[ExI] Terrorist? Who can tell?

[Tom Nowell]

BillK wrote:
If you walk the streets of London, or watch London TV news reports, in
many cases you will only rarely see a white face. And that white face
is often the news reporter.

Hey! All the Polish immigrants are white! Last time I was in London, I actually had a moment where I wondered where all the white British people were - everyone working in shops was non-white or wearing a nametag with an eastern european name. I then went to my job interview, and found where the white British people are - working in those skyscrapers that make up the London skyline.

BillK wrote:
I agree that the group of six bombers don't look like a group of six 
white people resembling Hugh Grant. But neither do any other members
of the non-white half of the London population.

Lee wrote:
Never was I supposing that all Londoners are white; I've
seen at least that much on television, even from the movies
of the 1970s.

Well, apologies to Lee, but Bill might have been worried you got your ideas about London from watching "Notting Hill" - you know, that movie where Hugh Grant takes Julia Roberts round to his white friends house, where no black person has a speaking part? Apparently it's set in Notting Hill, which this weekend hosted its Carnival, Britain's largest celebration of Afro-Caribbean culture. Quite a few people have commented on the irony of this.

Lee wrote:
Yes. Now it so happens that I don't travel at all, and have
not been to London, and know of the bombings which 
occurred there only by means of my admittedly very
faulty memory, but I could have sworn that *all* those
arrested and convicted in the recent bombings were
born in the Middle East, and have the same ethnic
profiles that allow me to often recognize the origins
of people I meet.

Lee - which bombing arrests are you thinking of? I checked on the details of the four men who directly carried out the July 7th bombings - two were born in Leeds (like me), one in Bradford, one in Jamaica. None were born in middle Eastern countries. Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. Of more recent arrests, very few details have been given about those arrested for making death threats to the prime minister, and Rafik Aouamria who was charged with a bombing in Exeter is Algerian.

The current crop of terrorist arrests make it hard to pin down factors other than "Muslim", which includes 1.6 million people in the UK. You can't monitor 3% of the population easily, nor can you justify infringing their civil liberties on a large scale. In addition to Islamic terrorists, there are still occasional acts of Irish terrorism, animal rights activists trying to bomb labs and intimidate researchers, racist groups trying to stir up violence against immigrants, and this is all before you consider Russian spies murdering people in London. The security services have to keep an eye on many threats, and not get obsessed with any shortcuts generated by profiling.

Tom

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