Is Europe’s war on Islamist terror running out of terrorists?
[Quote:]
The terror threat to Europe - Islamist or otherwise - may not be all it’s cracked up to be, statistics published by Europol this week indicate. Europol, a criminal intelligence support service for European law enforcement agencies, maintains that the Islamist terror threat remains high despite a 22 per cent drop in arrest numbers, but as was the case with last year’s report, very few actual incidents of, or attempts at, Islamist terror attacks were reported.
[..]
We can draw several conclusions. First, as far as the numbers are concerned, Europe’s war on terror is largely a French and Spanish matter, related to crackdowns on Basque and Corsican groups. Here, the number of arrests appears to reflect the number of incidents - evidence that there’s a struggle, if not a full-scale war, going on. France, incidentally, was the major influence on the overall drop in Islamist terrorism arrests, with its numbers down 35 per cent from 2006.
The figures for the UK, the third of the major drivers of the Europol stats, don’t match the French and Spanish pattern. The UK doesn’t break down the figures it submits to Europol into categories (which is odd, given that such figures are submitted to Lord Carlile for his reviews of terrorism legislation), but the “vast majority” of its 203 arrests related to Islamist terrorism. There were two (or possibly just the one, see above) Islamist attempts, while numbers weren’t submitted for any other categories. The UK’s 203 (mainly) Islamist arrests were double those in France, four times those in Spain, and almost ten times those in Italy. No other country made it into double figures, and the other two Islamist terror attempts took place in Denmark and Germany (nine and three arrests respectively).
The UK is therefore arresting an awful lot of people while experiencing a very small number of incidents, and the large number of arrests (half of the European total for Islamist terror) causes massive distortion in the European statistics.
There’s a chicken and egg discussion associated with these lopsided (compared with the French and Spanish figures) numbers. Is it the case, as UK law enforcement would have us believe, that the small number of incidents is accounted for by the success of the security services in nipping plots in the bud at an early stage (hence resulting in large numbers of arrests)? Is the UK more alert to the threat than anybody else? Is the UK massively more threatened than anybody else? Or is it the case that the large numbers of arrests are a consequence of wildly overestimating the size of the threat?
The fact that most of the plots uncovered so far have been incompetently planned and substantially incomplete at time of arrest suggests the latter.
Feel safer yet?