Paedo-jihadi-facebook-terror!

Paedo terrorist rapist jihadists are using teh internetz to spread filth and evil! OMG WTF!!11 !!
Or How the Internet Must be Controlled, by Jacqui Smith and Geoff Hoon.

After last week's humiliating failure of the government's latest 'anti-terror' strategy, which resulted in them dropping their plans to hold people for 42 days without charging them, and to hold secret inquests in State-implicated deaths, Jacqui Smith and Geoff Hoon came back with their giant database plan. They want access to absolutely everyone's mobile and web records, including social networking sites like Facebook. Why? Because ' terrorists use such communications'.

Not monitoring this traffic is 'giving terrorists a licence to kill people', Hoon actually had the brass neck to say. He confirmed that the government is prepared to go 'quite a long way' with removing civil liberties 'to stop terrorists killing people'.

*headdesk*

Terrorists also wear clothes, Geoff, which might conceal bombs. They live in houses, which have blinds and curtains, which can be drawn to conceal their nefarious terrorist activities therein. Ban window coverings! Get your kit off! If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear!

Anyway, today, as if by magic, we get three full pages in the Times about 'Links between child porn and Muslim terrorists' and 'dangerous and depraved: Paedophiles unite with terrorists online.'

Paedophiles and child porn and terrorists and Muslims and the internet all in one story! I don't think I've ever seen quite so many memes working in concert before: it's like the Chinese State Circus act I saw once when a dozen people all managed to balance on one bicycle and whizz round and round at high-speed whilst we all gasped and applauded.

I decided to take a closer look at the Times story. I note that it has

10 mentions of 'Muslim'
6 mentions of 'Islam'
5 mentions of 'Islamic'
8 mentions of 'Mosque'
8 mentions of 'Jihad'
6 mentions of 'Jihadi'
29 mentions of 'Terrorist'
15 mentions of 'Terrorism'

So what evidence have we got for all this?

a) An East-end rapist, who got seven friends to lie for him and give a false alibi that he was giving a sermon on repentance at a mosque during Ramadan when the attack took place. He was caught after being investigated by police over suspected links to a 'jihadi gunrunner'. DNA taken after he was arrested proved he was wanted for the vicious rape a year earlier. His computer was seized and found to contain child pornography downloads. He has never been convicted of terrorism offences.

b) Another suspected terrorist - also calling himself a Muslim - who was also found to have hard-core child porn when raided in a different investigation.

c) Hard-drives found at a Milanese mosque allegedly used by Islamist militants, which contained images of children being sexually abused that were also encoded with messages as 'a clandestine method of communication'. An Italian 'anti-terror magistrate' (a what?) said that pornographic images were being used to camouflage 'messages of quite a different content', and remarked to the Times that the men did not have 'paedophile tendencies', but 'in many parts of the Arab world - wives are often very young girls of 11, 12 or 13 who because of family negotiations are given in marriage to men much older than them...' . He then added, 'But that is not paedophilia, it is a question of Arab culture'.

(That last statement is utter rubbish by the way. The average age for marriage in Arab countries in in the 20's and rising. You can read a full report into marriage in the Arab world here. Even in Yemen, which has the youngest wives, the percentage of married women aged 15-19 has declined from 27% in 1997 to 17% in 2003.)

The person who ran the mosque was sentenced to 8 years for terrorism offences, in absentia.

Any more evidence for the CHILD PORN INTERNET MUSLIM TERRORIST thing?

Well, there's this.

d) The Times found 'a case in Spain where an Islamic terror suspect is accused of downloading child porn'. It's still before the courts. The case concerns an alleged terror cell broken up in 2007. Spanish police say thousands of hardcore child porn images were found on home computers.

e) There's an Algerian awaiting trial who is accused of incitement to jihad via the internet and of sending money to prisoners belonging to a banned Islamic group accused of killing 45 people in Casablanca in 2003. He is also accused of downloading child porn.

f) And a case in Yorkshire where child protection officers 'stumbled upon a nail-bomb terror plotter'. He was white, and making bombs to attack Black, Asian and Jewish people. He was not a Muslim, in fact, he was an anti-semitic Islamophobic nazi loon. He had 39,000 child abuse images.

g)Also a Salford chemistry student nabbed for looking at explosives websites and downloading 7 child abuse images. He was 21 years old, also white and non-Muslim. He was jailed for explosives offences, not terrorism.

And er, that's it.

I can't see that these few cases - from all over the world - justify the number of mentions of Islam, Muslim, terrorist and all the rest of it in the copy.

I really can't.

Nor can I see how the fact that some men - some nasty pieces of work - are into extremely horrible sex and violence - online and offline - in any way justifies the government wanting to spy on everyone's emails and phone calls and web use.

If anyone would like to have a go at explaining it in the comments, please feel free.