A great twat has had the freedom to injure removed; a great day thus. What is interesting is the background on his life. He isn’t a member of any organisation. Interesting. Pour scorn on me by all means for being crass, but what is it about neo-nazism that attracts nutters, even nutters with trivial backgrounds?

‘While mainland Europe in the past had problems mostly with left-wing terrorism, something that we avoided, having our fill provided by the IRA’

Don’t forget the Angry Brigade or they’ll be miffed.

And the IRA also flirted with Marxism in the 70’s – just as Marxists flirted with them.

In fact, many of us wore Che Guavara t-shirts, though we’d never tolerate his nonsense over here.

And while nobody in their right mind (can I use that term without someone throwing a hissy-fit?) would claim that Islamists are Left-wing, they do attract some nominal Lefties.

@ Shatter: LOL

To be honest I think they just want to start some sort of civil war – yet the problem with that is they don’t have the intelligence to know that the UK has a standing army and quite a good intelligence service, to boot.

An intelligence service isn’t much cop against a loner who doesn’t even have a PC.

And I still don’t understand the obssession with bombs, which generally require networks and material bound to attract attention when you could simply cause carnage by driving a truck full of bricks in front of a train.

Even if you get pulled up at random just before you get the chance, there’s nothing they can prove against you (unless you stole the truck, or the bricks).

Terrorists watch too much Spooks or 24.

Or you could steal a JCB and run amok: that’s been effective in Israel, and you are unlikely to meet an armed pedestrian over here.

Oh I was just speculating really – it’s obvious that this guy is a nutter – but so are the other lot.

For some strange reason it seems that many of these extremists(?) have forgotten, or don’t/didn’t realise that the UK went through an awful lot of bombings when the IRA were in full action. People went on with their lives and the condemnation got higher and higher as time went on – though we know that most happened in Northern Ireland London took a few good hits.

The indiscriminate killing of people really does piss people off, so I don’t know what they are trying to achieve – other than pissing people off. If they, the extremists on both sides think that all of a sudden the British people are going to divide and attack each other they are in for a big surprise.

Now – if they divided the line between Millwall and Leeds Utd fans…

Gary Brecher talks Fire versus Bombs: http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=13701&IBLOCK_ID=35

the image of running amok with a JCB has amused me

Hmm. This case passed me by, thanks septicisle. As with some other of those ‘Lone Nutter’ cases there do seem to be occasional ‘puzzling’ aspects in common.

Perhaps Gore Vidal pointed to the the way it was all going in ”The Art and Arts of E Howard Hunt’, an essay with a thesis I thought was brilliant but highly improbable.

Have since ratcheted the thesis down to ‘improbable’. We can take it for granted that there are spooks all over the place within the jihadists/nazis and their fringes, as there clearly were in the IRA. Also clearly, the penetration of the IRA worked, as there was a clear ideological matrix to get involved with, which I suppose is largely the case with the Islamists and Nazis.

And of course Jihadists and Nazis do have things in common, notably anti-semitism.

The fact that the methods mentioned like JCB, train de-railing are relatively easy does fill you with a degree of warmth that they aren’t more frequent.

Lets be honest he is a moron for god sake 50 or 40 years ago he would be in a hospital or a mental institute but now they are allowed out into the community. I bet he has a tattoo saying Terrorist.

These people are a threat to the people living next door for god sake. most of the people I know who think they are BNP members are poorly educated thick as a plank and would not know how to do a days work.

Yes we should lock him up, but not in jail for god sake in a mental hospital for the insane whoops naughty word.

Of course Oor Wullie was there first with the derailing, though of trams rather than trains –

http://www.thatsbraw.co.uk/Oor%20Wullie/Wullie-First-Strip.htm

Fortunately, the entry qualifications for the Waffen SS UK seem to be less rigourous than those for the original version.

Scepticisle raises some interesting points about the isolation of Lewington. The information that I have read all states that he was acting alone and was not a known associate of previously identified groups. But somebody shopped him before he detonated a bomb. It may have been family, or Lewington may have been indiscreet when purchasing his bomb making supplies. Or he may not have been acting alone, and information about his associate(s) may have been undesirable, for different reasons, for both prosecution and defence to reveal.

Other commenters have questioned why terrorists fetishize bombs when other methods of mass killing are simpler and more realistic to exploit. One explanation is that since the first days of terrorism, the bomb has been symbolic of a movement. Consider Conrad’s The Secret Agent and its impact on public perception of terrorists for 100 years. Some movements in Italy, Germany, Lebanon and Northern Ireland have had very good bomb makers — their ability to blow people up without warning was a signal that they were an organisation.

Perhaps the desire of lone terrorists to build bombs is a good thing in helping to identify them. Few individuals have the talent to build and plant a bomb without drawing attention to themselves; the Unabomber is a notable exception. I’ll discuss a potential UK bomb maker, because the task is so difficult here.

