We're hearing all kinds of stories about how great the British are holding up after the attacks on their city last week. The British people are indeed brave and will withstand this latest horror perpetrated on its innocent citizens.
However, Tony Blair is going to have to answer for some of the decisions he's had to make over the last 10 years that have put all of Europe at risk. Those stories are not coming out, kind of like after 9/11, no one wanted to be negative and criticize George Bush.
Well, more and more stories are coming out and here is a great one. Because it requires registration, I will quote it at length.
Did you know, for example, that:
IN AUGUST 1996, the British chargé d'affaires in Cairo was summoned by Egypt's deputy foreign minister and handed an angry letter for the eyes of UK Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind. The Egyptian communique was in protest at Britain's "support for international terrorism".
And that Britain undermined the efforts of Egypt, Algeria and France in containing Islamic fundamentalists:
Egypt, a strong Western ally, was incensed that Britain was allowing members of an exiled extremist Islamic group to use London as its main base of operations. That terror organisation was the Gamaa al-Islamiya (Islamic Group).
The Egyptian government had made repeated requests for Britain to extradite Islamic Group leaders to Cairo, where they had been sentenced to death in absentia for terrorist crimes including the attempted assassination of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
This wasn't just giving freedom of speech to people:
Britain has adopted a literal attitude to the Human Rights Convention that favoured extending protection even to convicted terrorists over the rights of the people in the countries where they had bombed and maimed. With this legal protection and Britain's notoriously slack immigration rules, London in the 1990s became a haven for dozens of extreme Islamic political exiles. They were able to hide easily in a city that had 300,000 Arab residents and a network of Middle Eastern financial institutions. In some quarters, multicultural London was rechristened "Londonistan".
And, even thwarting the efforts of other countries to stop terrorism:
The main Algerian expatriate terror group was the Groupe Islamique Arme or GIA. At first the GIA specialised in murdering moderate Algerians but a crackdown by the French authorities led the group to retaliate by carrying out a series of murderous bombings in Paris, including an attack on St Michel train station in 1995 which killed ten and maimed 116. Finding France too hot, the GIA moved to London. From here the GIA, and a splinter group called the GSPC, built up a European network. To fill its ranks the GIA/GSPC started to recruit young British Muslims. These were educated and intelligent young men, often British born and educated, who felt emotionally lost between the culture of their parents and the brashness of Western society. It was all too easy to be drawn to the romantic hard men of the GIA and GSPC and the simplicities of fundamentalist Islam. Plus there were new jihads to fight in Bosnia and Chechnya.
And, how were the British incompetent?
The classic case of Britain's inability to deal with the security threat from extreme Islamic activists coming to the UK concerns the radical cleric Omar Abu Othman, alias Abu Qatada. Bin Laden's ambassador in Britain, he is a Palestinian born in Jordan who came to London in the early 1990s as a political refugee. He was granted asylum despite arriving under a false passport.
Once here, Abu Qatada acted as spiritual advisor to Osama bin Laden and as an intermediary for bin Laden with the other jihadist groups. From his base in north west London, Qatada issued helpful fatwa justifying the Algerian terrorists' habit of cutting the throats of women and children. He proclaimed that Americans should be attacked wherever they are found and that there is "no difference between English, Jews and Americans". In multicultural London, no-one thought to charge him with incitement, breach of the peace or racial abuse, though if the British National Party had done the equivalent the outcome would have been very different.
The article goes on to explain how the Brits promised to deliver this man Qatada to the Jordanianss, but this promise was again broken.
There was another attack planned on London, but it wasn't British intelligence that found out about it, it was the Pakistanis:
Last year plans to attack Canary Wharf, in Docklands, were discovered on a computer captured by Pakistani intelligence officers. From then on the clock was ticking. The sad thing is that had Tory and Labour governments cracked down earlier on the jihadists, as the French did after the Paris bombings of 1995, Londoners would be less vulnerable today.
The entire story can be viewed after registration at :
http://news.scotsman.com/archive.cfm?id=761822005
Even sadder is the knowledge that had we not given the jihadists free rein to use London as their base for over a decade, other European cities would not be in the firing line as well.