy anywhere in the western world – and described as such by Bill Binney, formerly of America’s National Security Agency. May added that the “terrorist threat” was why we should stay in the EU, as otherwise “they would roam free”. She warned that it took 143 days to process terrorist DNA outside the EU, against 15 minutes inside. Does she still say that? We have to respect those who defend us, but terrorism induces a strange madness.

At the time, the British government also rushed ahead with its Prevent strategy, commanding every educational institution to show it had programmes in place “to counter nonviolent extremism, which can create an atmosphere conducive to terrorism”. The attendant bureaucracy is now massive. Hardly a week passes without the Metropolitan police demanding vigilance – inducing fear, caution and nervousness towards strangers. A recent BBC “drama documentary” titled Attack was ill-concealed publicity for more money for the police.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/m...not-threat-democracy