Fortress Britain
by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad / June 27th, 2008
“The public has to be more alert”,
warned one “international terrorism expert” in the
Daily Mail late last year, because Scotland “is set to become another Israel within five years”. “[A]nti-terror measures will soon become a common feature of life”, he assured the audience, and called for “routine arming of police officers” and increasing children’s “awareness of the dangers of terrorism” and for them to be “encouraged” to report anything “out of the ordinary”.
The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police.
1 Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits from Israeli anti-terror expertise. The police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground
had received similar training.
In the post-September 11 world,
Naomi Klein writes, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’”. Britain has since been furnished with its own unpopular occupation of Arab land — and the lessons from Israel are not lost on its architects. In disaster lies opportunity — and the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s
awareness of the dangers of terrorism — absent the real thing, fear should suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/06/fortress-britain/
The Power of Nightmares
In October 2001 it was revealed that the Pentagon was consulting Hollywood writers and producers specializing in spy thrillers and disaster flicks to imagine future attacks in order to best prepare for them. Developments such as the colour-coded threat alerts that change hue at the Department of Homeland Security’s caprice have alarmed even cold war hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski enough to lament this
‘culture of fear’:
Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue… Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum.