Mick Hartley

In the wake of yesterday's Westminster attack from yet another homicidal Islamist, it's perhaps worth reminding ourselves how often our security forces catch these delusional bastards before they do any harm. From today's Times:

A group of men who called themselves the “musketeers” were planning a terrorist attack using a pipe bomb and a meat cleaver with the word “infidels” etched into the blade, a court has been told.

Police searched a black Seat Leon on August 26 last year and found an arsenal of weapons in a plastic JD Sports bag under the driver’s seat.

Naweed Ali, 29, and Khobaib Hussain, 25, lived next door to each other in the Sparkhill area of Birmingham. The other two defendants, Mohibur Rahman, 32, and Tahir Aziz, 38, lived in Stoke-on-Trent where Mr Rahman worked at a takeaway restaurant called Mactas’ Peri Peri Grill. Mr Ali drove the Seat Leon.

The first three defendants set up an encrypted chat group using an image for Disney’s The Three Musketeers, which revealed their “desire to take action”, the Old Bailey was told.

Gareth Patterson, QC, for the prosecution, said: “Evidence found on phones and other devices that they used show that each of these four defendants shared radical and extremist beliefs and ideologies. Each of them believed in the use of violence in support of these radical beliefs.”

Well, it's not unusual.

And here, with the latest from MEMRI TV, we get to the source of all this. Mild stuff, mind, compared to ISIS propaganda, but it's all here: the glories of offensive jihad; no coexistence possible; death for apostasy as " one of the greatest punishments in Islam"…

Saudi cleric Sheikh Ayman Al-Anqari:

Much of the problem, as I've argued before, is that in Islam there's no overall control – no pope or Archbishop of Canterbury figure – to rein in the excesses of these clerics. It's a race to the bottom.

There are, though, the odd dissenting voices, who can see that all is not well in the Muslim world:

"Look around you. We have been building universities for over two centuries, and we have been filling our cities with intellectuals and doctors, yet we are even more backward than we used to be. In the past, we did not create organisations like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. At least we had aspirations and dreams of change. But what is happening today is the opposite. All we want to do is to become even more backward. We believe that further regression is the right choice…."