Fanatical fools trying to blow us all up? They're the least of our problems...

This is Peter Hitchen's Mail on Sunday column

Long ago
I annoyed a prominent Irish republican. When we were mistakenly left alone
together in the same hospitality room in a TV studio, he raged at me, white
with fury, accusing me of being paid to persecute him.

It
crossed my mind that I might be a terrorist target as a result. I pondered for
a while, and concluded there wasn't much I could do about it.

Too bad.
My father had spent long months on the Russian convoys in the Second World War,
harried by appalling weather, U-boats, German surface raiders and the
Luftwaffe, with half an inch of steel between him and a sea so cold that it
would kill you in seconds.

Compared
to that, my danger was tiny and barely worth worrying about. My only sorrow was
that my minor risk was all in vain. Not long afterwards, the British State
cravenly surrendered to the Provisional IRA, and called it 'peace'.

This has
made me more scornful, ever after, of the ludicrous spasms we go into when
criminal bombers strike at us. In the end these people are just immoral zealots
who have turned to crime because they have an exaggerated idea of their own
goodness.

In many
cases they save us the trouble of killing them by doing it themselves. But if
they survive, they deserve a fair trial and then a swift vertical journey
through a trap door with a rope round their necks.

 Yet instead, we do exactly what
they hope we will do. We act as if they are important. We turn our countries
upside down to take useless precautions against them. We give the police
special powers. We make travel into a silly palaver of searches and checks of
obviously harmless people. We destroy half our ancient liberties as we tramp
and stamp about. Then, later on, we give in to the terrorists anyway.

None of
these precautions works. They are as futile as the toy golf-ball detector which
a cunning fraud successfully sold as an explosives scanner, and they work on
the same principle. The client is so scared that he has stopped thinking, and
will gullibly accept almost anything he is told.

If some
fanatical cretin wants to bomb a marathon, how on earth can you stop him? We
know that the American authorities had been warned about this particular
cretin, but, short of locking him up without charge, what could they
realistically have done?

Just
before the July 7 outrages in London in 2005, our vaunted, boastful security
organs were completely unaware that anything was going to happen (and, worse,
our emergency services were sadly unprepared).

They have
been trying to justify their enormous budgets ever since by rounding up groups
of bearded, incompetent but talkative fantasists, and slinging them into prison
for very long periods. They also periodically let it be known that they have
saved us from lots of other nameless perils that they can't speak about. Well,
perhaps.

Meanwhile
we continue the hilarious pursuit of some furry-faced Muslim cleric, who seems
to have been invented to demonstrate that we no longer control our own borders.
The Government's legal bill must be enormous. What we won't even consider doing
is leaving the EU and the Human Rights convention, the two actions that would
free us to act as we wish.

Meanwhile,
the real Islamic problem grows unnoticed – the quiet spread of Sharia law,
female subjugation and polygamy in our country, mainly the result of the
uncontrolled mass immigration that would have been a good deal easier to tackle
than 'terrorism' ever was.

In the
end, who knows where this may lead? Our culture is already noticeably scared of
Islam and gives it a great deal of leeway. My own view is that this will end in
the slow Islamisation of this country.

If you
don't think we will wear this, look at the fascinating picture of Katherine Russell,
widow of the unlamented Boston murderer Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an all-American
girl, brought up in freedom, yet now shrouded in the submissive garb of the
Muslim wife. I shouldn't think she thought that would happen to her, either.
She is a metaphor for all of us.

1997: A vintage year for shifty crooks

I have
lived in the same place, off and on, for nearly 50 years. In that time I have
seen the police vanish from its streets. I have seen the local courts issue
feebler and feebler sentences. I have seen the appearance of open drug-taking,
severe drunkenness, epidemic shoplifting, menacing begging, random late-night
violence, unchecked graffiti and vandalism.

I read or
hear horrible stories of knifings and beatings that would have been national
scandals in 1963 (and would also have led to the deaths of their victims, these
days often saved by brilliant surgeons and paramedics). Nowadays they pass in a
few seconds on the local news.

Everything
has been in one direction. Nothing at all has happened to suggest that this
long-term trend has stopped, let alone reversed.

So how do
we explain the extraordinary figures published last week in something called
the UK Peace Index, much trumpeted by the BBC and its scrupulously neutral Home
Editor, whose name I forget (but he won't mind because he's so modest)? It
suggests that we are becoming a more peaceful country.

On page
19 of this wondrous document is a series of graphs. Each shows more or less the
same thing: burglary, fraud and forgery, violent crime, robbery and sex
offences were all shooting upwards nearly vertically. Then, in about 1997, they
all dropped almost as steeply as they had been rising.

Now, I
know all kinds of grand people who scold me for saying this, but can any
intelligent, grown-up take these figures seriously?

Here's
one alternative explanation. The great drop in all these crimes took place very
close to 1997, the year in which the most dishonest and unscrupulous government
in modern history took office. Weapons of Mass Subtraction, anybody?

I never
thought of myself this way before, but I am now officially ‘frivolous’. That
mighty quango Ofcom has used this word to dismiss my complaint against the BBC.

I
objected to the fact that, in referring to one of my columns here, a Radio 4
programme edited out some words to change the meaning.

They then
criticised me for saying what I hadn’t in fact said. Well, if it’s frivolous to
complain about that, or think it unfair, I’m proud to be so.

I often warn
here of how a demoralised and gutless establishment have given up trying to
control the spread of dangerous illegal drugs.

Now the
Prison Governors Association has joined the liberalisation campaign. How
shameful. These people are paid and trusted to enforce the law of the land.

If they
don't believe in the law, they should find other jobs. And if they carry on in
this vein, some of us might wonder if there is any connection between their
craven opinions and the fact that our jails are full of drugs.

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