To make a bomb, you need an explosive, a detonator, an operating or timing device and the ability to plant it. As we’ve seen from the Islamist bombers, getting hold of explosive is difficult. Assume that it is impossible to obtain commercial explosive unless you have an insider who works at a quarry. Sales of the materials required to make a traditional nitrogen based explosive are monitored (the IRA had an organisation that enabled them to steal fertiliser from farms) and peroxide based explosives are difficult to manufacture, unstable and the results are unpredictable. You need to be optimistic and suicidal to make peroxide based explosive in quantity, and again sales of the source materials are monitored. Detonators are theoretically easy to make, but their failure has saved many lives.

For a timing device, you can take the mechanical route or the electronic one. Mechanical alarm clocks provide an off the shelf timer with high reliability, but they are big and go tick-tock. Good for car bombs if you wrap them in high density foam. To make a smaller bomb, you need to use a fiddly watch mechanism. Lots of bomb makers have died when assembling these and they don’t travel well. An electronic timer can use a template or kit (there are loads for rocket enthusiasts etc) or you could build it around one of those kitchen timers that goes beep. A third timing device is the suicide bomber who presses a button.

Planting a bomb on the street, in a car or in a waste bin, is easy if the planter behaves naturally and is sober. How long does it take for CCTV analysis to identify potential perpetrators? How long did it take to catch Copeland? Getting a bomb into an airport, post check-in, is implausible and if I had any ideas about the potential, I wouldn’t discuss them in public. Electronic and canine sniffers will spot any nitrogen based bomb. In theory, new electronic sniffers will spot peroxide based explosives, but mere humans can smell those too. That is why the bombers blow up bus and train commuters instead.

Who is capable of building a working bomb? You’d be looking for somebody with a good A Level in chemistry, decent electronics and/or fine handicraft skills. Colleges and universities turn out these people by the dozen. But hardly any of them build bombs.

‘Of course Oor Wullie was there first with the derailing, though of trams rather than trains’

That’s exactly the kind of subversive literature the government are trying to clamp down on!

‘Other commenters have questioned why terrorists fetishize bombs when other methods of mass killing are simpler and more realistic to exploit’

As an anarchist, I wouldn’t be seen dead with anything less than those round black ones with a sparkling fuse you see in Road Runner cartoons. I suspect my black cape and stove-pipe hat might draw undue attention to me though.

Oh, and can we PLEASE have our litter bins back? I’ve yet to hear of a suicide bomb attack carried out from inside a bin.

Rail travellers are currently under a greater health risk from diseased pidgeons than Al Qaida.

Shatterface: “As an anarchist, I wouldn’t be seen dead with anything less than those round black ones with a sparkling fuse you see in Road Runner cartoons.”

Thus just enjoy Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

Shatterface: Amazingly, I hadn’t come across the Angry Brigade before, so thanks for mentioning them. The IRA and splinter organisations did indeed flirt with Marxism but their struggle was always nationalist first and socialist last.

I also think the one that Charlieman missed off when discussing why bombs and not JCBs etc, is that most imagine, unless they’re suicide attackers, that they may be able to get away with planting devices or at least long enough to ensure that they can repeat the process, such as Copeland did. Lewington seemed to imagine that he could throw tennis balls at houses or people and then get away; perhaps he could have done if he had actually had the chance, but it still seems more likely to me that he was taking those two he had in his bag along with him to show off to the woman he was meeting.

‘Shatterface: Amazingly, I hadn’t come across the Angry Brigade before, so thanks for mentioning them.’

They carried out a couple of dozen attacks in the early 70’s (though they never killed anyone despite causing injuries) and many of them are still active in gay and lesbian rights movement and animal liberation. They were rather overshadowed by the IRA though, and the ‘sexier’ Baader-Meinhoff in Europe.

They were Baader-Meinhoff lite. Christopher Eccleston character joins them in Our Friends in the North.

Come to think of it, the ALF were fairly ‘Left-wing’.

@15

He wasn’t shopped by anyone. his was being abusive to a member of staff on a train who called coppers for the next station, and the was nicked for urinating in public. He couldn’t communicate too well so they searched his bag and found some stuff that could have gone bang.

assuming this twat was one day sober enough to have put the bits together, would most likely have celebrated by getting arse-holed and blown his own balls off.

Utter git. Best off locked up, but not an element of the far right. If only they were all this dumb.

‘He wasn’t shopped by anyone. his was being abusive to a member of staff on a train who called coppers for the next station, and the was nicked for urinating in public. He couldn’t communicate too well so they searched his bag and found some stuff that could have gone bang.’

Lex Luthor made a similar mistake.

Will these super-villains never learn?