In today’s news we learn that British Muslim bomb making expert and jihadist, Hamayun Tariq, has been tweeting that ISIS has finally managed to create a dirty bomb, which he is looking forward to using against us. It’s not entirely clear that he is really a bomb making expert. He seems to have posted some revision notes that he’d saved from his GCSE Physics course. But he left his home in Dudley in 2012, and so has had a couple of years to learn how to blow innocent people up.I’m not sure what is more disturbing? Is it that a crazed group of murderers and rapists, spurred on to the death (our death that is) by their interpretation of Islam, wish to explode a dirty bomb in the middle of one of our capital cities? Or is it that this British Muslim making such threats was brought up in England, went to school with us, received all of the benefits of British citizenship and used the hospitality he was offered to plot our demise?
If there was only one madman in the world threatening to cause mass murder in London then it would be pretty much the standard plot of many a thriller. The lone terrorist would be caught just at the last moment by a detective from the Met who had been suspended from active duty. But there is not only one madman. Indeed before Hamayun Tariq left Dudley how many people knew that he was a Muslim jihadist? And this is the most disturbing thing. How many Hamayun Tariqs are there around us? It is reasonable to ask. Several thousand have made the journey with him to Syria and Iraq to kill and destroy in the name of Islam. But how many more have not yet set off, and how many more will not be leaving the UK but share the same murderous hatred of British society?
If 2000 have gone to fight already is it unreasonable to conclude that there are at least 10,000 who would be willing to perpetrate violence in the UK if given the chance? And it is unreasonable to conclude that another 20,000 are very sympathetic to the aims and methods of ISIS and will support those who wish to perpetrate violence, even simply by colluding in silence?
The chance that a dirty bomb might be detonated in London is perhaps slim, but the chance that one of the thousands of British Muslims who support ISIS might act has already been admitted as being very high indeed by our Government. At least Hamayun Tariq has taken the prophet’s shilling and is busy killing elsewhere. How many of his friends here in the UK pose an even greater, if invisible, threat.