I would love to have the Met in Beirut to counter terror in my part of the world

By Robert Fisk Independent U.K. 8/12/06

When my electricity returned at around 3am yesterday, I turned on the BBC World Service television. There were a series of powerful explosions which shook the house – just as they vibrated across all of Beirut – as the latest Israeli air raids blasted over the city. And then up came the World Service headline: “Terror Plot”. Terror what, I asked myself? And there was my favorite cop, Paul Stephenson, explaining how my favorite police force – the ones who bravely executed an innocent young Brazilian on the Tube, taking 30 seconds to fire six bullets into him – had saved the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians from suicide bombers on airliners.

I’m sure Independent readers will join me in watching how many of the suspects – or “British-born Muslims” as the BBC defined them in its special form of “soft” racism (they are surely Muslim Britons or British Muslims, are they not?) – are still in custody in a couple of weeks’ time.

And I’m sure it’s quite by chance that the lads in blue chose yesterday – with anger at Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara’s shameful failure over Lebanon at its peak – to save the world. After all, it’s scarcely three years since the other great Terror Plot had British armoured vehicles surrounding Heathrow on the very day – again quite by chance, of course – that hundreds of thousands of Britons were demonstrating against Lord Blair’s intended invasion of Iraq.

So I sat on the carpet in my living room and watched all these heavily armed chaps at Heathrow protecting the British people from annihilation and then on came President George Bush to tell us that we were all fighting “Islamic fascism”. There were more thumps in the darkness across Beirut where an awful lot of people are suffering from terror – although I can assure George W that while the pilots of the aircraft dropping bombs across the city in which I have lived for 30 years may or may not be fascists, they are definitely not Islamic.

And there, of course, was the same old problem. To protect the British people – and the American people – from “Islamic terror”, we must have lots and lots of heavily armed policemen and soldiers and plainclothes police and endless departments of anti-terrorism, homeland security and other more sordid folk like the American torturers – some of them sadistic women – at Abu Ghraib and Baghram and Guantanamo. Yet the only way to protect ourselves from the real violence which may – and probably will – be visited upon us, is to deal, morally, with courage and with justice, with the tragedy of Lebanon and “Palestine” and Iraq and Afghanistan. And this we will not do.

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