How dare the US say ‘we are reeling’. They know nothing of our resilience

Not that I give a damn about the feelings of Islamist terrorists, but those who commissioned or supported Saturday night’s atrocity at London Bridge will have been encouraged by the resulting headline on America’s alleged paper of record, the New York times.

It read: ‘terrorist Attacks in the Heart of London Hit a Nation Still Reeling.’

No, we are not reeling. We are not even slightly unsteady. And we are determined not to have our way of life changed by these murderous nonentities from the radicalised depths of what is sometimes called ‘the Muslim community’.

the true nature of Londoners’ reaction was best expressed by a tour guide operator called Paul, interviewed by the BBC near the scene. He had been giving his talk to tourists on an open-top bus by London Bridge, as he does every night, when the terrorists struck.

He’d had no sleep, but, utterly calm, he told the reporter: ‘I’ll be back here at work tonight as usual.’

there are millions of Londoners like Paul — and millions of such Mancunians, too, as they get on with their day-to-day life after the murder of 22 people, many of them young Ariana Grande fans, in their city a fortnight ago: none of them, dear New York times, will be ‘reeling’. Still less the nation as a whole.

Primitive

London, in particular, is no stranger to terror. Compared with what the capital’s citizens have faced stoically in the past, Saturday night’s attack, while horrifically life- changing for the families of the victims, is far from unendurable.

We should remind the New York times of the Blitz, when, in 1940-1941, Hitler’s Luftwaffe launched night-raids — some almost continuous — that killed 43,000 civilians. this onslaught was designed not just to slaughter, but, primarily, to demoralise Londoners.

they were not demoralised. they didn’t ‘reel’, either.

the quiet resilience of the British clearly came as a surprise to many in America.

the U.S. ambassador, Joseph Kennedy (father of President John F. Kennedy), was one of the great majority of American residents of London who abandoned the city. At the height of the bombing, in october 1940, Kennedy bolted back across the Atlantic, having declared: ‘England is gone.’

At least the odious Kennedy had the excuse that the UK was under attack from the might of the most militarised country on the planet.

What the New York times absurdly regards as too much for the nerves of Londoners are three inadequate idiots using the most primitive of weapons.

their knives were no defence against the Swiss-made assault rifles of the Metropolitan Police’s anti- terrorist branch. Within just eight minutes of the first call to the Met Police, the three terrorists had been shot dead. this is the ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy which the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has said makes him ‘unhappy . . . in general’. I bet it makes Londoners (and Mancunians) feel safer, in general.

It was, in fact, the Irish Republicans Corbyn reveres, who, much more recently than the Blitz, tried — also in vain — to traumatise Londoners with random acts of terror.

I remember it all quite vividly, in part because my father, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was found to be on an IRA list of individual targets. For a time, we had armed police in the garden at the family home in the parliamentary constituency. they hid there at night, just in case. And yes, Mr Corbyn, they were instructed to shoot to kill.

on october 12, 1984, the IRA came very close to murdering the entire Cabinet, including Prime Minister Margaret thatcher, with a huge bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. this was the night before Mrs thatcher was due to make her closing speech as leader of the Conservative Party at its annual conference.

Amid idiotic calls for this thursday’s General Election to be postponed, it’s worth remembering that, despite the deaths and life-changing injuries of some of her friends and colleagues, Mrs thatcher declared that the party conference should continue as scheduled at 9.30 that morning.

Failed

No one in the Government had slept in the hours since the bomb destroyed the hotel they’d been in. But Mrs thatcher understood that the IRA’s purpose had been to destroy our democracy.

So she stood up to make exactly the speech she had intended before the attempted massacre, after the following initial statement: ‘the fact that we are gathered here now — shocked, but composed and determined — is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.’

But what was the response of Jeremy Corbyn — then, as now, the MP for Islington North? He continued to support and write for a London-based pro-IRA publication which rejoiced at the Brighton bombing: ‘the British only take notice of Ireland when they are bombed into it.’

And when the man subsequently convicted of the Brighton bombing, Patrick Magee, faced justice at the old Bailey, Corbyn picketed the court to oppose what he described as ‘a show trial’. Some might think it tasteless to bring all this up, only hours after seven Londoners have been murdered. But it is made essential by the very fact that we are in the closing days of an election campaign in which Jeremy Corbyn is asking us to make him Prime Minister.

If security was not an issue when the campaign started, it clearly is now. After the third Islamist attack on British soil within weeks, it is only natural that voters should address the question: which of the two putative prime ministers is better qualified to deal with the threat we face?

As someone who has called the Islamist proscribed terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah ‘friends’ — and who, in 2009, had urged that Hamas be removed from the official British list of ‘groups concerned in terrorism’ — the onus is on Mr Corbyn to tell us, in the remaining days of the campaign, where he stands.

Yesterday, theresa May told us where she stands. In particular, she spoke of the need to ‘stamp out extremism across the public sector’, which she added ‘ will require some difficult and embarrassing conversations’.

Risible

this was a reference to attitudes towards the anti-radicalisation Prevent programme, which makes it mandatory for those working in the public sector — such as at universities — ‘to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’.

Jeremy Corbyn opposes this as turning public servants into informers.

But then, as he proudly asserted six years ago: ‘I’ve been involved in opposing anti-terror legislation ever since I first went into Parliament in 1983.’

And he said, after Khalid Masood’s murderous attack on Westminster Bridge and Parliament in March: ‘I talk to people in mosques, I talk to people in churches, I talk to people who go to synagogues . . . I think what Prevent has often done is seen to target the Muslim community, not anyone else.’

Well, if we get Corbyn as Prime Minister, presumably he would ask our hardpressed security services to divert some of their deradicalisation effort towards those who pray in churches and synagogues on the grounds that we would not then be ‘ seen to target the Muslim community’.

that would, of course, be risible — and a grotesque waste of vital resources in the fight against terrorism. It would also illustrate how much confidence we can have in Corbyn on this life-and-death matter.

In the wake of the Manchester atrocity, the Labour leader insisted: ‘I have spent my political life working for peace and human rights and to bring an end to conflict. that will always mean talking to people you profoundly disagree with.’

Actually, in his dealings with Sinn Fein/ IRA in the Eighties, he was talking to people he profoundly agreed with.

But if he thinks we imagine his ‘talking’ is a suitable way of dealing with the jihadists in our midst whose mission is to replace democracy with Sharia law, he misreads the British people.

We are not reeling. But we are not appeasers of terror, either.