I bet you it will turn out to be a hoax

Despite all the revelations about the latest 'terror plot', politicians and security chiefs got it wrong before and are likely to have got it wrong now too.

By Azzam Tamimi

08/15/06 "The Guardian" -- -- British politicians and security chiefs seemed absolutely certain that they were doing the right thing when on July 22 2005, Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent young Brazilian man was shot dead by police at Stockwell tube station. I had a conversation with the mayor of London, Ken Livingston, the following morning opposite to Brent Mosque in north-west London when he told me that the police commissioner assured him that the shot man was indeed a terrorist. A few hours later the entire country was shocked to learn that the man was innocent and that the entire story about his conduct was entirely false, or I should say fabricated in a bid to safe face both government and police. The same authorities seemed no less certain when on June 2 2006 Mohammed Abdul Kahar was shot in a near fatal attack by police. His family and his neighbours were subject to brutal assaults during the "anti-terror" raids in Forest Gate. We were told then that Abdulahar and his brother had been embroiled in the manufacture of a "dirty bomb"; it all turned to be a dirty "intelligence" work.

For days passengers across the UK and many airports around the world have been subjected to severe delays and to unprecedented humiliation because once more our politicians and security chiefs believe they've discovered a major plot to blow up transatlantic planes. More than 20 young Muslim men and women have been in detention subjected, expectedly, to intense interrogation because the Pakistani (unintelligent) intelligence services claimed a man they arrested in Pakistan was a key al-Qaeda operative who had been planning the alleged attacks.

The severe government-induced crisis in air travel coincided with the call by a large number of MPs for a parliamentary session to discuss the crisis in Lebanon and amid a growing discontent among different circles over the manner in which the Blair-led government had conducted itself during the Israeli war against Lebanon. More importantly, the crisis unfolded as Israel was being dealt the most humiliating defeat since it was created less than 60 years ago. I wonder too whether it is a mere coincidence that only days earlier Tony Blair was criticised widely for once again blaming Islam and the Muslims for the rise in "international terrorism".

I think we've seen enough over the past five years or so not to trust politicians and the security agencies any more when they claim a plot of some sort has been foiled. They told us nothing but untruth about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and about the alleged link between the regime of the former Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, and al-Qaeda. They misled the public over the de Menezes affair and then over the Forest Gate fiasco.

I have a feeling that all the Muslims detained in connection with the recent police operation to foil and alleged plot are innocent and will soon be proven so. I also suspect that the entire episode has been deemed, despite its enormous cost, to be of utility to a government that is increasingly out of touch with reality and seriously short of public support and sympathy. I wonder whether this was also intended to smear the image of Islam and the Muslims at the time when the entire world can see that they are the victims of a most unjust world order dominated by the USA and the UK who both support and sponsor Israeli terrorism against Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon and who both oppress the Muslim peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq through direct occupation.

If the government is confident that it has a case against the detained Muslims then have them tried in a court of law. Instead what we are witnessing is a campaign of misinformation that deludes the public into believing that the group is guilty of what is nothing but mere suspicion and most probably false intelligence from the Pakistanis. This is not the first time, by the way, that the Pakistani authorities detain, charge, convict and extradite innocent individuals; most of the Guantanamo Bay detainees are victims of the Pakistani regime that is dying to please its friends in the White House and Whitehall at any cost. George Bush, the tyrannical leader of the oppressive world order who took delivery of the victims of his ally in Pakistan before and has kept them in the most inhumane conditions at his Cuban jail, could not conceal his malice for Islam and the Muslims by issuing his verdict against what he called "Islamic fascists". This, I'm sure would have been seen by many people as further proof of the likely innocence of these Muslims and a manifestation of the real purpose of the campaign against them, namely to blame it all on Islam and the Muslims.

One wonders who the real fascists today are. What about those who send their troops to destroy entire nations in Afghanistan and Iraq and who supply the Israelis with the most lethal weaponry ever known to humanity to kill and maim thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian men, women and children?

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