It is a rather scrawny sacred cow, the one that says we we don't do deals with terrorists, for acts of terrorism against British forces and citizens have resulted in the deals which led to the creation of the state of Israel, to the getting out of jail free of hundreds of Ulster terrorists, the abolition of the provincial police force and the eventual reunification of Ireland. The Stern Gang and the Irgun didn't fuck about, happily hanging British soldiers and attacking US warships but the hardmen batallions of Gerry Adams and Marty Kneecaps were more equivocal on their targeting strategy, maybe because they were funded mainly by East Coast US citizens; if they had really wanted to win their war swiftly they need only have wandered into one of those May Balls in the quadrangles of Oxbridge and Cambridge and slaughtered a few dozen of the children of the rich and powerful, a Bullingdon Club membership, perhaps, and they'd have been dancing down Belfast's Royal Avenue, waving the Tricolour faster than you could say SinnFein Rules, OK? They had a go, of course, with the attack on Mountbatten's boat but he wasn't quite a civilian, was he, and though he was of the elite, he didn't have a father in the cabinet or an uncle who was a permanent seckatry of this or that mandarinate. Had Kneecaps & Co blitzed Kings College or Balliol perhaps the struggle, as they called it, would have been foreshortened. It may well be the case, of course, that even in this dirtiest of wars there was a gentlemen's agreement between the senior participants, not to kill each other's families; so whilst it was terror, Jim, it was not as we now know it
And imagine the reaction if, after bombing the buses and trains in the seven/seven attack, whoever perpetrated it also placed a few guys in white coats at the hospitals receiving the injured, and imagine these guys, in the confusion, entering the triage stations and the operating theatres and detonating some of those suicide waistcoats among the injured and the medical staff. And then imagine, a week later, some more suicide bombers joining the mourners at the funeral, or just on the streets, as the hearses went by and blowing up themselves and a coffin or two, a funeral limo full of grieving relatives, maybe; that would be proper terror, fuck me, wouldn't it just, an attack on civilians, an attack on the hospitals in which they were being treated and then an attack on the funerals. Way to go, Ahmed.
It seems that the first proper, rational terrorist of the modern age, though, is not a Marxist Irish Republican, not a muslem Jihadist, but a Norwegian, a white man, a Christian and a Freeemason. I know that McVeigh, of the Omaha bombing was a WASP and everything but his was the archetypal one-bang attack,.Anders Breivik's one-man blitzkrieg was altogether more comprehensive - firstly, an attack on govament buildings, then a systematic, broad daylight culling of the young elite and finally a calm as you like surrender to the cops; no cathartic execution by marksmen, no Allah-bound suicide, just a Here we are, chaps, whaddaya gonna do, now? It was an Insider's Mayhem he wrought, no language problems, no visa or passport issues, no borders across which to ship his explosives. And surrendering alive, native and to the manor born he keeps his preoccupation front and centre for the foreseeable future. Unless they mysteriously kill him.
It was a brilliant achievement, as these things go - Norway, bizarrely, in news ratings terms, outguns Somalia, Washington, Afghanistan, Libya, Murdoch and even druggy chanteuse Amy and her ghastly father; all this the work of just one man and who knows where it will lead? I don't know about anyone else but I have swiftly grown irritated by the mannered, patient, reasonable know-it-allism of the SardineHeads, giving reasonable, worthy interviews, in their wretched, quizzical English. Such a pain in the arse are they that you can see why matey would get pissed at them as, in his mind's eye, he saw Saladin and a scimitar-waving host sailing up the fiords and sacking Oslo, and everybody smirking about the place, in their neat suits, being fucking reasonable and tolerant.
In the corridors of sleaze the worry must be that these events set a new temper for the countless millions, all across the white world, quietly, permanently enraged by what Mad Melanie Phillips calls the Londonistan phenomenon. Indeed, Sarkozy the dwarf pimp, has already responded to this constituency by launching one of those sneaky, Frog pogroms, against the Romany, to start with, but as Madamoiselle le Pen gains in stature, who knows which group he will attack next?
