by Mark Angelides
In what is surely one of the most ludicrous (yet entirely unsurprising) displays of the pitiable excuse for leadership in the Western world, the European Union’s EU counter-terrorism coordinator, Gilles de Kerchove said the way to combat terrorism is putting up bollards.
‘We must work more at protecting so-called easy targets. Bollards, the re-designing of pedestrian streets are necessary. There is a clear effect of imitation in terrorism, and it seems clear that something like Barcelona will happen again,’ he said. Yes, Giles, the way to stop deranged madmen from murdering innocent people in the streets is to make them walk around a concrete post first!?!
This is a guy who has been in his position since 2007, and has overseen the largest rise in terrorism on the streets of Europe ever seen. The idea that putting up posts at the beginnings of bust streets would not only cause absolute chaos (because it is not only terrorists who drive down streets), would not only be impossibly expensive (it would involve simultaneously redesigning every city and road way), but it would also be singularly ineffective!
If the purpose is to stop cars from being able to drive down high streets, or busy thoroughfares, wouldn’t the people then be limited to denser entrance and exit points…Which would clearly be a great target for terrorists.
Why is this the response? Why not something that actually either A) removes radicals from the streets (if not the country) or B) stops despotic regimes from funding Hate Mosques? The answer is unfortunately, that they do not want to stop terrorism, merely manage it.
Gilles de Kerchove himself says that there are a massive number of extremists in the UK and Europe:
“The United Kingdom has identified 20,000 to 35,000 radicals. Of these, 3,000 are worrying for MI5, and of those 500 are under constant and special attention.”
“France has 17,000. Spain many less, but more than 5,000 I suppose. In Belgium almost 500 have been to Syria and there are around 2,000 radicals or more.”
He reckons at least 50,000 across Europe in total.
Is this really the best solution the “elected” leaders of the world can come up with to defeat Radical Islamic terrorism? The UK pays the EU 12 billion GBP each and every year, and it is being spent on this? A proper method of dealing with terrorism needs to be in place, and if that involves taking away radicals individually, one by one, until they are all gone, then so be it.