That’s it! This is all too scary. I’m off to buy a Quran and a ticket to Syria. I’ve got some white bed sheets I can tear up and some garden canes to make my white flag.
I know the politicians are telling us that we shouldn’t be cowed, and that parliament and the British way of life are not under threat, but the fact that they are saying this tells us that we should be scared because otherwise they wouldn’t be saying it, right?
Yes, I know there are sixty five million people in Britain, and we have tanks and warships and nuclear weapons, but the Westminster Bridge killer had a knife for God’s sake: a big knife. And he got through the gates of parliament, so we’ve all had it.
Some will think this is not the time for jokes, and they would be right. Here is what is important: This criminal took the lives of four innocent people, and severely damaged the lives of many more, and he did this in one of the most barbaric, brutal and cruel ways possible. His behaviour was monstrous and unforgivable. My heart and my best wishes go out to the victims, but to pretend that Britain or our way of life is under threat is absurd. The threat to me or my family is tiny. Terrorists will only frighten me in the vanishingly unlikely event that I see one coming towards me. Sensible people know to be frightened of things that really might damage their lives like cancer, dementia, heart disease and Trump’s nuclear war (see previous post).
There have been times when Britain’s way of life has genuinely been under threat. In 1940 for instance, and the beginning of the nineteenth century when Napoleon had his designs on us, and before that in the late 16th Century when Philip of Spain sent his Armada. But the greatest of all threats – not just to our way of life but to our very survival – was the potential nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. Please let’s be sensible. The idea that a few half-baked extremists are any threat to Britain is ridiculous. To pretend that they are a threat to our country is to empower these otherwise impotent no hopers. Maybe there will have to be minor changes to our way of life in order to protect our security, but any changes we make will be at our discretion, not theirs. Their doomed so-called caliphate is destined for the dustbin of historical footnotes. To make this into something it isn’t, is to fall into the trap Bush/Blair fell into when they miss described the 9/11 attack as an act of war instead of what it really was, a crime. The result of their miscalculation was the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens.
Peter D Fisher 