It's Official, T-Shirt Satire Is Dead......

Remember that t-shirt you could buy from 'The Onion', the one that said "Drugs Win War on Drugs?" Well they may as well print one that says "Terrorists Win War on Terrorism," because from evidence of public perception it would appear that in terms of propaganda they have. Mind you if they did market such a t-shirt and you bought it, you'd probably get arrested.

It would seem that we have reached a state of arousal in this country regarding terrorism that frankly borders on the pornographic. A man was detained by an officer of the Metropolitan Police for wearing this t-shirt.




















En route to Heathrow last Wednesday I was stopped and searched by the police under section 44(2) of the Terrorism Act 2000. One of the officers was keen to point out that the reason I had been stopped was that I was wearing a sweatshirt which reads "George Bush and Sons, Family Butchers (est 1989)". Is this indicative of the sophisticated profiling techniques soon to be police policy in the war against terrorism?

Guy Taylor
London
The Guardian - Tuesday 21 August 2006

Actually I suppose we should be grateful that our officers are now being trained to spot offensive garments as well as bottles of shampoo that may or may not contain chemicals that may or may not be mixed with other chemicals to create an explosion. Perhaps when they have finished with the t-shirts they'll do something about the hideous item of clothing that was previously known as a tank-top but which is now called 'a sleeveless jumper.'







Arrest this man now!











Seriously though, if the point and purpose of terrorism is to strike terror into the minds of the British public then you need look no further than this article from last Friday's Daily Mail (not two words I thought I'd ever type but there you go) to see it's working:

Muslim leaders responded yesterday by warning of the dangers that terrorists would succeed in their goal of dividing the nation, and fostering mutual fear and suspicion.

They urged all Britons to show solidarity in the face of terrorism, and stressed that the UK's 1.6million Muslims had a duty to help disrupt plots and to isolate extremists.

This week's YouGov poll asked almost 1,800 people across Britain for their views on terrorism and the "Muslim connection", and compared the findings with identical surveys taken in 2001 after the September 11 attacks, and immediately after last year's July 7 bombings in London.

The starkest finding was that 53 per cent of people now agreed that Islam itself - not just fundamentalist groups - posed a threat to Western liberal democracy, while only 34 per cent disagreed. That marks a major shift in recent years.

A year ago the proportions were evenly balanced, and in 2001 only 32 per cent of people felt threatened by the Muslim faith while 63 per cent believed there was no threat.

The proportion of respondents who agreed that "a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country and are prepared to condone or even carry out acts of terrorism" has almost doubled since last year from 10 to 18 per cent.

At the same time the proportion stating that "practically all British Muslims" are law-abiding and deplore terrorism has dropped from 23 to 16 per cent.

Consider those statistics for a second. There was been one day of terror in London (7/7), a policewoman shot in Bradford, a raid on a house in Forest Gate, twenty odd arrests in the last month and the uncovering of an alleged plot to blow-up half a dozen American owned transatlantic aircraft. And as a result of that 53% of people questioned believe that Islam is a threat to the west. Muslim Leaders have recognised the fact that a small group of nutters are dividing the nation and the number is unbelievably small, the rest of us think they are all at it.

What's happened to the famous British sense of fair play and belief in justice? We have turned the old phrase "better nine guilty men go free than one innocent man go to jail," on it's head.

This Government has created such a sense of mistrust that if you look muslim or have a muslim sounding name, or you know people who might look Muslim and who might have Muslim sounding names and you know somebody who might have passed comment on the ability of Pakistan's bowlers to swing both ways you are a possible terrorist. Communities where people from different backgrounds had co-existed now find themselves regarding each other with a sense of mistrust.

Germany in the thirties anyone? Uganda in the seventies? Rwanda in the nineties? It's exactly as it was in the 70's and 80's when if you were Irish you must be a terrorist or know somebody who was one.

We have long since passed the navel gazing stage and are now close to being able to lick our own genitals.

I'm not advocating a blase attitude towards Homeland Security but where's the consistency? The idea of mixing chemicals in small containers on an aeroplane has been known by the Security Services since 1994, it's been tried once before in the Phillipines, so why did this years big raid take place the same day as Israel launched an offensive and Tony Blair was out of the country? Why have scanning machines been introduced this summer at some railway stations to detect knives but not other offensive weapons? Why can you only take a small amount of hand luggage on an aircraft but you can, in theory, take a guitar case filled with explosives on the tube?

Where's the sodding intelligence? Both figuratively and actually.

Of course people should be arrested and detained in connection with acts of terrorism but detaining some smart arse for wearing a t-shirt isn't part of the solution.It must look great on the arrest figures: caught, one male in possession of a 100% cotton t-shirt made in China. It's like the 'Constable Savage' sketch from Not The Nine O'Clock News the best part of thirty years ago - "arrested for wearing a loud shirt," "arrested for having curly hair and thick rubbery lips."

Ho hum