Robert Fisk, The Independent, August 12:
When my electricity returned at around 3am yesterday, I turned on the BBC World Service television. There were a series of powerful explosions which shook the house – just as they vibrated across all of Beirut – as the latest Israeli air raids blasted over the city. And then up came the World Service headline: “Terror Plot”. Terror what, I asked myself? And there was my favourite cop, Paul Stephenson, explaining how my favourite police force – the ones who bravely executed an innocent young Brazilian on the Tube, taking 30 seconds to fire six bullets into him – had saved the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians from suicide bombers on airliners.
I’m sure Independent readers will join me in watching how many of the suspects – or “British-born Muslims” as the BBC defined them in its special form of “soft” racism (they are surely Muslim Britons or British Muslims, are they not?) – are still in custody in a couple of weeks’ time.
And I’m sure it’s quite by chance that the lads in blue chose yesterday – with anger at Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara’s shameful failure over Lebanon at its peak – to save the world. After all, it’s scarcely three years since the other great Terror Plot had British armoured vehicles surrounding Heathrow on the very day – again quite by chance, of course – that hundreds of thousands of Britons were demonstrating against Lord Blair’s intended invasion of Iraq.
So I sat on the carpet in my living room and watched all these heavily armed chaps at Heathrow protecting the British people from annihilation and then on came President George Bush to tell us that we were all fighting “Islamic fascism”. There were more thumps in the darkness across Beirut where an awful lot of people are suffering from terror – although I can assure George W that while the pilots of the aircraft dropping bombs across the city in which I have lived for 30 years may or may not be fascists, they are definitely not Islamic.
Frankly, the “threat” from Islamic terrorism pales into insignificance compared to the crimes committed in our name in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.