Appeasement in Britain and Spain.
Topic: Politics
I bought the Evening Standard today to see what it had to say about the arrest of a would-be suicide bomber. In a column by Andrew Gilligan about the Finsbury Park mosque, he writes:

'For years, MI5 allowed radicals and al Qaeda leaders such as Khalid al Fawwaz and Abu Qatada to operate openly in London in the hope that Islamist terrorists would not then attack Britain. Documents seen by the Standard show that MI5 sought to recruit Qatada as an informer in the hope that he "would not bite the hand that fed him" and "keep terrorism off the streets of the UK".'

Oh dear. Do we never learn? Churchill got it right: 'An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last.'

On the topic of appeasement I thought I should draw your attention to a news story that you might have missed. After the Madrid bombings, the Spanish public did what al Qaeda wanted and voted in a socialist government that promised to withdraw troops from Iraq. Not long afterwards, Spanish police closed in on the gang responsible for the bombing in a block of flats.

Rather than giving themselves in, they detonated a bomb as police entered their flat killing themselves and one policeman. As far as I'm concerned this was another terrorist atrocity; one that took place after the terrorists' demands had been met.

And the story doesn't stop there. After the burial of the policeman killed in the attacks, his tomb was raided by vandals and burned.

See here!

I cannot think of anything that better underlines the futility of appeasement or the level of contempt that fanatics have for free societies than the desecration of the grave of Francisco Javier Torronteras.