What is Wrong With Ben White and the Independent???

Whilst blogging from Sao Paolo, Brazil, Ben White grieves for the uprooting of trees which have born fruit for generations, but such expansive humanity is a precious thing and can be distilled only when writing against Israel and “theologically false” Zionism. Not Sri Lanka, not Burma, *never* Darfur.

White observes reports of arrests in New York over an alleged plot to target military aircraft with Stinger missiles and, in shades of the 1994 AMIA Jewish community centre bombing in Buenos Airies which has been linked to Hezbollah – what White calls a “national liberation movement” – to detonate truck bombs outside two synagogues in the Bronx. Instead of viewing with relief that FBI agents had been in full control of the situation at all times, supplying the suspects with fake explosives to pursue their stated desires, White sees it as:

A fully controlled threat to our freedoms
May 21st, 2009

A federal law enforcement official described the plot as “aspirational” — meaning that the suspects wanted to do something but had no weapons or explosives — and described the operation as a sting with a cooperator within the group.

“It was fully controlled at all times,” a law enforcement official said.

Which freedoms are these, Ben? The freedom for Jews not to be killed, or the freedom to kill Jews-as-Jews? It is not as if you do not understand that some people harbour negative feelings towards Jews individually. Of course, you do not consider yourself to be an antisemite (and Vic Mackey did not consider himself to be a common criminal).

In a death-rattle of a dying newspaper, the Independent reports how “MI5 blackmails British Muslims”, and proceeds to quote five “Muslim community workers”. The central allegation is that the spooks threatened to denounce the individuals as terrorism-suspects. If this is true, it will be unacceptable, but I am immediately sceptical after reading the emotive headline and unsubstantiated allegations. Furthermore, the men were targeted due to links with the Arabian peninsular or Horn of Africa; in the same way, I assume, arrivals on flights from certain Latin American countries are targeted by drugs-investigators and I do not accept penpal requests from Russian ladies claiming to cook very much and desiring to love.

I know of many non-Muslim non-Europeans who have also been targeted/inconvenienced at British entrepôts (including Israelis of differing skin-colour), but an alien from outer space picking up British newspapers at random would be forgiven for thinking that only British Muslims find themselves delayed and that it occurs regularly. Yet their stories are not nearly so well-publicized. Despite the Indie’s admission that intelligence gathering is essential (to guard against a low-level serious threat from Islamist terrorism), this report is one reason why.

One wonders if White and the Indie would have seen this, where the spooks replaced ammonium nitrate with an inert substance, was a fully controlled threat to our freedoms not to be blown-up on British streets.

Back at Ben White’s blog, he started with courageously deleting an almost uniformly negative response, and has now closed the thread.