I, the turcopolier, have made this comment by EO into a front page post so don't complain about the lack of paragraphing. pl
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"Colonel, Manchester was as bitter as we have had. As bitter as 9/11 or the London bombings, perhaps more so because the targets were young people just setting out on the road to adulthood. That is a time of promise. It should not be a time of death. It is more bitter than most of us know. It is worse because we ourselves have contributed to the tragedy. On the one hand we have thousands upon thousands in our police forces and in our intelligence agencies straining every nerve to prevent such tragedies. On the other we are heaping fuel on the fire of fundamentalist Muslim terrorism with every day that passes. That is sometimes said too glibly. There are those who claim that we in the West are the root cause of Jihadi terrorism simply because we have intervened so much in the Middle East. Maybe that is so, for some Jihadis, but Muslim fundamentalism is such a strong growth that it needed no Western provocation to set it in motion. No, what we have done is more than that. We have not only removed or weakened the regimes that inhibited, more or less, that growth. What we have done is to encourage Jihad to flourish on an immensely greater scale. That increased scale increases its glamour and its pull for our English Muslims many times over. That increases greatly the chance that they will fall victim to that glamour. That increases greatly the probability of terrorist attacks. By chance I came across a video, just a short time before Manchester, that summed this murderous foolishness up. For all I know it may be a staged video - so many are - or compiled for PR purposes. But staged or contrived though it may be, the video sets out with grim clarity how we have contributed to, set the scene for indeed, the deaths of our own. https://freespeechdefense.net/2017/05/i-wonder-why-this-is-being-censored/ I refer to the section starting at nine minutes. It sets out what perhaps all on your site know but so few elsewhere. Western countries have been arming and training Muslim fighters knowing full well that those fighters were Jihadis, and were more than likely to join even more extreme Jihadi units. Knowing full well also that some of those Jihadis, but now trained in killing and invigorated by contact with other true believers, would return to their countries of origin and do what harm they could. Later on, in the copy of the video I have seen, we hear Jihadists, English and German nationals among them, making it clear they have the intention of doing that if they can. But if that were all then perhaps the danger would not be so great. Those thousands and thousands of our security forces at home do at least have a fighting chance of knowing who's been over there and who's come back. They know what they have to deal with even if that is a difficult task. What we fail to understand is the appeal of the Jihadi cause to our own disenchanted Muslim young at home, and how we ourselves have so greatly magnified that appeal. We fail to understand that what is to us atrocity upon atrocity in Syria is to them a great cause. We see ragged groups of thugs using, often inexpertly, the deadly equipment we give them or the supply of which we facilitate. They see a band of glorious martyrs. We see a mix of ethnic cleansing and rule by terror, covertly used by us to weaken regimes we don't like. They see only meritorious conquest leading to a cleaner and more just society. Can we wonder that to a number of our idealistic young, some of whom experience more than the rest of us the dysfunctionality of parts of Western society, the glamour of such a vision is irresistible? We, operating through our intelligence agencies and Special Forces, have presented them with the stage upon which that vision can be exhibited. And from his English home the loner or the psychotic or the idealist can see that great stage that we have set up and wish, somehow, to be part of it. It is not significant whether Manchester was the work of a homegrown loner or of an organised gang; the vision that inspired the commission of the atrocity is the vision we engineered. For there is now no doubt that the flood of foreign Jihadis that have wreaked such havoc in Syria and neighbouring countries was released by us or with our active complicity. It could not have happened but for Western assistance. We do not acknowledge it. We pretend that the tragedy of Manchester has no relation to our contribution to the tragedy in the Middle East. As here, from a BBC report - "Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said the city would "pull together", adding: "That's what we are. That's what we do. They won't win." As if, as the Mayor of London intimated recently, bomb attacks were phenomena that we just have to learn to live with. As if they were simply there, and no cause for them. Or no cause we have anything to do with. Just after the London bombing I met a journalist who worked for one of the broadsheets. He was proud of the fact, as well he might have been, that he and his colleagues went in to work the next day undaunted, as did, I believe, most Londoners. Looking back more than seventy years he conjured up the spirit of the Blitz. No matter what they throw at us we don't give in. We muddle on. "That's what we do." So he spoke. I held my peace. How could a journalist of all people, I did not say, fail to know that we had in large measure brought it upon ourselves? How could we be such fools? Police and intelligence in this country, all thousands of them, holding terrorism at bay. Their colleagues abroad creating the conditions in which it can grow; deliberately setting the scene for the deadly vision to flourish past any heights it could have achieved unaided, that deadly vision which now inspires so many of our disenchanted Muslims or Muslim converts here. We are fools in deadly truth, and it is our young who have paid for it in Manchester. " EO