Friday 14 September 2007

Normal service resumes at Guardian

After Timothy Garton Ash's refreshingly realistic assessment of the terrorist threat in yesterday's Guardian, a more wearily familiar note is struck in today's paper by Simon Jenkins, who would have us believe that 'the biggest threat to our freedoms comes not from al-Qaida but from the security bureaucrats and their cronies'.

Jenkins thinks that 'sinister forces' are exaggerating the terror threat for their own purposes (try telling that to the victims of 7/7 and the near-victims of this summer's foiled attacks) and that 'while arming against communism helped defeat communism, arming against terrorism only feeds the beast.' And his alternative strategy is....? When it comes to combating Islamist terror, Jenkins appears to belong to the 'keep quiet and they might just go away' school of thought.

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