Are We Paying Attention?

As well as articulating the pain that many of is feel at no longer being able to defend the BBC as we would wish to do, Peter Hitchens writes: 

Well, the policy of treating mad knife attackers as political and religious fanatics is not working. Still these crimes keep coming, and even squads of trained officers just yards away cannot stop them. 

Only a Babylonian tyranny can lock people up for ever. And only crummy Third World countries change the law retroactively, a desperate and despicable policy which will rot what is left of our liberty and make us no safer.

In any case, are we paying attention? Are we even thinking? Many of us will face a crazy person with a knife, but in most cases this will have precisely nothing to do with terrorism or Islam.

In the year ending March 2019, there were about 47,000 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in England and Wales.

In London alone, knife crime is at a record high with 15,023 offences in a year. The London tally does not even include offences of knife possession.

But it does include 79 attempted murders as well as 63 homicides and 4,855 assaults using a blade. There were also 164 knifepoint rapes or sexual assaults and 812 threats to kill using a blade. 

All that real terror, and almost none of it due to 'extremism'. 

Whereas can anyone explain to me how knifing a cyclist in Streatham High Road in any way advances the cause of Islamic State or Al Qaeda? No, you can't. It's futile by any measure. These people are off their heads.

So why is there so much more knife violence? As most of these cases go virtually unreported, we do not know. 

But I think we get a pretty good clue from the supposedly Islamist cases, such as last Sunday's in Streatham.

I knew as soon as I heard the news that Sudesh Amman would probably have a record for marijuana, and so he did. I knew he would be a chaotic, disturbed, mad person. And so he was. 

His schoolfellows said: 'At parties he was always in the garden smoking weed' … 'He was very weird and everyone thought he was strange. 'He stuck out like a sore thumb… He was always smoking weed.'

There are people like this in most schools in the country, including ones near you. Their numbers grow weekly as our increasingly useless and politicised police defy the democratic will of Parliament and refuse to enforce the drug possession laws.

If you really want these horrible events to be reduced and stopped, enforce the drug laws. They do it in Japan, and I can't begin to tell you how much more civilised it is than modern Britain. 

And:

Nasty slurs were levelled this week at two of the bravest and most principled people I know.

These are the courageous arms inspectors who, for absolutely no gain or self-interest, told the truth about the flawed investigation into the alleged use of poison gas in Syria in 2018.

If Hollywood made a film about them, everyone would be cheering for them.

But at the moment their official and media enemies (such creeps and toadies) think they can scare them – and me – into silence.

Not a chance. I shall soon be providing a full and detailed defence against the attacks made on them by their former employers, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.