Right Wing Terrorism Is Re-Classed As Extremism And Discreetly Ignored

At Lenin’s Tomb there is a post about the Europol report into terrorism in the EU, he covers the main points well revealing the fear of islamist terrorism far outstrips the reality. But something leapt out at me when I went and downloaded and read Interpol’s report, and here it is:-

Right-wing extremist violence is a serious, increasing problem in a number of Member States. However,reporting on right-wing terrorism is random as right-wing violence and other politically motivated crimes are mainly investigated as right-wing extremism and not as terrorist offences. [page 37 Europol Telsat 2007]-

Yeah, read it again. This does explain why the BNP connected terrorists found with a rocket launcher, explosives, weapons and a nuclear chemical biological suit were not treated as terrorists and the press coverage was lackluster:-

There were 498 incidents in eleven EU countries last year labelled as “terrorist attacks.” The Basque separatist group ETA did best (136 terrorist attacks) and was responsible for the only deadly attack, killing two in Madrid. The remaining 497 fortunately cost no human lives.

How about the Islamic terrorists then? Considering the perpetual warnings in our daily papers, the findings in the Europol report is, to say the least, surprising. The truth is that Islamists only carried out one out of the 498 terrorist attacks in the European Union in 2006. Don’t believe me? The entire report is available on Europol’s website http://www.europol.europa.eu/publications/TESAT/TESAT2007.pdf.

Had Islamic fundamentalists been behind a higher number of attacks – say 136 – it would have been front page news at every big daily. One attack is simply too few – it won’t do if the image of an “Islamic threat” is to live on.

The Europol report devotes several pages to Islamist terrorism, despite the low number. Except for the one attack in Germany this group was responsible for (which, by the way, failed and resulted in no victims), also Denmark and the United Kingdom reported that Islamists plotted to carry out one attack in each country respectively (incidentally, all three countries are accessory to the illegal occupation of Iraq). –

Now the right word for this isn’t exactly favouritism but if all other varieties of terrorist are subjected to the enhanced state apparatus of surveillance, interrogation and imprisonment but the right wing loonies get treated as run of the mill offenders, it does suggest shaping of policy and public perceptions to regard certain groups as dangerous enemies. But other groups who are equally dangerous are actively kept insulated from the paranoia factory of our Governments ‘War on Terror’ by a discreet policy of not treating right wing terrorists as terrorist but simply as poor misguided extremists. The next question is why? To further policy in the oil rich middle east? Because America told us so? Because Nick Griffin has pictures of Blair fist fucking Tessa Jowell over a pile of the 7/7 dead?