UK Times article of new threats against british subjects by Al Qaeda cells in Britain.

“Islamic terror cells in Britain have been instructed to carry out a series of kidnappings and beheadings of the kind allegedly planned by the nine terrorist suspects arrested in Birmingham last week.

The “strategic” assassination instruction was issued by Al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan and Iraq to dozens of their followers in this country. It was uncovered by MI5 last autumn, senior security sources say.

… The revelation explains the recent deployment of a permanent SAS unit to London. The unit has been placed on 24-hour standby to respond to a terrorist attack in the capital. It would aim to carry out a hostage rescue mission within minutes of being alerted.

… One well placed source said: “Cells in the UK have been alerted to carry out this type of attack as opposed to the more sophisticated type of bombing in which you place a large number of volunteers at risk. All you need for a beheading is a bit of courage and a sharp knife.”

Paint me skeptical of the “sensationalism” of this article which seems to be more noise than reality.

Nevertheless this again makes my long standing point about what kind of enemy we face. For instance the last statement, “All you need is courage and a knife”, is dangerous in itself. You don’t need to make such suggestions to encourage copycat crimes or crimes which appear to be linked to terror but are perped by wannabes instead of principals.

Again, for a person to stap on explosives to their person and walk into any mall in America would be – sadly enough – a cake walk. Sure there is security, normally unarmed and underpaid and even more so under trained. Of course even to avoide such a disaster would require security features, such as metal detectors, X-ray that is simply not practical in a commerical environment such as a mall. But it doesn’t take a trained terrorist to pull off an attack. As we found out at Columbine, it takes two losers with guns to create death and mayhem.

The enemy we face is not as easy as assigning it to a specific geographical region. For every true cell of Al Qaeda there are possibly thousands of wannabes cells or groups who would like the sick fame and forturn it would bring to be named a terrorist. Outside of name only they have no connection to the home group. For the most part those who belong to these groups are the youth who have a need to belong and when properly motivation seek to belong to the wrong crowd. Think of the draw to our youth of being a gang member and you see my point.

In looking at Europe where militant Islam has existed for many years it has gained strength mainly due to it’s appeal to disgruntled youth in the region. Take the violence of last year in France. Although the media was reluctant to write of the Islamic gangs who committed rapes and burned houses and cars, the fact is that many of them were ordinary street thugs who had been recruited and trained for such violence.

Of course this makes detection very daunting to say the least. Even more so within the freedoms we enjoy in the United States. Yet sometimes that very freedom which we cherish which undermines our efforts to catch those who would attack us.

Nevertheless we must prevail and retool and keep fluid and imaginative in our detection methods. The NSA domestic survelliance program, vilified by the left, has literally saved us from hundreds of such attacks and will continue to do so if not evently thwarted by those too blind the see the terror that awaits to take us again when we least expect it.