Thursday 22 November 2007

Waste of words

Today Timothy Garton Ash wasted just over a thousand words debating which term out of Islamofascists, Islamists or jihadist we should use to identify those "trying to kill us" and almost by accident hits it in the first 18 with "just plain murderers".
My personal view is the motivation behind the attacks, the group they belong to, the cause they are espousing, may be relevant to the avenues of investigation that those trying to stop them on our behalf use but shouldn't be part of the public reaction lest it cloud the picture. My argument for this is even in his article, in the same way that it wasn't all the Irish[1] or all Irish Catholics, etc etc that were blowing us up, then not all of any of the groups mentioned above are doing so now and suggesting they are is actually going to piss people off enough that they will consider join these groups.
We only need one word to describe the people doing this, Terrorist.
Of course the problem with that is how to tell this current crop of terrorists from the other large group that is doing its best to instil fear into the population of the UK and other countries? I suppose we could use a very old label that describes them, Her Majesty's Government. Unlike last time, as well as oppressing and alienating a minority group in the population and thus often driving recruitment to the bad guys, they are using the situation to terrorise the whole population. Gordon, and Tony before, have ensured they are brushed up on their Orwell with measures such as requiring every possible statistic on you from your hat size to the number of moles on your arse before you can leave the country or wanting to double the period you can be imprisoned without charge which is already one of the longest in the world. All of this is done in a way that makes the shoe bomber look like a master criminal, for example the government thinks that putting bag searches at 250 railway stations and other points of departure will prevent terrorists travelling. It won't even protect the railway stations they will have the searches at, because they can travel from any other the other 2250 stations by train!
Finally the biggest deception to come out of the "Ministry of Truth" is that ID cards will stop all this, I am still utterly mystified as to how they can think this, unless the bit they haven't told us is that the reason this project is so expensive is that each card will come equipped with a field portable gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer explosive detector and a GPS tracking device.
Oh well at least there are still a few bins left to use this time around.

[1]No matter what West Midlands Serious Crime Squad might have thought.

No comments: