The number of potential terrorists in Britain

The inane Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post says that the failure of the two attempted terrorist attacks on Britain last week shows that Britain is “winning” the war on terrorism. Tony Blankley takes apart that claim, then concludes:

I was personally told last year when I was in London by a very senior British counter-intelligence official that they judged there was a pool of more than 100,000 Muslims who might potentially be recruited to terrorism—and that the British are hopelessly undermanned in their capacity to even monitor several hundred suspects simultaneously.

One hundred thousand potential terrorists—that’s one of out 16 Muslims in Britain. And that’s not mere supporters of sharia or supporters of jihad or supporters of terror—that’s potential terrorists.

Thought experiment: if legal immigration had brought a population of 1.6 million Nazis to Britain, and the authorities then realized that 100,000 of the 1.6 million Nazis were potential mass killers, and that it was impossible to distinguish between the potential mass killers and the rest of the Nazi population, what would the British do? I think they would deport the entire Nazi population. The fact that they were legal immigrants and even citizens would be irrelevant. It is an axiom of politics that national survival trumps the individual rights and convenience of enemies.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 06, 2007 08:24 AM | Send