Well Done Terrorism - you've won again
A single guy is discovered with (potentially) explosive underpants and now millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is being spent on full body scanners in airports. Initially, there was a fuss over liquids, which are still banned until 2011. Presumably someone somewhere in the world was discovered with a bottle of liquid which was apparently part of a wider bomb plot. As a result of that, millions of travellers not only have to endure excessively long queues but are left baffled every day when their bottles of juice and plastic bags are confiscated by security personnel. Terrorists around the world must be rubbing their hands together gleefully at the thought of the millions of pounds we’ve been forced to spend on largely meaningless and useless crap every time there’s even a whiff of suspected terrorist activity. I wouldn’t be surprised if the terrorists who plotted the daring underpants raid had shares in these body scanner producing companies.
I mean, what’s the big fuss over anyway? When the daring underpants raid unravelled, news stations worldwide were reporting the plain and simple facts – that some Nigerian radical had tried and failed to blow himself (and others) up on Christmas Day. In the UK though, our newspapers had to point out his time at UCL as if that fact was somehow related, almost as if he was radicalised during his time in the UK. Once again, freedom of speech in universities came under fire, if but briefly, even though universities quite simply don’t create extremists. It’s ridiculous to say that Cambridge is somehow responsible for Nick Griffin or that David Irving, who wrote for Felix while at Imperial, was radicalised during his time here. However, we cannot possibly ignore the fact that a graduate engineer has failed to blow himself up. I mean, what kind of a graduate engineer cannot even blow himself up? How can we possibly continue to advertise our world class education? I believe an immediate enquiry should be made into the academic standards of UCL.
Coming back to the full body scanners I mentioned earlier, well, there have now been some pretty pointless attacks on this technology on the grounds that it is now a threat to child rights. The images can apparently be classed as child pornography so everyone under the age of 18 cannot be scanned on this legal technicality. As I see it, government is going to find a way around this. As an added bonus, the hysteria of the child protection agencies, in pointing this out, have just possibly rather ironically encouraged child perverts to queue up for these jobs at airports – getting their rocks off on these images. So, the safety of our children has just been further compromised. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m very much against these new scanners anyway because I feel they’re a pointless waste of money to placate irrational public fears. If you’re too much of a paranoid grapefruit to fly because of those laughable terrorists, then by all means leave the skies to those with enough backbone and self-respect to say no to the ridiculous measures taken in the name of anti-terrorism.
My point is that the attack on body scanners on the basis of some kind of a pervert charter is quite frankly silly. Child protection groups seem concerned that a child’s genitalia will show up in these full body scans. How erotic... Why are they not equally concerned if some kid turns up in A&E and has to get an x-ray of that region because some other kid has kicked him in the balls in the playground during break time? Surely it’s all about how the images are used – I mean, if you browse through a catalogue of kids swimsuits, that’s fine but if you have a scrapbook of thousands of images of kids in swimsuits, then I wouldn’t be surprised if you were prosecuted for being a weirdo. Isn’t it time that we stood up to these terrorists instead of overreacting? What the hell happened to British backbone, or are we still going to run to mummy every time a nasty man in a beard attempts another inept attack?
