From Guy E.S. Herbert
Sir: Terror certainly seems to have worked on Melanie Phillips (‘A terror so great we forgot it at once’, 9 December). So desperate is she that we take the Islamist maniacs at their own estimation that she sets up a series of straw men and dances about them shrieking.
There were some very interesting things about the Dhiren Barot case. It wasn’t a trial in the usual sense. He pleaded guilty, and the evidence against him was therefore untested. That there are seven other men who have yet to be brought to trial explains the continuing reporting restrictions that Ms Phillips alludes to, not some extra-spooky horror we need to be protected from.
For all Barot’s megalomaniac plotting and elaborate library of notes about possible targets and weapons; despite the vast complexity of his conspiracy (or power-fantasy), the prosecution admitted that this fairly secret warrior had no funding and no materials. That there was so much coverage of such a non-story at the time is what requires explanation, not that there has been so little subsequently. If this man actually was ‘one of alQa’eda’s most experienced terrorists’, then we have little to fear from al-Qa’eda.
Incidentally, during the Barot case, two white nationalist extremists were charged in Lancashire under the Explosive Substances Act 1883, after police allegedly found actual rocket launchers, an actual NBC (nuclear/biological/chemical) suit, and made ‘the largest ever’ seizure of explosive components on the British mainland. It scarcely made the nationals. Are there liberal-media types suppressing this, too, believing the far Right to be harmless? Or could it be that it is just not very threatening to anyone outside Lancashire?
Guy Herbert London NW1
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