Mass terrorist death in London stopped by happenstance

Apparently it was pure luck, combined with police bravery, that prevented the two car bombs in London from exploding. An ambulance crew, which had come to the Tiger Tiger nightclub to aid a young man who had fallen and hit his head, noticed fumes coming from a car parked outside the club and alerted police. As the Scotsman reports it:

Inside were green gas canisters, tanks of petrol and steel nails, ready to become deadly missiles at detonation.

That the explosion did not happen is a testimony to the bravery of two Scotland Yard bomb disposal officers.

Instead of withdrawing to a safe distance and sending in a robotic drone, the officers leaned inside the car and disabled the device by hand.

If the ambulance crew hadn’t been there and noticed the fumes, the bomb would have gone off and killed or injured hundreds of people in the nightclub.

Also a main suspect at the moment is an Iraqi who had been living in Britain under police restrictions and then escaped. Are we to understand that a member of Al Qaeda in Iraq was admitted into Britain? What happened to “By fighting them there, we don’t have to fight them here?”

Also, the Scotsman writes:

The prospect of such an attack less than a mile from Downing Street cast a shadow over Gordon Brown’s second day in office.

The Scotsman is greatly understating the problem. I would say that the prospect of such an attack, and of an endless series of similar attacks, casts a shadow not just over the current government of Britain, it casts a shadow over all modern liberal societies, which in the name of equal respect for all people (a phrase that comes straight from Melanie Phillips’s liberal credo) have denied their own cultural distinctiveness and political sovereignty and, on that basis, have freely admitted within their borders unlimited numbers of unassimilable aliens.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 30, 2007 07:32 AM | Send