Appeasement next?
AMID the condemnation and the ‘ let’s get tough on extremism’ rhetoric, we have had the misplaced assurance of troops on the streets and armed police patrolling strategic locations as if any of that was likely to put off a determined jihadi from carrying out another suicide attack.
The full might of coalition forces in Iraq and elsewhere did not deter any would-be bomber.
Having lived through the Troubles in Northern Ireland, I can predict what happens next. Like previous British administrations down the years, no matter what their political hue, the Government will embark on a programme of appeasement.
Just as it did in Northern Ireland, it will begin in the jails. Islamist convicts will be segregated for fear of radicalising the wider prison population, they will be given political status, prison mosques will follow and eventually they will be running their own prisons.
The forces of law and order will be instructed to stay out of Muslim communities and be blind to any indiscretions and lawbreaking, so as not to be seen to harass or alienate them. The radicals will stand for election and be returned to councils and Parliament as representative of their local constituencies.
They will get concession after concession and their grievances, real or invented, including the right to enforce Sharia law in their communities, will be acceded to.
Eventually, even those who have committed the most heinous of crimes will be released from jail as a ‘price worth paying for peace’.
As for police and troops deployed on the streets, I wonder how many of them will stop and think before they act to prevent a further atrocity that perhaps in 20 years’ time they may be hauled before the courts charged with murder — a price worth paying for doing their duty?
Don’t think that terrorist attacks are in any way linked to western foreign policy. The goal is to spread and consolidate the caliphate in liberal western democracies such as the UK where the moral high ground is preferred to the safety and security of the population.
ROBERT CASSELLS, Coleraine, Co. Londonderry.