Cameron has guns, bombs and a plane - and not one good idea

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

So far there is little sign of serious thought about the Paris atrocities. We are to have more spooks, though spooks failed to see it coming, and failed to see most of the other outrages coming, and the new ones will be no more clairvoyant than the old ones.

 

France and Belgium are reaching for emergency laws, surveillance, pre-trial detention, more humiliation of innocent travellers and all the other rubbish that has never worked in the past and won’t work again.

 

David Cameron (in a nifty bit of news management) takes the opportunity to announce that he will henceforth be spared from flying like a normal human being, in an ego-stroking Blaircraft paid for by you and me. Austerity must have been having a day off.

 

Actually, if grand personages like him had to shuffle through the security screens, belts off, shoes off, shampoo humourlessly confiscated, like the rest of us, these daft and illogical rules would have been reviewed long ago.

 

British police officers dress up like Starship Troopers, something they’ve obviously been itching to do for ages and now have an excuse to do, the masked women involved looking oddly like Muslim women in niquabs.

 

It’s not the police’s job to do this. If things are so bad that we need armed people on the streets, then we have an Army and should deploy it. If not, then spare us these theatricals, which must delight the leaders of ISIS, who long for us to panic and wreck our own societies in fear of them.

 

Next comes the growing demand for us to bomb Syria. Well, if you want to. Only a couple of weeks ago all the establishment experts were saying that the Russian Airbus massacre was obviously the result of Vladimir Putin’s bombing of Syria.

 

Now the same experts say it’s ridiculous to suggest that our planned bombing of Syria might bring murder to the streets of London or to a British aircraft.

 

Perhaps it’s relevant to this that Pierre Janaszak, a radio presenter who survived the Bataclan massacre in Paris, said he heard one fanatic in the theatre say to his victims, ‘It's the fault of Hollande, it's the fault of your President, he should not have intervened in Syria.’

 

There may be (I personally doubt it) a good case for what’s left of the RAF to drop what’s left of our bombs on Syria. It may be so good that it justifies risking a retaliation in our capital, and that we should brace ourselves for such a war.

 

But I think those who support such bombing should accept that there might be such a connection, and explain to the British people why it is worth it.

 

I am wholly confused by the Cameron government’s position on Syria. It presents its desire to bomb that country as a rerun of the Parliamentary vote it lost in 2013.

 

But in 2013, Mr Cameron wanted (wrongly, as it turned out) to bomb President Assad’s forces and installations, to help the Islamist sectarian fanatics who are fighting to overthrow the secular Assad state.

 

This is more or less the exact opposite of what he seems to want now. Far from being a rerun, it is one of the most embarrassing diplomatic U-turns in modern British history.

 

Or is it? Does Mr Cameron in fact intend, somehow, to return to his original purpose, and to use the RAF to aid the anti-Assad rebels – who are the sort of people he would arrest if they turned up here?

 

If ISIS was our real target, then this would be absurd. But is ISIS our real target? If so, we would abandon all scruple, and side with the Syrian Kurds, the Iranians, Hezbollah, Russia and Assad to defeat it. For they are by far its most effective opponents.

 

After all, when we fought the Hitler menace, we allied with another monster, Stalin, to do so.

 

Mr Cameron also called ISIS ‘the head of the snake’, and the origin of  all these horrors. But again, is this true? Or is ISIS in fact an outgrowth of the burgeoning, richly-funded spread of extreme, puritanical, intolerant, violent Islamism, whose head is not in Raqqa but rather further south?

 

I hope that if Mr Cameron brings a plan for war to Parliament, there will be enough informed and wise men and women there to question him thoroughly on these points, and vote against him if they are not convinced.

 

Trickery and propaganda do not invariably arrive in the same shape. Just because we all now know that Anthony Blair defrauded us into a dangerous war with WMD, we shouldn’t be too sure that we won’t be just as easily fooled by his equally smooth and persuasive heir.

 

The Terror Link Nobody Wants to Talk About

 

What do modern terrorists have in common? Yes, they are fanatical Islamists, usually (but not always) from ethnic minorities.

 

But there’s something else very interesting. They are invariably on mind-altering drugs, usually cannabis. The Bombay killers took cocaine and steroids. Anders Breivik took steroids. At least one of the Boston bombers , the Tsarnaev brothers smoked cannabis (one heard voices in his head, one of them was without doubt a dope dealer) , Lee Rigby’s killers. Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo,  smoked (a lot of ) cannabis. Omar El-Hussein, the Copenhagen killer, had twice been arrested for cannabis offences. Seifeddine Rezgui, the Tunisian beach killer, was a cannabis user. Ayoub el-Khazzani, who tried to kill passengers on the Amsterdam Paris train, is a convicted dope user. The Charlie Hebdo killers, the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly,  were known cannabis users. The killers of two Canadian soldiers, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau and Martin Couture-Rouleau, were cannabis users.

 

And now we know that the same is true of the November 13 killers, Ibrahim and Salah Abdeslam,were heavy users of marijuana. Abdelhamid Abaaoud had likewise ‘drifted into a life of thievery and drugs’. Omar Ismail Mostefai was on police records for buying illegal drugs. As for Hasna Aitboulahcen, who was blown to pieces in the St Denis siege, she ‘hung around with drug dealers’.

