Just imagine the Queen’s Birthday
Parade, June 13, 2015: the monarch, her family and escorting officers are
arrayed on Horse Guards’ in Whitehall, watching the serried red companies wheel
and march past in slow time.
Suddenly, men burst from the crowd and
begin spraying bullets among the soldiers and spectators.
It is a scenario from hell, yet no more
fanciful than that of Wednesday’s massacre in a Paris magazine office, or last
month’s slaughter of 132 schoolchildren in Peshawar, or the carnage of the
London bus and Tube bombs of July 2005.
It is the sort of image with which
security chiefs live every day of their working lives, because for them that
would be the cost of a failure.
Yesterday’s dramatic events in France ended with three terrorists and four hostages dead after a formidable French security and intelligence operation.
The intelligence services have never
doubted that new terrorist attacks will come to the West, including Britain. An
event such as the Charlie Hebdo killings merely gives the ongoing threat a
shocking new sense of immediacy.
On Thursday, the director general of
MI5, Andrew Parker, made a rare speech, warning it was almost inevitable that
an attack in this country would get through sooner or later. ‘Although we and
our partners try our utmost, we know that we cannot hope to stop everything,’
he said.
The price of living in an open society,
with the precious freedoms we take for granted, is that all of us, great and
small, are vulnerable to attackers consumed by hatred for our culture, its
values, and manifest superiority to those from which they come.
Globalisation places a disturbing
number of such people in our midst, rather than far away in Somalia or Iran.
The good news is that although Islamic
fanatics can cause us pain and grief, they pose no existential threat as did
Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union.
They cannot be compromised or parleyed
with, because they have no rational political demands: they claim affiliation
to a feudal order in which women are denied rights, technology is banished and
mullahs arbitrate over daily life.
