STANDPOINT.ONLINE: I have recently spent time talking with senior Pentagon officials and others involved in counter-terrorism. Their intellectual seriousness, and the global scope of their concerns, are strikingly different from those of their British counterparts, who are obsessed with “community cohesion” and the “radicalisation” of young Muslims. On these issues, the views of the non-Muslim majority population are largely ignored — except as potential “Islamophobes” with little or no say in the matter.
In the United States, by contrast, the Senate committee on homeland security heard evidence in April about the likely effects of a terrorist nuclear attack on Washington DC. The chairman, Senator Joe Lieberman, said, “The scenarios we discuss today are very hard for us to contemplate, and so emotionally traumatic and unsettling that it is tempting to push them aside.”
What was Lieberman talking about? A 10-kiloton bomb left in a truck by the White House would kill about 100,000 people and erase a two-mile radius of mainly federal buildings downtown. Most casualties would be burn victims, the majority of them African-Americans who work for the federal government. About 95 per cent of them would die an agonising death, because current capacity to treat such cases is limited to about 1,500. Since the winds blow west to east, the ensuing radioactive plume would drift towards the poor black neighbourhoods of the capital’s South East where there is only one hospital. Lieberman concluded, “Now is the time to have this difficult conversation, to ask the tough questions, and then to get answers as best we can.” One wonders what preparations for such a nightmare scenario are being made here in Britain. Are our parliamentarians asking these questions and enabling us to have this conversation? How To Defeat The Global Jihadists >>> By Michael Burleigh | June 2008
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback – USA)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardcover – USA)
