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A british BNP candidate captured with chemical arsenal is not a Terrorist according to British Terrorism Laws but bunch of Muslims are terrorists for possessing downloaded materials from internet!
Last month, a former British National Party (BNP) candidate was sentenced to jail for two-and-a-half years after being convicted of amassing an arsenal of explosive chemicals in anticipation of a future civil war. Robert Cottage, 49, who was not charged under Britain’s terrorism laws nor even described as a terrorist, pleaded guilty to possession of 21 different chemicals, including potassium nitrate and sulphur to manufacture gunpowder, but was earlier cleared in two failed trials of conspiring to cause explosions. What was particularly noted was that the sentence was less than those passed a week earlier against three of five Muslim students, who were commonly labelled as terrorists, for possessing terrorist material downloaded from the internet.
The trial, and there have been others involving white extremists, raises questions about the Government’s definition of terrorism and the judicial response. The current British definition, under the Terrorism Act 2000, is extremely broad, but is mostly used in the threat of serious violence for the purposes of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause that is designed to influence the Government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public. Legislation extends to conspiracy and more recently to glorification in what appears to have become a witch hunt against only Muslims. Otherwise, why is the campaign to defeat terrorism not widely used against such groups as those defending animal rights, not to mention white supremacists?
A new definition of what constitutes terrorism was given by Lancashire Police’s Det Supt Mick Gradwell. His reply to accusations that if the suspect was a Muslim (instead of Cottage), he would have been detained under terror legislation, was: “This investigation was not from intelligence-led proactive policing. It was Carina Cottage [Cottage’s wife] saying come and help me…” However, Mohammed Irfan Raja, who was jailed for two years on July 27, was arrested in February last year under terrorism legislation, even though it was his parents who called the police and therefore not “intelligence-led proactive policing.”
The contemporary label is highly pejorative; it is an emotive stigma that demonises certain people and groups. But as in the case of Cottage, the criteria of threatening the use of violence somehow does not warrant the definition of terrorism. State actors and governments are also commonly excluded unless they are perceived as enemies. Yet the definition should be universally used against all criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them. It should not, as the leader in the French revolution, Maximilien Robespierre, proclaimed in 1794, be misused as a general principal of democracy applied to the “country’s most urgent needs.”
http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/paper/index.php?article=3101 |
UK & Europe 
