So heres a few more recent cases for you to be concerned and amazed at...................................
Lets start with Neil Lewington, Mr Lewington has just been on trial at the Old Bailey charged with the preparation of terrorist attacks using home made bombs made from tennis balls and weedkiller. He made the bombs at his parents home in Reading and aimed to target those who he thought of as 'non British' searches of Mr Lewington's home revealed a notebook entitled "Waffen SS UK members' handbook" which contained drawings of electronics and chemical mixtures. He had once told a woman that "the only good Paki was a dead Paki." Mr Lewington has been found guilty and will be sentenced in September. Press Coverage has to say the least been sparce.
Or how about the case of Robert Cottage? a former 3 times BNP candidate jailed in July 2007 for possessing explosive chemicals in his home. Police comments at the time informed us that following his arrest they found the largest amount of chemical explosive of its type ever found in this country. The national coverage of Cottage’s arrest in October 2006 amounted to exactly 56 words in a single “news in brief” item in the Sunday Times. Cottage was charged under the obscure Explosive Substances Act 1883, not the panoply of modern anti-terror laws now at the disposal of the police which probably explains his lenient 2 and a half year sentence! Cottage told the court that "the evils of uncontrolled immigration' would lead to civil war which would be imminent and inevitable."
And then there is Martyn Gilleard, another Nazi fantasist and a pedophile who in June 2008 was arrested after police found nail bombs, bullets, swords, axes and knives in his flat, together with more than 39,000 indecent images of children on his computer.
In addition he left a note in which he had written, “I am so sick and tired of hearing nationalists talk of killing Muslims, of blowing up mosques, of fighting back. Only to see these acts of resistance fail to appear. The time has come to stop the talk and start to act.” In another note, he wrote that he wanted to see "reds" - left-wing activists - attacked with "lightning strikes" and "home-made grenades". Gilliard was jailed for 16 years and there was only sporadic and not surprisingly limited media coverage.
And then there is Nathan Worrell? This neo-Nazi, described by police as a “dangerous individual”, who hoarded bomb-making materials in his home, and was found guilty in December 2008 of possessing material for terrorist purposes and for racially aggravated harassment. He was jailed for 7 years. Worrell admitted to police that he was a white nationalist. He signed his texts off as "88" - a code for Hitler. The trial heard Worrell left racist stickers at the home of Susan Crofts and Mohammed Chowdhery and on a lamppost. One sticker read: "Only inferior white women date outside their race. Be proud of your heritage. Don't be a race-mixing slut", while another from the Combat 18 group said: "It's our country. Let's win it back. Repatriation now." His trial attracted just two passing references in the popular national press, in the Daily Star and the Sun.
Medhi Hussein highlights the above cases in the New Statesman and helpfully informs us that Europol, the European police agency, suggest that the threat of Islamist terrorism is minimal compared with that carried out by separatists and nationlist groups. Across Europe in 2006, one out of 498 documented terrorist attacks across Europe could be classed as “Islamist”; in 2007, the figure rose to just four out of 583 – that’s less than 1 per cent of the total. By contrast, 517 attacks across the continent were claimed by or attributed to nationalist or separatist terrorist groups, such as ETA in Spain.
Now to me a terrorist is a terrorist, the taking of innocent life or the threat to do so is abhorant to us all. But why do the British Media reserve their press inches for the minority of Muslim offenders whilst conveniently missing or skirting over stories such as those outlined above?
It is no wonder that the country is becoming paranoid and Islamaphobic when it is being fed such an unbalanced view from the press as to the real nature of the threat that surrounds us all. It is also no wonder that Britain's Muslim youth feel so alienated and stigmatised.
The threat to our security and community is most definitely out our there, it is very very real, but it isn't necessarily always dressed up in dark skins and beards and the sooner the media realise this and start to present a more balanced view of what is happening the better we will all be for it.
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