 

Don’t try to avoid the significance of this information by accusing me of saying things I don’t.  The point here is that drug abuse appears to be a common factor. So why completely ignore it?  If the police of North America and Western Europe stopped turning a blind eye to it, they might be a lot more use in the struggle to defend us all from terror.

 

An exquisite skyline swamped by concrete

Approval has now been given for the building of a vast new concrete slab in the heart of London, 22 Bishopsgate. You may like this sort of thing or not.  But once it is built it will be hard to tell London’s skyline from that of Chicago. This doesn’t seem to me to be a gain. In a generation, Christopher Wren’s lovely forest of spires and domes, which belonged to Britain and the world, has been shouldered aside by temples of greed. I am astonished that this has happened with so little protest.

 

What's so funny about this unpleasant story?

Alan Bennett has for many years dug into the darker side of suburban Britain, giving a faintly tragic, even sordid,  tinge to what most of us think is normal and reasonably happy. How strange, then, that the new film by and about him ‘The Lady in the Van’ , makes an oddly cheerful comedy about what looks to me like a rather unpleasant story. Did none of his rich, left-wing north London neighbours shun him for allowing a smelly, bad-tempered nuisance to park in his front garden for years?  If so, they aren’t in the film.

For the Avoidance of Doubt – I do not work for MI5

I am publishing this as a free-standing post because I feel it must be resolved properly, and want to be certain that the person involved is aware of the risks he runs.

Some days ago, in a response to my column of last Sunday (‘This is no SuperCam’), a Mr ‘Harold Stone’ posted a comment. I should say here that some of his comment was edited for legal reasons but - according to the rules which operate here - his direct personal criticisms of me were not edited.  All may say what you like about me, provided it is true, or just hostile and abusive. Untruths, however, are not acceptable. The editing process also led to a delay in his words being published. But they were published.  This is what he said:
He first quoted what I had said  :‘It occurs to me - though of course it isn’t true - that if MI5 wanted to discredit any honest movement against mass immigration, the cleverest thing it could do would be to set up something called, say, the ‘British Patriotic Party’, and staff it with Jew-haters, racialists and Holocaust deniers.’

He then wrote: ‘And it occurs to me – since of course it is perfectly true – that an MI5 anxious to ensure we continue to believe we live in a society which protects free speech would almost certainly staff newspapers with faux-conservative “assets” to lead people up blind alleys about the effectiveness of the party system, or oppose repatriation on “moral grounds” because the other deception they peddle, about the irrelevance of racial differences, allows them to insist that an Englishman can come from Tunbridge or Timbuktu. You’d scarcely be the first newspaper journalist to be run by the security services (think Ian Fleming and a score of others less well-known). Speaking as a racialist myself, that is to say one genuinely led by the facts, by observation, by reason and the lessons of history rather than pretending to be, I’d say it’s how all security services operate to discredit truth-tellers. Trotsky ordered the cadres to ignore rational argument and to make truth-telling distasteful to people. Equalitarian dogma (disguised as Christianity?) could thereby pass itself off as ‘authentic’ conservatism which, because of its ideologically driven repudiation of biology, would fail to conserve a damned thing. Again I must ask if you know what a nation actually is Mr Hitchens, you who boast about your grasp of history, and wonder what on earth gives you the right to sneer at Cameron when you display not a shred of integrity yourself on this subject, since it’s plain you know the truth deep down?’

Mr Stone is welcome to his opinions, much as I dislike them. But he appears to suggest that I am an employee or servant of the Security Service, engaging in systematic dishonesty on their behalf. He uses these pretty direct words: ‘You’d scarcely be the first newspaper journalist to be run by the security services’ and  ‘it occurs to me – since of course it is perfectly true – that an MI5 anxious to ensure we continue to believe we live in a society which protects free speech would almost certainly staff newspapers with faux-conservative “assets” to lead people up blind alleys’.

I must ask him either to substantiate this allegation with facts, or to withdraw it and offer an unreserved apology. If he does neither then, under the usual rules, he will no longer be welcome here. I think a week should be enough. In case he has not so far seen this warning (first posted yesterday on the relevant thread) I will date that week from the publication of this posting.  I will listen to any reasonable request for more time but given his confident tone, I imagine he has the evidence at his fingertips and should rapidly be able to back up his claims. Or perhaps not.

Security doesn't make you safe

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

The reason why MI5 and the rest of the 'Security' apparatus failed on July 7 is that there is no such thing as total security. More laws, more spooks, more surveillance will leave us poorer and less free, but they probably won't stop a single bomb.

Terrorism is by its nature a surprise attack on a huge, unsuspecting soft target. And in a huge, civilised society a few crude bombs can do terrible damage. It is simply foolish to imagine that we can be totally protected against this - though proper control of our borders and a police force that patrolled on foot would make a surprising difference.

So reject any calls for yet more money to be lavished on MI5 or SOCA or any other of these rather creepy organisations which already look altogether too much like an embryo secret police. Hard graft, good knowledge of a neighbourhood and its people, and mother wit are far more likely to uncover murder plots than expensive apparatus or graduate trainees. If MI5 want more money, let them give us real proof that they are any use at all. I have yet to see any.