Letter to the Editor:

Dear Editor,

You posted a thread about general talk recently.

I come on the HOL (rather than BBS) for a number of reasons.One reason is that historically,notwithstanding the majority have views well to the right of my own,I enjoy the craic and the personalities on General Talk.Its also a bit of a cop out to take part in a forum where your views predominate,no?

The level of enjoyment has diminished recently..

NG is one of the best posters around (putting politics aside).He puts an unpopular view,stimulates debate by so doing,takes piles of pathetic sh@t from a bunch of tunnel-visioned w@@kers without reacting back with personal digs, and is generally courteous.And He's Palace to the core,giving his time to help with HOL radio.Does that mean I always agree with him or his analyses? Certainly not.

The present cyber hounding of him is frankly pathetic..especially from those who claim they are in favour of traditionaL British values of tolerance and free speech.

Any editor worth their salt would IMHO (speaking as a onetime magazine editor)be backing him for those reasons,not joining the moronic knocking...and taking the easy way out by blaming the wound rather than the symptom.

Just an opinion.

How exactly do you create stricter guidelines for identifying Jyhadists, given you either have evidence or you don't.

And you wonder why people think the FLA is a 'fascist front'. You're talking about the suspension of basic rights - remember you're talking about people who are SUSPECTED, and imprisoning them or deporting them, without trial.

What constitutes extremist material. I read the German Ideology, Kapital (a punishment in its own right) and Mein Kampf (for example) - both of which could be construed as far right or far left. Also plenty of publications exist, in print, sold in bookshops, legally than contain various instructions for making bombs etc. One of my areas of interest, is European Terrorism of the 1970s and 80s. I have a large collection of books on Left wing and Right Wing terrorism.

Where am I going to be deported to. Do I get a choice, should I be interned?

Now I agree that it should be (and it is a crime) to access certain jihadist websites, and download material from them, for use in terrorism.

But the world ain't as simple as it seems. You can't deal with a problem by imprisoning and punishing people without a trial. Not without becoming akin to the monster your complaining about. Sooner rather than later, you're going to have people who are innocent being deported or imprisoned (interned) without a just reason - and the system in these cases is always geared up towards protecting the state, not the individual.

Internment did more for the Provisional IRA than any publicity campaign the Republican b******s could manage.

Sure, Islamist terrorism is a threat, but a country that starts taking punitive measures against its citizens, on the basis of the say so of questionable evidence (and there is a reason why intelligence agencies do NOT have power of arrest) is implementing a police state.

And will ultimately do far more damage to the way of life of British people, than any Islamist terror group. They can kill us, but only we can destroy what it means to be us.

I think it's a bit of a challenge to know from which people problems are going to come from though. After all, there's been a wash of people coming and going for a very long time.

I doubt many rock up as ready made, foaming at the mouth kamikaze merchants. As mentioned before, I think it's likely conditions of marginalisation, fear, and desperation create lead people towards this. Yes, terrorists are disproportionately claiming to be Muslim at present, but it's still a tiny fraction of the population who have done anything.

I guess you can argue that having diversity of thought or ideas itself creates this risk, but I don't think there's much you can do about that, even if you lived like a hermit kingdom.

Amen to that Jamie, a pretty spectacular post.

Also, I would have thought that locking up or deporting people on the suspicion of fundamentalist militancy is more likely to create conditions of fear, isolation, and anger. These are the sort of conditions under which people are more likely to feel hopeless and hence more attracted to fanatical ideas and terrorism.

Claiming to be Muslim?

Are you not aware of the size of our security budget watching these 'tiny fractions' of people?....over twenty thousand....which will grow...logically....as the population percentage increases.

The number of plots we have to break up every year?

The number of ongoing M15 investigations we have ongoing?

As for diversity of thought....we have had people of different religions in the country for many centuries. Where is the Hindu or Sikh or Jew radical problem? There isn't any.

Edited by Stirlingsays (02 Nov 2017 6.01am)

Nick is generally courteous?.....doesn't do personal digs?

Some magazine editor you were.....You obviously have a very weird interpretation of Nick's contributions to miss the swearing and insults and two incidents where he refused to stop directly replying to people who asked him to leave them alone and weren't communicating with him.