Today's Sun take on the conviction of the 21/7 bombers is nothing if not intriguing. After spending the years since 9/11 endlessly scaremongering about the threat posed by jihadists and their progressively diminishing skills in constructing bombs, it seems that the paper's just as confused as ever in what stance to take after last week's comprehensive failure, moving from defiance to jingoism without knowing on which to settle.
Why then choose now to ridicule and mock these bombers? Rather than doing so at the time of their snap, crackling and popping, the first thing the Sun demanded was that politicians return from their recess in order to do something, with Blair hearing the cry and heeding their noble cause of 90 day detention, control orders and changing the rules of the game. The Scum had a use for these amateurs then; they don't now.
Hence the banner boosting splash "MORON TERROR", which I have to admit is at least a decent pun. Why then is the "Buck-toothed fanatic Muktah Ibrahim" both a moron and an imbecile? Err, he got the recipe for the detonators wrong, with the initial explosion not being strong enough to set-off the tupperware bowls that were filled with the main charge mixture of hydrogen peroxide and chappati flour. Oh, and he failed his Maths GCSE.
We could spend weeks debating just who's the biggest idiot out of the recent Islamist attempts at murdering innocents: is it Ibrahim and his cock-up with the detonators, Dhiren "Borat" Barot and his quite brilliant smoke alarm dirty bomb, or how about those attempts at Tiger Tiger and Glasgow, seemingly following the plans drawn up by Barot for the limo gas canisters project? The difference between the lot is that the Scum continues to pretends that hundreds could have been killed by the failed attacks of June 30th and 31st, and adores to dwell on just what could have happened if Barot had succeeded in his smoke alarm outrage. Out of all these, Ibrahim and his gang of backpackers came by far the closest to succeeding, yet they're the ones getting made fun of. Confused? You should be.
It's quite true that it does take a very special kind of idiot to continue to claim what was obviously an attempt to bomb the tube for the second time in two weeks was in actual fact a protest against the Iraq war, but even that staggering inanity doesn't explain why these guys are idiots and the rest are soldiers who we're at war against.
Perhaps the leader explains it. Or rather, explains that there is no real explanation:
THE four 21/7 terrorists are despicable thugs who deserve no mercy. They plotted the biggest civilian slaughter in this country since World War Two.
Really? Even worse than 7/7? It wasn't plotted here, but worse than Lockerbie? Worse than the supposed liquid bombs plot of last year?
Hundreds of lives were saved solely because evil gang leader Muktah Ibrahim couldn’t add up.
But that was pure luck.
Hallelujah! Praise the luck!
Coming two weeks after 7/7, a second attack would have paralysed London and devastated the economy.
Nonsense. Things would have continued much the same as they did after 7/7. Stop giving these laughable idiots so much credit.
The jury had to decide if it was a publicity stunt or an attempt at mass murder. They reached the only possible verdict . . . guilty as hell.
Yet all we seem able to do is lock them away for a few years. These depraved plotters came here from Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Presumably by a few years the Scum means for the rest of their lives, which is the sentence they are likely to receive.
Why can’t we drop them back where they came from...with or without a parachute?
Firstly, I somehow doubt that either Eritrea or Ethiopia want them. As for Somalia, seeing as there's no central government and that there's currently an Islamist insurgency raging against the transitional federal government, I don't think it's the greatest idea to deport them back there.
Elsewhere, although Tim makes an excellent point about telling Campbell where to go, I can't really ignore the glaring ass-kissing going on in the leader column:
ALASTAIR Campbell’s diaries are as good as a front-row seat through the chaos and black comedy of the Blair years.
Campbell reveals moments of high drama and near-hysteria between Tony and Gordon Brown.
Cherie Blair complains her husband was unable to sleep for worrying about their brooding neighbour. Tony was once even ready to quit and let Two Jags run the country instead.
We learn about Peter Mandelson’s hissy fits, Cherie’s oddball relationship with Carole Caplin . . . and her decision to pack carrots for an overseas holiday.
This book was billed as a sanitised account of the Blair decade.
If so, we can’t wait for the full uncensored version.
The reason for the Scum's sycophancy is most likely identified by Martin Kettle. Out of 763 pages, Trevor Kavanagh, the Scum's former political editor, with whom Campbell would have conspired on hundreds if not thousands of occasions, is mentioned just 4 times. Similarly, Tom Baldwin, ex of the Times, is only referred to once throughout the entire diaries. Campbell hasn't just sanitised the TB/GBs, he's also self-censored his incestuous relationship with the Murdoch press, much to their delight.
Finally, it wouldn't be the Scum if it also wasn't desperately plugging its sister organisations. In the face of the apparent flight to Facebook, it's bigging up just how many people are using MurdochSpace regularly. It's ten million apparently.Labels: 21/7 bombers trial, Alastair Campbell, morons, Muktah Ibrahim, MurdochSpace, Scum-watch, Sun-watch
