Following the events of Sunday, 2 February, when a radicalised Islamist attacked innocent people on the streets of London, and it turned out that he had been released from jail only a few days earlier, halfway through a prison sentence for terrorist offences, the British PM has promised to toughen sentences for terrorists and warned that such people rarely get de-radicalised.
It has long been the prevailing theory that terrorists are in fact friendly folk who, while minding their own business one day, and though no fault of their own, get radicalised by an evil puppet master, who pulls their chains and makes them do things that they never really wanted to do in the first place. This analysis allows cardigan-wearing liberals to say that they’re not really bad people, and can easily be changed back to productive members of society.
The Prime Minister’s statement puts that theory in jeopardy.
One Muslim father told us that he sent his 13-year-old son, Attah, to the shops to get a copy of the Spoof News but when he hadn’t returned after an hour, he became worried. When Attah finally returned, he hadn’t bought Britain’s favourite parody rag but a used copy of the Koran - the hardliner’s edition. His dad said: “I realised something was wrong when Attah approached the house. I saw him through the front window, and he wasn’t skipping gaily like any other teenager given a happy chore by his father. He was walking slowly, with a frown on his face. Plus, he had suddenly grown a beard and was wearing spectacles. Not the happy ones like what Benedict Cumberbatch wears, but the thin hardliner spectacles which the mullahs like. Plus, he had two women in burkas walking five yards behind him. I suddenly realised that every Muslim parent’s worst fear had happened to me.
“My son had become radicalised.”
Attah’s mom told us that, by speaking to local tradesmen who operate on the road, they were able to deduce that the radicalisation had happened somewhere between the park bench where Emily the Prostitute plies her trade and the bus stop fifty yards away, where Sid the Drug Dealer works.
“We’ve written to Boris Johnson asking him to go light on Attah, but we fear he will be sent to prison for a long time.”
