ONE HAS THE HAUNTING SENSE...:

So it's not Iraq or Afghanistan that drives terrorists - it's drunk women in nightclubs: What emerged in the bomb trial was a hotchpotch of prejudice, ignorance and sexual immaturity (Howard Jacobson, 05 May 2007, Independent)

So now we know where the destruction of Western civilisation is being plotted: not in the madrassas of Karachi and Lahore, not in the Taliban training camps of Helmand province, not even in the eschatological fantasies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but in Crawley, West Sussex. I am not of course suggesting that we rule Karachi and Tehran out of the topography of terror altogether, only that we adjust the range of our apprehension and learn to grow afraid of the loathing for the way we live that's being brewed just around the corner, in the suburbs, in the green belts, in the new towns of our fair and pleasant land. Crawley, West Sussex - never did sound fun, but never did sound dangerous either. But there you are, nowhere's safe, now we all know how to make explosives out of aftershave, from the menace which is certainty.

Call it Islamic certainty, but what emerged in the course of the fertiliser bomb trial was such a hotchpotch of prejudice, ignorance, sexual immaturity, woman-hating and theology, that the only one murderous component we can identify with confidence is the absolute conviction of right. Most of us have horrible attitudes and wouldn't mind putting a figurative bomb under something or someone or other; what stops us is that we think differently the next day. If we want to get to the bottom of why some young men don't feel differently the next day we need to understand why one brain freezes and another doesn't. Disaffection is not an explanation; it is a consequence. Blame religion if you like, but a half-baked university education can have exactly the same effect. It isn't straightforward charting the progress of fanaticism.

But the trial has thrown up matter which should embarrass more people than it can console. Good that we got the hateful little bastards, but lives might have been saved had we got them earlier. Much has been made of this, calls for a public inquiry into our policing and our security services, etc. But I wonder how many of those calling for this inquiry were busy telling us not all that long ago that there was no terrorism for our security services to police. An invention of our respective governments - Blair's and Bush's - the lot of it. An inveigling us into fear for the purpose of controlling us.

...that this what happens to guys who don't have the AV Club at school and the novels of Ayn Rand to fall back on.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 9, 2007 8:21 PM