Journos join Krazy Klown jihadis in slapstick idiocy
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/02/terror_idiocy_outbreak/

Analysis: The "car bomber" hysteria gripping much of the British and international media over the weekend has had a bucket of cold water from the Reg already, but just one bucket doesn't seem enough for this kind of outbreak.

To recap: an exceptionally incompetent group of troublemakers, unknown to the plods or spooks, decided to bring a spot of terror to old Blighty starting last Friday. These people had no actual explosives, and were apparently too lazy and ignorant to learn how to make them. Instead, they decided to load cars with petrol, domestic gas cylinders and "containers holding nails", and then set fire to them - either manually or using a cellphone-initiated remote rig of some kind.

...these have to be some of the most pathetic terror attacks ever - difficult to distinguish from minor accidents. For goodness' sake, a car is full of petrol anyway; and gas cylinders too often enough. People drive cylinders of gas around all the time. Now and again - oh my god! - they probably carry boxes of nails, bolts, tools or whatever in the same vehicle. (Aiee!)

Sometimes these fiends crash their cars, and sometimes the vehicles burn out. It's one of the costs of living in the industrial world; if people couldn't get fuel - portable energy - easily enough to have accidents with it, most of us would still be dirt-poor, illiterate, shovelling muck for a living and dying like flies from disease - rather than dying very rarely in car crashes or gas explosions.

This kind of event happens on the motorways almost every day, at least the petrol fires and often enough with the other hazards added. The roads get closed off as a result, sometimes for hours - just like the Haymarket did on Friday morning. It causes massive inconvenience to lots and lots of people.

But the perimeter is manned by firemen and traffic cops, not bomb teams and terror-feds. And so this weekend a minor news story - one injured in bunt-out car / suicide attempt causes travel chaos - becomes a big international media frenzy, a "test of the new Prime Minister's mettle," if you please.

It might be a test of ministerial mettle if thousands of British Muslims were burning cars every night, as has happened in France. But what we seem to have here is some foreigners burning just one car and failing to burn two more owing to almost unbelievable incompetence.

The mindset of a man who's willing to set himself on fire to make a point - as one of the Glasgow terror-clowns seems to have done - but not to spend any effort at all on researching methods is a difficult one to understand. Even if these jokers were illiterate or had no internet access (seems unlikely, one of the suspects is apparently a doctor) they could have at least done a test. In my part of town, fun-loving teenagers burn out a car or two down by the canal every week or so: nobody would notice another one with some nails in it.

If these guys at the weekend really were anything to do with al-Qaeda, all one can really say is that it looks as though the War on Terror is won. This whole hoo-ha kicked off, remember, with 9/11: an extremely effective attack. Then we had the Bali and Madrid bombings, not by any measure as shocking and bloody but still nasty stuff. Then we had London 7/7, a further significant drop in bodycount but still competently planned and executed (Not too many groups would have been able to mix up that much peroxide-based explosive first try without an own goal).

Now we have this; one terror-clown badly burnt and nobody else hurt at all. An event about as significant as the teenagers burning cars down my way - and don't I wish those little sods got as much police attention and jail time. The jihadi threat has seemingly sunk to animal-lib levels.

Why, it's almost as if suicide bombing was a fairly dumb tactic. The 7/7 bombers seem to have been one of very few terror groups in the UK who were competent enough to make explosives and weren't under plod/spook surveillance, and now they're all dead.

...

Move along; nothing to see here. ®

[Edited on July 12, 2007 at 11:26 AM. Reason : bld]

7/12/2007 11:19:20 AM

no way im reading all of that

7/12/2007 11:21:53 AM

Don't worry too much about it. I just really enjoyed reading the article, nothing really "Soap Boxy" about it to discuss.

7/12/2007 11:23:48 AM

k...

7/12/2007 11:26:07 AM

Quote :

"If these guys at the weekend really were anything to do with al-Qaeda, all one can really say is that it looks as though the War on Terror is won. "

nice

7/12/2007 12:05:00 PM

great article.

its finding gems like that, why i keep coming here.

7/12/2007 12:15:14 PM

Yeah.

I can't imagine your typical fanatical jihadist being the sharpest tool in the shed.

7/12/2007 12:20:57 PM

Quote :

"Why, it's almost as if suicide bombing was a fairly dumb tactic. The 7/7 bombers seem to have been one of very few terror groups in the UK who were competent enough to make explosives and weren't under plod/spook surveillance, and now they're all dead."

insightful...

7/12/2007 12:52:37 PM

What pisses me off is that you don't read editorials like that in American media. I mean if something like that were to be printed in an American newspaper after a terror attack like that in the U.S. -- or, hell, after the ones in Britain -- people would be all up in arms about how...

IT WAS A TRAGEDY AND PEOPLE GOT HURT

YOU CAN'T SAY STUFF LIKE THAT ABOUT A TRAGEDY

7/12/2007 1:44:33 PM

^ it might not make the main media, but some American authorities/experts are writing like this

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/07/terrorist_speci_1.html

Quote :

"Terrorist Special Olympics in the UK First London and then Glasgow. Who are these idiots? Is there a Special Olympics for terrorists going on in the UK this week?"

7/12/2007 2:04:46 PM

^ ahahahha gg!

7/12/2007 2:11:26 PM

Quote :

"Last year, terrorists attempted to blow up a German train station using wires placed inside a 11 liter natural gas canister (containing only gas, no oxygen), with a few bottles of gasoline next to it. The device did not detonate, but we were told that hundreds would have died or been injured from the metal fragments that would have flown for "a hundred meters"."

Geez, I had no idea that so many of the "thwarted terrorist attacks" were not really attacks at all, merely idiots running around with what they just cobbled together. What idiot thinks natural gas is going to ignite without first mixing it with air?

7/12/2007 3:34:16 PM

I've got this mental picture of British terrorists running around with the Benny Hill music playing.

7/12/2007 3:42:55 PM

I guess the turrists forgot that these folks weathered the Blitz in 1940 - 41.

7/12/2007 4:08:37 PM

^ damn straight. just like when us Amurrcans held the lines during the brutal winter at Valley Forge.

"Remember the Lusitania!"

7/12/2007 4:22:20 PM