Plan B Forum

Good afternoon. Earlier today the Home Secretary confirmed that the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre has increased the threat level in the United Kingdom from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’. This is the first time in 3 years that the threat to our country has been at this level.

My first priority as Prime Minister is to make sure we do everything possible to keep our people safe. Today I want to set out the scale and nature of the threat we face and the comprehensive approach that we are taking to combat it. We’ve all been shocked and sickened by the barbaric murder of American journalist James Foley and by the voice of what increasingly seems to have been a British terrorist recorded on that video.

It was clear evidence – not that any more was needed – that this is not some foreign conflict thousands of miles from home that we can hope to ignore. The ambition to create an extremist caliphate in the heart of Iraq and Syria is a threat to our own security here in the UK. And that is in addition to the many other al Qaeda inspired terrorist groups that exist in that region.

The first ISIL inspired terrorist acts on the continent of Europe have already taken place. We now believe that at least 500 people have travelled from Britain to fight in Syria, and potentially Iraq. Let’s be clear about the source of the threat that we face. The terrorist threat was not created by the Iraq war 10 years ago. It existed even before the horrific attacks on 9/11, themselves some time before the Iraq war. This threat cannot be solved simply by dealing with the perceived grievances over Western foreign policy. Nor can it be dealt with by addressing poverty, dictatorship or instability in the region, as important as these things are.

The root cause of this threat to our security is quite clear. It is a poisonous ideology of Islamist extremism that is condemned by all faiths and by all faith leaders. It believes in using the most brutal forms of terrorism to force people to accept a warped world view and to live in an almost medieval state. A state in which its own citizens would suffer unimaginable brutality, including barbaric beheadings of those who refuse to convert to their warped version of Islam; the enslavement and raping of women; and the widespread slaughter of Muslims by fellow Muslims. And, of course, the exporting of terrorism abroad.

So this is about a battle between Islam on the one hand and extremists who want to abuse Islam on the other. It is absolutely vital that we make this distinction between religion and political ideology. Islam is a religion observed peacefully and devoutly by over 1 billion people. It is a source of spiritual guidance which daily inspires millions to countless acts of kindness.

Islamist extremism is a poisonous political ideology supported by a minority. These extremists often funded by fanatics living comfortably far away from the battlefields pervert the Islamic faith as a way of justifying their warped and barbaric ideology.

Now this is not a new problem: we have seen this extremism before here in our own country. We saw it with the sickening murder of Lee Rigby and we saw it too with the home grown 7/7 bombers who blew up tube trains and buses. The links between what happens overseas and what happens here has also always been there. Many of those who sought to do us harm in the past have been foreign nationals living in Britain or even British citizens who have returned from terrorist training camps in Pakistan or elsewhere around the world.

But what we’re facing in Iraq now with ISIL is a greater and deeper threat to our security than we have known before. In Afghanistan, the Taliban were prepared to play host to al Qaeda, a terrorist organisation. With ISIL, we are facing a terrorist organisation not being hosted in a country but actually seeking to establish and then violently expand its own terrorist state. And with designs on expanding to Jordan and Lebanon, right up to the Turkish border, we could be facing a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a NATO member.

Now, we cannot appease this ideology. We have to confront it at home and abroad. To do this we need a tough, intelligent, patient and comprehensive approach to defeat the terrorist threat at its source. Tough, in that we need a firm security response whether that is action to go after the terrorists, international cooperation on intelligence and counter terrorism or uncompromising measures against terrorists here at home.

But it also must be an intelligent, political response. We must use all resources we have at our disposal – aid, diplomacy, political influence, and our military. Learning the lessons from the past doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for our military; the military were vital in driving Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, and we support the US air strikes against ISIL in Iraq. The key point is that military force is just one element of what we can do. And we need a much wider approach, working with neighbours in the region, and addressing not just security but politics too.

We know that terrorist organisations thrive where there is political instability and weak or dysfunctional political institutions. So we must support the building blocks of democracy, the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, the rights of minorities, free media, free association, a proper place in society for the army, and we must show perseverance. Not just because these building blocks take time to put in place, but because we are in the middle of a generational struggle against a poisonous and extremist ideology that I believe we’ll be fighting for years and probably decades.

