MI5 needs our support, not criticism

The Security Service and police need and deserve our full support.  They have an impossible balancing act to perform with limited resources.  It is easy to judge with hindsight and accuse them of incompetence because they failed to track two individuals who later perpetrated the July 7 bombings – but this is unreasonable and ungrateful.  Time-constrained judgements have to be made about where to focus resources, and there is no indication that poor judgment was exercised in this case, based on the information available.

            

An inquiry into alleged failures will serve no purpose, except to distract and humiliate the very people who are trying to protect us all (and provide the terrorists with much amusement and insight).  We should trust that lessons have been learned and assimilated, and the Security Service will continue to do its very best. 

             

If we really wanted to be 100% safe from all potential terrorists, we would probably need at least one Security Service officer per five hundred of the population – around 120,000 officers, instead of the 2,800 we have at the moment.  Then we truly would be in a police state, with the Security Service monitoring all of our movements and activities.  Who really wants that? 

                

From the Muslim perspective, call me naive, but I believe that MI5 does its very best to protect all of us, and does not primarily exist for the purpose of gratuitously harassing Muslims.

             

Those Muslims who feel aggrieved and agitated about Security Service and police raids on terrorist suspects are falling into the tribal trap.  Instead of identifying with the innocent mainstream population, and being suitably grateful, they are foolishly allowing themselves to feel commonality (ethnic and 'religious') with the terrorist suspects, which is inherently an ignorant and racist position. 

                

Where information is provided about possible terrorist activities, there is no choice but to follow it up.  Since most of these communities are closed to outsiders, such information must be coming from sources within, and people of these ethnic groups are not unknown to harbour longstanding family and tribal grudges against others in their own community.  They might be inclined to give false information and don't care about the consequences, not least the wasting of precious resources. 

                     

But if information is forthcoming and suspects need to be apprehended, and addresses searched, this generally must be done in the early hours and with massive manpower, because any other approach would be putting lives at risk.  I know of no gentle, polite way to go about this, given the nature of the threat.

                        

My sympathies are with the police officers, some married with children, who – in the line of duty – are courageously entering suspect premises where they may be shot or blown up at any moment, by crazy people who actually want to die.  I don’t blame them for being apprehensive and perhaps too heavy handed. 

                      

If some innocent Muslims are inconvenienced by such raids, that is unfortunate, but a small price to pay.  In the current climate, we should all be careful whom we associate with, whom we apparently support, what we say (in jest or in anger) and where we go for summer camp.  The very fact that some suspects are released without charge is our reassurance that the system is working.  In most so-called Islamic countries, the police would not suffer such embarrassment and would simply fabricate, or extract by torture, the necessary evidence. 

                  

Another terrorist incident is the very worst thing that could happen for all the various Muslim communities in Britain.  The indigenous population collectively has been remarkably restrained and tolerant after 7/7, but another incident will try their patience too far.  Muslims just have to accept any inconvenience and remember to identify themselves with society in general and not the terrorist suspects. 

                      

Those Muslims who genuinely believe that Britain’s Security Service and police would invest huge amounts of resources, time and money on investigating and apprehending (ie harassing) individuals out of pure racism should go to live in any of the so-called Islamic countries, where they can enjoy the very fine policing and commitment to human rights practised there.