I have been writing quite a bit about the dangers of PC thought (for which Dymphna has been kind enough to coin the term "ideophobia", literally "fear of thought") . It undermines our ability to think clearly about who it is we are fighting (we are fighting against Islamic fascism in various guises, not against "terror" which is a tactic, not an enemy) and undermines our ability to adequately prosecute the war on Islamic fascism (with our proscriptions against anything that resembles "ethnic profiling" which diverts energy from looking for those most likely to be enemies to investigating the shoes of 80 year old grandmothers with emphysema.) The London bombings may now be our first, concrete example of Political Correctness killing people.
The London Evening Standard of 15 February 2005 had an article Immigration checks on Tube passengers banned, By Ben Leapman, Home Affairs Correspondent. (Hat tip: LGF) Apparently, the Standard, with great pride, had discovered and publicized the existence of a nefarious program of the London Immigration Service which performed random immigration checks on underground riders.
We revealed how dozens of police and immigration officers at a time swooped on stations and asked foreign-sounding commuters to justify their presence in Britain.
And after we uncovered the practice last summer, unhappy Tube chiefs have told the Home Office and police that their officers will no longer be allowed to carry out the raids.
The sides are still in talks but already the number of operations has been cut and the Immigration Service has agreed to curb the way its officers work.
Later in the article, the articulation of the Politically Correct ideological basis of this decision is revealed:
Critics had claimed the raids were unfairly targeting black and Asian Londoners. Unlike police, the Immigration Service does not disclose figures on how many of the people it stops are from ethnic minorities.
Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Mark Oaten said: "The decision to ban these operations is a victory for civil liberties and the Standard is to be congratulated.
"Black and Asian people have every right to go about their business on the Underground without being stopped on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant.
"Trawling public places for failed asylum seekers is no substitute for having a proper system of deportation."
Perhaps a survey could be conducted today asking Black and Asian riders if they agree with the Liberal Democrat spokesman. London has been in the crosshairs of al Qaeda for a very long time. British officials have said on more than one occasion that an attack was inevitable, yet the fools who promote PC thought decided a little inconvenience was worse than the risk of catastrophe.
There is no evidence as yet as to where the bombers came form. We do not know if they were British citizens, and London certainly has enough Islamists of its own, or if any were illegal asylum seekers, but it is incontrovertible that if there were random police sweeps of the underground, it would have made the risk to the perpetrators of a successful attack much higher. al Qaeda has a history of careful preparation. They monitor their targets and routine is their friend. The New York police randomly appear in subway and train stations. If their presence is unpredictable, an enemy will have a much greater task in perpetrating an atrocity.
Three months after 9/11, my son's close friend from college, a Kuwaiti citizen flying on a Saudi passport, came to visit us form Virginia. When we asked him about the flight up, he replied that it was uneventful but frightening. It turned out that he was not frightened or inconvenienced by the security officers; in fact, they waved him through without even a cursory glance at him or his bags, while pulling aside some elderly white haired grandmother. He wondered how safe he could be when no one had the temerity or intellectual command to carefully check out a 20 year old, single, dark-skinned Arab man who fit the ideal profile for an Islamic terrorist, or another Arab man on the same flight (a stranger to my son's friend) yet were carefully checking over the aforementioned 80 year old grandmother.
Can I prove that the Standard's PC attack on the Immigration Service caused deaths in London last week? No, there is no way to know if things would have gone differently were they still conducting random immigration checks. Are immigration checks inconvenient? Absolutely, yet I tolerate police check points seeking intoxicated drivers. It delays me a few minutes on my way home at night on occasion. It is inconvenient, but it is well worth my five minutes to lessen the chance that I or someone I love will be killed by a drunk driver. It isn't fool proof, but it is one more way to lessen the odds of a terrible event occurring. Random immigration checks were lost to the Brits when their PC police intervened and surely made the atrocities of last week more likely.
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