Last week, Robert Cottage of the BNP (British National Party) was in court for stockpiling chemicals and accused of “conspiracy to cause an explosion.”
See the BBC article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/6369953.stm
I can’t help thinking of the word missing from this article ? terrorist. The word terrorist has been used more freely on raids where no weapon materials were found. His arrest wasn’t even in the national news (yet, we watched a couple of Muslim brothers on trial in the press last year and nothing was found).
If Robert Cottage were Muslim, would the article call him a terrorist? Would he be tried under terror laws? Is there something wrong here?
The difference is in the intelligence between the two. One group were organised with intelligence to support and justify the raid (and the level of response) in relation to the current threat of Islamist extremism.
The other were a group of disorganised nutjobs stockpiling component chemicals (no rocket launchers as reported by the press) and beans for the time when there open civil war in Nelson.
As for the conspiracy theory that the Police hushed the whole thing, it appears that is also untrue. Cottages wife apparently went into her local police station and reported what she’d seen. She has mental health issues. I’m fairly sure the cops don’t ring the papers every time some mad woman walks into a police station claiming her husband has some leaky hydrogen peroxide under the stairs. I’d bet they were more shocked than anyone when they got there and found she was right.
I really don’t see how the two compare.