Iraqi forces take Amerli town from Islamic State fighters

US airstrikes and British, French and Australian aid assist the advances against Isis

US airstrikes near a Shia Turkoman town north of Baghdad have cleared the way for militiamen and Iraqi troops to rescue 12,000 residents from jihadis who had besieged them for more than two months.

The jihadis from the extremist group Islamic State (Isis) had partially withdrawn from the outskirts of Amerli, around 110 miles north of Baghdad, when paramilitaries and Iraqi forces attacked around dawn on Sunday. The attack came hours after US jets had pushed further south into Iraq than at any time in the last three weeks when they have been attacking insurgent positions in support of the Kurds. Aid was also air dropped to Amerli by British, French and Australian aircraft.

wesw wrote:tony blair gave an address to a joint session of congress after9/11 that was magnificent. it rivaled any speech in history.

even Churchill would have been impressed. he will forever be an honorary American to me.

Blair and his companies have been awarded a string of multimillion consultancy contracts with private corporations, dictatorships and regimes, including, Kuwait, the UAE and Colombia.

In June, a group of former British ambassadors and political figures joined a campaign to call for Blair to be sacked as Middle East envoy, citing, among other things, his "blurring the lines between his public position as envoy" and his private business dealings in the region.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... protesters

Tony Blair's role advising countries with poor human rights records has come under scrutiny again after he gave Kazakhstan's president advice on how to avoid his image being tarnished by the killing of 15 civilian protesters by police.

Tony Blair's close ties to the Egyptian government have been called into question after some of the country's key officials were accused of collaborating in the “widespread and systematic” killings of more than 1000 protestors.

A year-long investigation by Human Rights Watch (HRW) claims that Egyptian security forces “systematically and deliberately” killed large numbers of mainly unarmed demonstrators who had gathered in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square in Cairo last August to protest about the ousting of former president Mohamed Morsi.

The group said the massacre was as bad as Tiananmen Square and that it “likely amounted to crimes against humanity”.

It called for several senior Egyptian officials to be investigated for their role in the incident - including the country's current President, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who was defence minister at the time.

Tony Blair, who is a Middle East peace envoy, supported the coup against president Morsi and has voiced his support for the new Egyptian government. He is also acting as an informal adviser to Mr al-Sisi on economic reform.

Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, said: “It's not the first time, and I suppose it may not be the last time, that Tony Blair has been associated with regimes that have a very poor human rights record.

Oh dear, you're welcome to him, etc., etc,

Crackpot wrote:Jim it probably has something to do with the fact that the last time Obama tried to take action the Neo-isolationists and the peace-nicks grasped hands and sang kumbya while taking a big dump on our foreign policy and shredding both his and the nations credibility.

Draconian plans to strip British jihadis of their UK citizenship will be unveiled by David Cameron tomorrow.

He will ban them from entering the UK, forcing them to stay in Iraq, Syria or other countries such as Turkey, from where many fly back to Britain.

The Prime Minister will argue that they must be stripped of their passports – and their right to come back to the UK – because they could be plotting terrorist attacks.

The move could land the Government in trouble with human rights judges, however. It is against international law to make an individual stateless – they can be stripped of their citizenship only if they have dual nationality.

The Prime Minister intends to get round this by claiming the ban is temporary – and justified following a warning by intelligence chiefs that the risk of a major terrorist attack on the UK mainland is ‘severe.’

The tough response from No 10 comes a week after former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis and Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, called for similar action.

It is against international law to make an individual stateless – they can be stripped of their citizenship only if they have dual nationality.

Good afternoon. Earlier today the Home Secretary confirmed that the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre has increased the threat level in the United Kingdom from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’. This is the first time in 3 years that the threat to our country has been at this level.
... "

... but linguists have been working night and day to invent 3 words even more menacing and scary than "severe" so we can have a ways to go before its time to panic. But we need something really distractingly fearful to keep you from noticing that our economic policies have produced a more protracted economic downturn than the Great Depression. Being British we know that you will hate the mullahs more even though they have hurt you far less than we have."

Crackpot wrote:Jim it probably has something to do with the fact that the last time Obama tried to take action the Neo-isolationists and the peace-nicks grasped hands and sang kumbya while taking a big dump on our foreign policy and shredding both his and the nations credibility.