I share Andy's rage at the gobby, ineffective, cowardycustard middle class because that, for my sins, is my own natural milieu but now and again I have drank and dined and ranted in different homes, places where people were never consulted about the multiculturalisation of their country, a drastic overhaul and reworking of their way of life which they never chose but had thrust upon them, by career moralists, by inverted racists and by politically opportunistic shits like Jack Torture and Roy Hatterjee. The Race Relations Act was never going to resonate with Colin and his sons, Lee and Wayne and Scott, they didn't give a fuck for all that shit; they weren't deranged bigots or fascists, they just were very uncomfortable at being over-run and over-run by people who they perceived as being wily, ill-mannered and over-indulged; Mosques and halal butchershops all over the inner ring road. Maybe they would have worked towards assimilation, Colin and his family, if the newcomers had adapted, just a little bit, but they didn't, hardly at all. And it was no good me saying to Colin, Listen mate, you have to give these things a coupla generations to settle down, not when all he had, really, was his little bit of white working class culture or, as the clever people impudently called it, his racism.
I remember, twenty years ago, driving through Washwood Heath in inner-city Birmingham and thinking, Christ, this is a different country, how has this happened? It didn't matter much to me because I didn't live there or anywhere near there, but if I had I would've been aghast, estranged and frightened, living in an alien ghetto, garish, smelly and lawless, in my own city.
I know nothing about Andy, only what nincompoops like Jon Sopel say, on tne telly, and that's worthless, sensationalist, sentimental bollocks - did you think you were gonna die, did you text your familiy to say goodbye, d you think je should get more than the maximum sentence, more Sun than BBC, Sopel. But I do know about Colin, an ordinary bloke, unschooled, unread but like many of his generation and class, a bit of a Zen Master when it came to his trade, no use for letters but he could hone a chisel to laser sharpness, replicate a complex, ancient architrave moulding with his battery of moulding planes, his beady eye and his steady hand, Colin could insert a square foot of mahogany into a damaged tabletop and you'd never see the join - worth a hundred Darcus Howes, a hundred Trevor Phillipses and a thousand Boris Johnsons, an English tradesman, in short, for forty years, now, further and further down the food chain, his neighbourhoods, his jobs, his schools, his assumptions, his country and his parliament demolished before his eyes; the likes of Beardy Git, Robin Cook, telling him that the English National Dish is Chicken Tikka Masala; the likes of CallHimDave cast-iron promising him a referendum and then reneging on his word, like a proper Etonian cunt.
And I know that in Colin's house and in millions of others, people will be saying about the Norwegian, Well, fair play to him, somebody has to stand up for whatever it is, else what's the point?
It is not for me to condone or condemn wotsisname - I am with the anti-death penalty campaigners - you can't judge a person on the basis of the worst act he or she ever committed, such would see us all fucked, by God and man, alike, but I have lived through his genesis and his fertilisation, seen him, like a slow train, coming up around the bend, and said very little, frightened, like the Norwegians, of giving offence to multiculturalism's lurking, vengeful, antagonistic watchmen.
It is not possible or desireable to - what is it - repatriate, millions of non-indigenous people, nor is it right to attempt to treat any of us as second-class citizens; it must be possible, however, to engineer some basic, inclusive standards of citizenship to which all must adhere; the eternal cruelty inherent in all of the Abrahamic religions presents a tougher problem, be it demonstrated by the Bible-Thumping Hangmen of the MidWest, the Zionist babykillers banging their bearded heads on Jerusalem's WailingWall or the HeadChopping Ayatollahs of Saudi Arabia; maybe we should hang a good mixed handful of the hateful bastards, or at the very least come down on them like a ton of bricks, bang 'em up for ninety-nine years, the very first time one of them calls for Jihad or Crusade or the infinite expansion of the Holy Land.
Power doesn't care to admit it but there will be many like Oslo's Bold Marauder, many of them armed, many of them with police or military training, none of them giving a flying fuck about the Newsnight/Question Time phony sensibility. We do do deals with Terror, better that we do it now, whilst he slumbers, biding his time, than see a platoon of tooled-up Aryans, marching across Bradford or Birmingham or London. Or Oxford, Cambridge and le Sorbonne.