Who's a Useful Idiot Now?

You may have noticed in my last posting that I was a bit pissed off that "Irish" and "Muslim" terrorists were being tarred with the same brush by the right-wing press and media in the UK, not to mention a not-unsubstantial section of the so-called "liberal" press.

After thinking about it for a while, I think maybe it's not such a bad thing as it might convince the likes of Al-Queda that we hate the British just as much as they do, though if any of them were to get a flight to Dublin or Shannon and saw all the copies of FHM on sale they'd hardly know that they'd left the UK at all.

Over the last few days I've seen the fear pervading the streets of London the same way the smell of roasted hops and barley pervades the street where I live (I live near a brewery) from a safe distance and wonder if the people there can stand back from the situation and ask why this is happening to them.

When Britain was a target for IRA bombs in the '70s and '80s, most people in the UK didn't have the foggiest idea what their motivation was, unsurprisingly, as the British government was only too happy for the rest of the world to think that they owned all of Ireland against the will of the country's pugnacious natives. If the people there understood that what they were really dying for, which was the right of fascistic descendents of fanatical Scottish mountain thugs to continue bullying the Catholic minority in their little sectarian statelet, they might have thought differently about the situation.

Likewise, today, if people could make the link between the current bombings and the war in Iraq there might be some pressure on Tony Blair to reconsider his policy of helping the fanatical junta that currently leads the US to seize control of the oil of the middle east.

Maybe this is why there was an article in the Guardian, a paper becoming increasingly to Tony Blair what Fox News is to George Bush, dismissing opponents of the war as know-it-alls, who have no proof of the link between the war and the terrorist attacks.

Believe it or not, I met a girl who claims she knows Bush's former Homeland defence secretary Tom Ridge, whose constant terror alerts kept the US population living in fear in the months leading up to George Bush's reelection. When I told her that I thought the war in Iraq was all about Oil, she insisted that it was a "coincidence" that the biggest consumer of oil in the world was invading the second biggest producer at a time when it's governement was led almost entirely by former oil industry executives.

Maybe the author of the that piece in the Guardian thinks that it's a coincidence that Britain, Spain, Australia and Qatar, all of which nations supported the war in Iraq were attacked in onwe way or another while France and Germany, both of which have massive muslim populations have just been lucky so far. Maybe it's the fact that Osama bin Laden has repeatedly said that he wants to split Europe from the US that leads the we-told-you-so brigade, as he vulgarly calls us, to think that there may be a hint of a connection between the two.

Unfortunately Tony Blair hasn't got a reverse gear so there isn't going to be any shift in policy from him. At least our own government over hear will be able to take comfort in the fact that no-one knows that our country exists and therefore won't be interested in bombing us, in spite of the fact that by lending our air-space to the US, the blood of 25,000 Iraqis is as much on our hands as those of the Brits.