The British must spy on each other to avoid terror

Britain’s new security chief, Alan West, says that Britain must adopt very un-British attitudes if it is to defeat the terrorism threat.

“Britishness does not normally involve snitching or talking about someone,” he said. “I’m afraid, in this situation, anyone who’s got any information should say something because the people we are talking about are trying to destroy our entire way of life.”

He said he was determined to build on the Government’s core anti-terrorism strategy of the “four Ps”—prepare, protect, pursue, prevent—but that the “prevent” side, dealing with the radicalisation of young Muslims, was the most important.

In other words, Britain must turn itself into an internal security state to protect itself from Muslim terrorists. The thought that if Britain did not have any Muslims it would not have to turn itself into a security state, does not occur to anyone. Indeed, according to West, Muslims are not the problem at all:

“I don’t like the fact that we talk about ‘the Muslim community’ and this sort of thing. I have a lot of Muslim friends and they see themselves as British. We’ve got to be very careful. The threat is to our British way of life and all of our British people.”

Of the terrorists, he said: “I think they have severely damaged one of the world’s great religions—the one they purport to support.” The claims that British foreign policy was solely to blame was an erroneous argument, he said.

So here’s the British response to Muslim terror: change Britain into a security state, while continuing to laud Islam as a great religion which ha somehow been damaged by terrorists who have nothing to do with true Islam. Nevertheless, the fact remains: If there were no Islam in Britain, Britain could be a free country again. Too bad that when the concept of “root causes” would actually do some good, liberals won’t go anywhere near it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 08, 2007 03:54 PM | Send