Osama bin Laden and Che Guevara-Murdered Revolutionaries?

I spent quite a lot of time on the road yesterday and Tuesday, so had plenty of time listening to the radio. I have a terrible habit of listening to radio phone-ins. It's a bit like slowing down to look at an accident, you know you shouldn't but...

Anyway since bin Laden was dispatched to join his 72 virgins there has been a strange response from a minority on radio phone-ins and on the internet. It includes condemnation of the US for naked aggression against an unarmed man. Accusations of 'state sponsored murder' by the US. Accusations that the US is no better than Al-Qaeda and that no democracy should carry out executions without a fair trial. Oh, not forgetting the old US warmongering allegation.

To all that I say absolute bull! bin Laden had it coming and got what he deserved. Bloody hell, to hear some of the idiots gassing off you'd think the special forces had swooped on the local bingo hall and taken out a harmless, grey haired old granny. It was bin Laden, responsible for the deaths of thousands, get a grip people.

Is there any doubt of bin Laden's guilt? No there isn't, that's the test in a case like this. Who wouldn't have taken Hitler out in 1940 if they'd had the chance? Leaving the political nonsense about due process and a fair trial aside, more important is the moral question. How many lives would have been saved if Hitler had been bumped off in 1932, 1939, 1940 or whenever?

If bin Laden had been taken out in 2000 there is a great chance that at least 3000 innocent people would be alive today. He showed no remorse, no sign that he would cease his terrorist activities, I would therefore suggest that many more lives have been saved as a result of taking bin Laden out. What was done was a perfectly moral action. For once Obama has done the right thing.

So what's the link to Che Guevara then? It's a long time now since I had a pop at the BBC but they really angered me yesterday, or rather Peter Allen did on BBC5Live. They were doing a piece about dead terrorists and Che Guevara, Ernie to use his real but less appealing name, was mentioned.

Guevara was the Argentinian terrorist who helped Castro build Cuba into a totalitarian police state. Once the people of Cuba had been suppressed and oppressed, Guevara had to look elswhere to satisfy his murderous bloodlust. So he headed off to oppress the people of Bolivia. However, there weren't enough loonies in Bolivia to follow Ernie and he ended up lost in the forest with a small band of misfits. I don't think they had Che Guevara t-shirts on though, not then. To cut a long story short the Bolivian army surrounded the terrorists and Guevara was shot by a young officer. Job done, another dead terrorist.

But oh no, Allen apologised for calling Ernie a 'terrorist' and referred to him instead as a 'revolutionary'. I may have found 'revolutionary terrorist' an acceptable term but not 'revolutionary', I still prefer 'terrorist' to describe people like bin Laden and Guevara.

I wonder how long until the BBC will be referring to bin Laden as a 'revolutionary'?

Scary Terrorists

The old mantra 'terrorist threat' has been wheeled out so many times to justify more and more oppressive measures by New Labour that it lost its impact a long time ago. Indeed many of us doubted the seriousness of the threat from the start. Apart from the odd nutter or two the threat has never been as severe as that from the IRA a few years ago, and we lived in a state of relative freedom then in spite of them.

Then, over Christmas, the authorities wheel out a nutty Nigerian who used a syringe on a plane to make something on his leg go 'pop' and spout a bit of smoke. There you are, no doubt they will now ratchet up airport security even more, and install even more CCTV cameras in Kendal and Kirkby Lonsdale.

But last time I flew I had a bottle of over-sized shampoo confiscated because they thought I was going to use it as a terrorist weapon. Rub suds in the pilot's eyes perhaps causing the plane to crash? So how did nutty Nigerian chap get a syringe and a thing that goes 'pop' and makes smoke through all that hi-tech security? Perhaps it was actually time for the state to show us that there is a threat and that removing our freedoms and liberties is justified, but they didn't want to actually kill anyone in the process, not at Christmas.

The other thing that concerned me was that this nutty chap has a mechanical engineering degree from University College London. Now I don't expect they teach bomb making at UCL, but what happened to education, education, education under New Labour if that is the best an engineering graduate can do? On top of that his family are very wealthy it seems, so he could have afforded the best ingredients.

I think it's all very odd.

Labour Party Scum

25 years ago the IRA blew up the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the Tories were holding their annual conference. It was the first Tory conference in a few years that I hadn't attended but I had friends there, some actually in the hotel but none of them died thankfully.

The Labour Party have proved how thoroughly vile they are, despite their 'New Labour' makeover, by inviting Martin McGuiness to their conference, in Brighton this year. Overly polite people may call that insensitive, I think it is far worse and more sinister. McGuiness is totally unrepentant, he and his ilk have got away with murder and are rubbing our noses in it.

Remember too, that it was Labour MPS who, in the '80s and '90s consistently voted against the relatively mild anti-terror legislation of the day, when the IRA were committing atrocities here on a far more regular basis than Al Qaeda. Yet they are the ones now turning the UK into a huge prison island.

I've always believed that Labour, and socialists in general were scum, little has changed.

Daily Mail Report

Afghanistan, Iraq And War Criminals

Blair, Brown and others deserve putting on trial once the disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq are over and our troops are home. Here is the full litany of how they not only invaded foreign sovereign states but did it, and carry on, while putting our troops in unneccessary added danger by underfunding and under supplying them.

Brown and his minnions are now scurrying around claiming that the action in Afghanistan is making the UK a safer place. Oh really?

Over the last 30 years many of us felt much more in danger from the IRA than we have felt in the last few years from Al Qaeda. In the past I've been very close to several bomb attacks by the IRA as have family members, including the Manchester bomb, the '96 one as well as the two in the 1970s, and the Canary Wharf bomb. I was sat on a train at Charing Cross when the London Bridge bomb went off and was in London when the Bishopgate bomb was detonated by the IRA.

I don't remember the British government threatening to invade the Irish Republic or the USA, who arguably gave much more support to Irish republican terrorists than Afghanistan has to Al Qaeda. And Sinn Fein/IRA are now power-sharing!

It would be nice to one day see a great Soviet or Nuremberg style show trial with the current batch of war criminals, and those retired, getting their comeuppence.

Now that's off my chest I'll go and start Richard North's book Ministry of Defeat, reviewed here.

Oh Manchester, So Much To Answer For.

The Times reports on Islamist terror groups' use of fake colleges to smuggle terrorists into the country. That's a strange departure as, up until now, they've always used British lads from Luton or Bradford. But there you go, our security services must be right, they did assure us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction didn't they?

What particularly struck me was that much of the report centres on East Manchester, where I grew up. Roughly speaking that means Gorton, Levenshulme, Openshaw and out to Tameside which includes Hyde and Hattersley. I can't help imagining the high dudgeon of the local citizens, indignant that Al Qaeda should lower the tone of East Manchester in such a terrible way.

Of course they are forgetting that Openshaw saw one of the first IRA murders on the mainland in the 1970s, outside my local as it happens. That Gorton, Hattersley, Hyde and Ashton-under-Lyne were where the Moors Murderers did their evil deeds. That Hyde was where Harold Shipman had his surgery. I'm bloody sure that he, and the previous events, did a great deal more to lower the tone of the neighbourhood than a few more terrorist raids that will probably lead to nowt but a few illegals, as also happened recently in North Manchester.

My parents always harp back, bless 'em, to the golden days when you could leave your front door open, not like theses days. I always have to check with them if by that they mean the 1950s, the decade when they suffered their only ever burglary and one grim night heard the screams of a woman being murdered in a nearby alley.

I suppose we all have our coping mechanisms. Mine is Morrissey and The Smiths so here we go: