Society
The polluted stream where spies fish
Published 19 June 2006
From their headquarters in central London, 250 Christian soldiers marched as to war, with the cross of St George going on before! Theirs was a mission to capture an Islamic fortress in Forest Gate, east London, where chemical weapons were being manufactured: sarin, cyanide . . . or maybe some other type of poison gas not yet known to science.
They were kitted out in special clothing that no poison could penetrate. Side arms were issued, along with the most powerful military artillery. The airspace above them was cleared and secured.
War had been declared almost a year before this engagement, when four Asian jihadists set in motion the so-called "clash of civilisations" in a suicide bombing spree among London's civilian population, which accounted for 56 dead and several hundred injured.
After a stirring speech by the commander- in-chief, the mighty army set off on its historic mission. They captured the fortress with no resistance whatsoever. They shot one of the inhabitants to show that they meant business, cracked the skull of another and slapped about a middle-aged woman.
This was only part of the operation. Back at base they briefed the press. They said that the fortress had been under surveillance for weeks. They were certain that the poison gas would be found and the perpetrators, a cell of young Asian men, arrested.
The scribes were set in motion, absorbing every word that dripped in leaks from above. The young man was shot after a struggle with an armed soldier. Then, within hours, the story changed: a gloved soldier had awkwardly pulled the trigger because the glove had desensitised his finger. The owner of the fortress and his wife, we were wrongly told, were allowed to leave for Mauritius on holiday. And this disinformation was backed by the assurance that the intelligence was strong and firmly based in reality. The two young jihadists were banged up and a judge sanctioned their detention without charge, a power given to the Christian army by the government of the day.
Days and hours passed, and another story slowly unfolded. This was no fortress, only a family house, peopled by innocents, unarmed, and now traumatised by this heavy assault on a few Muslims whose innocence was bared for all to see and digest. The commanders had transformed mere tittle-tattle into firm intelligence. The details of the manufacture of poison gas were a sham.
The intelligence services ought to have known that within these small, ethnic-minority communities, of which I am a member, the most intense feuds are pursued.
Mosques are hives of internecine strife, intensified by different interpretations of religious doctrine. Spite and malice exist in full measure. The intelligence services fished in this polluted stream without a serious forensic examination of what was being offered by the informant.
Informants are not inhibited by rules and regulations. They operate in their own interest, motivated by financial reward and the desperate need to get even with their enemies.
Scotland Yard had previous experiences of this in the West Indian community and learned no serious lessons from it. In the early 1970s a gang of informants in the West Indian community played havoc with the drug squad and, as a result, almost the entire squad was imprisoned for corruption.
In recent times, Scotland Yard again imported informants from Jamaica in the hope of uncovering stockpiles of guns in Britain's West Indian community. These informants robbed, pillaged and raped their way through our communities in the UK.
Now, it's the turn of young Muslims. The security services and the police, who alarmed us by claiming that 4,000 jihadists were hiding in the Asian community, and that this war on terror would last for the next 50 years, are consumed by a self-fulfilling prophecy.
These young men and women of Pakistani and Bengali origin must be careful not to react, there-by giving justification to the powers to counter-attack ferociously.
Their self-appointed leaders have no moral or political authority over them, and the conventional allies within the host community are paralysed by a fear of the unknown. These allies must be carefully cultivated - educated, even, in the reality of these young lives. They simply cannot go it alone.
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