Theresa May seems in her remarks to have blandly and complacently accepted that the Muslims who travel from Britain to Syria and train for jihad simply must be admitted back into Britain. Yet when the jihadist imam Omar Bakri left Britain for Lebanon a few years ago, he wasn’t allowed back in — and May didn’t hesitate to ban Pamela Geller and me from the U.K. for opposing the same jihad that these “Britons” are now returning from Syria to spread. She is, in other words, quite mad.
“Britons using Syria as terrorist training ground – and then returning home, says Theresa May,” by Christopher Hope for the Telegraph, October 6 (thanks to Gilles):
British extremists are going to Syria for terrorist training and returning to Britain, Theresa May has warned.
The Home secretary also disclosed that security has been tightened at shopping centres amid fears of terrorist attack in the UK.
The comments come after the charities” watchdog said it was concerned that donors” money to help refugees was being diverted to support terrorism.
Mrs May raised the prospect of the Syrian civil war being use as a nursery for a new generation of terrorists on BBC1″s Andrew Marr programme.
She said: “What we have seen for some time now, is that a number of British people travelling out to Somalia, we”re now seeing people travel out to Syria.
“Obviously, in those circumstances, some of those people are potential terrorists, some of whom may get training, and in some cases may actually engage in conflict and then return to the UK.”
Mrs May said while they were referred to in a report as “foreign fighters” she viewed them as “potential terrorists, some of whom will be of a Jihadi mind-set”.
The Home Secretary also said the Government has given the police greater powers to deal with the kind of firearms attacks seen in the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya.
She said the Government had tightened security to address the threat from “potential firearm attacks” in the wake of the attacks on a luxury hotel in Mumbai in 2008.
She said: “We have increased the ability of police to deal with those sort of attacks, the number of armed response vehicles, the number of specially-trained firearm officers, but of course we continue to look at these issues to continue to ensure we are doing all we can to keep people safe.
“One element of our counter-terrorism strategy is the protect element, and that is about working with the private sector to ensure suitable protection are in place.”
She added: “I think what is right is that the Government looks at every possibility of an attack and looks at dealing with that, at protecting the country from potential attacks but obviously, crucially, the work that is done in day in day out, together with the police, to prevent attacks, they do a very good job.
“We can never be complacent, we must always look to see if there is something more that we can be doing.”…
Sounds like a great idea, but less so when one realizes that this was spoken by one of the most complacent and willfully blind of British officials.