Four Muslim men have been convicted of planning a “Lee Rigby-style” terrorist attack that sought to murder and behead police or military personnel using explosive devices and swords. Four years ago, British soldier Lee Rigby was beheaded on a busy London street by two Nigerian-born men — both recent converts to Islam. The gang of four wanted to carry out a similar attack.
The four men were arrested last year carrying a bag of weapons, including a pipe bomb and a meat cleaver with the word ‘kafir’, or infidel, carved on it. The investigators also recovered a samurai sword in related raids.
Three of these four Islamists had previous terrorism convictions and were under surveillance as they plotted their future attacks, raising questions about the effectiveness of the security apparatus currently monitoring thousands of Islamists living in Britain. The case also highlights the issue of Jihadist propaganda and mobilisation inside the UK prison system.
According to the estimates released earlier this year by the UK’s domestic intelligence service MI5, the country is home to some 23,000 potential Jihadists. However, as Europe has increasingly witnessed, many of the Jihadists are not even on the police scanner when they commit their acts of terror.
UK newspaper Independent reported:
Pressure is mounting on the Government and security services to explain how a terror cell who dubbed themselves the “Three Musketeers” were able to prepare an imminent attack while under surveillance by police and MI5.Naweed Ali, Khobaib Hussain, Mohibur Rahman and Tahir Aziz have been convicted of plotting a Lee Rigby-style attack on police or military targets in the UK at the end of a trial dogged by debates over secrecy.Intelligence officers had believed the plot was in an early stage of planning when they went to bug one of the men’s cars, only to find a machete and homemade pipe bomb hidden under a seat.Three members of the group had previously been jailed for terror offences but were allowed to mingle in prison, while Hussain and Ali moved next door to each other in Birmingham after being released.
The threat doesn’t just exist in the UK. France and Germany are also facing the growing threat of Jihad of the same magnitude. France has 15,000 Islamists on its terrorism watch list. Terrorists have already taken more than 230 lives in the country since 2015. France plans to build 15,000 new prison cells and expand its domestic surveillance apparatus to deal with this imported and home-grown Jihadsim.
Thanks to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open borders policy, Germany is catching up with France and UK. According to Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV), the country is now home to more than 10,000 Islamists, compared to last year’s number of nearly 8,000.
After every deadly terrorist attack, politicians and mainstream media never fail to remind us that we are dealing with just a “tiny minority of extremists” within the Muslim population that resorts to violence after misunderstand the teachings of Islam. One can dismiss this idea merely on the basis of mental gymnastics it undertakes, but the argument contradicts itself even arithmetically.
If the Muslim demographic grows exponentially — as it does in Western Europe today — this ‘tiny minority’ of dimwits who chronically ‘misunderstand’ Islam would grow exponentially as well.
European countries can’t monitor each and every Islamist around the clock. There aren’t enough resources in the world to keep tabs on the growing number of Jihad-seekers in the West. The most sensible thing would be to secure the EU’s outer borders and stem the influx of migrants from Arab and Muslim countries. But that’s exactly the kind of common sense Merkel and her likes want to criminalise using internet policing and hate speech laws.
No amount of ‘counter-terrorism’ measures and ‘de-radicalisation’ programmes can avert the catastrophes amassing on the horizon if the European elite don’t connect these dots soon enough.
Video: CCTV footage of UK Islamist terror plotters
[Cover image via Youtube]
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