The drive home. That's the worst part of a failed terror plot. In your Renault Laguna, pootering back down the M1, still listening to the recordings of radical preachers you were up all night burning onto CD just to have something to "get you into the mood". The sweet relief that you don't have to go through with it, today at least: that you can go home, have a cup of tea, see what's on Sky Sports and just put your feet up, rather than making a desperate last stand with guns and knives amid the soggy still-warm entrails of hundreds of dead fascists. But also, the nagging guilt that, y'know, you didn't go through with it. The worrying sense that you're a failure in life if you can't successfully blow yourself up, and a nagging feeling that Chris Morris was taking the piss out of people exactly like you.
Annons
“Well, I guess there was nothing we could've done differently,” you say. “Yeah. Pretty unavoidable,” your co-conspirator agrees. “But maybe… in future, we could just get there a bit early, anyway?” you suggest. “Just in case…” An awkward silence descends. Both of you turn to look out of the window at the slate-grey Midlands skies; the radical preaching hits a crescendo of righteous fury, and an ominous blue light begins turning in the rear-view mirror.So it must have been for Jewel Uddin and Omar Khan, as they had their ageing Laguna impounded on the last day of June 2012, for failing to have insurance. The pair, plus four of their friends, had been hoping to bomb a 750-man EDL rally up in Dewsbury, Yorkshire. But the scheduled star speaker, EDL boss Tommy Robinson, had decided to give the whole thing a miss. So the rally had finished at 2PM instead of 4PM. Meaning that the crowd had already dispersed by the time they got there.Their downfall came when they had tried to buy insurance for their vehicle, the Woolwich Crown Court later heard. Uddin had entered the wrong registration number on an online form. Worst of all: he'd only been trying to buy one day's worth of insurance. Clearly, the faulty thinking behind this wasn't covered in Inspire, the al-Qaeda recruiting magazine they also had in their possession, and whose bomb-making recipes they seem to have followed to the letter. More senior jihadists might've given them another well-known unwritten rule of jihad: For God's sakes, don't look cheap.
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Three days after their vehicle was impounded, the boot was found to contain a nail bomb packed with 457 bits of shrapnel, fashioned from cardboard and bunged together fireworks. There were also some knives and ten copies of a note. The note read:“This is a message to the enemies of Allah and his messenger. This is a message to the kafir (non-believer) female devil and self-proclaimed Queen Elizabeth and her accursed jubilee, fooling a nation of blind sheep to your self-proclaimed royalty and majesty."To the EDL (English Drunkards League). O enemies of Allah! We have heard and seen you openly insulting the final Messenger of Allah… you should know that for every action there is a reaction.“Today is a day of retaliation (especially) for your blasphemy of Allah and his Messenger Muhammad. We love death more than you love life. The penalty for blasphemy of Allah and his Messenger Muhammad is death."
The foiled Dewsbury jihadists, (from left to right): Jewel Uddin, Anzal Hussain, Zohaib AhmedIf most of us had been Jewel Uddin, our bomb waiting to be discovered in that impounded car yard, we'd have been on the first plane to Pakistan by sunset. But no. Uddin had clearly been radicalised at a very brazen, very thick school of terror. On the Monday, he called up the cops, and asked whether he could "retrieve some items from the boot" of this Laguna. Again: “For God's sakes, don't look cheap.” So the cops had a look in the boot. And then he turned up. Then they arrested him. Then they arrested his equally moronic pals, who were also still moping around Brum, doing their shopping, fixing little bits around the house, browsing the jihadi deep-web, like nothing was wrong that couldn't easily be put right. “Oh, the terror thing? You want to talk to me about that thing?”
Annons
The foiled Dewsbury jihadists, (from left to right): Mohammed Saud, Mohammed Hasseen, Omar KhanThankfully, this is the calibre of man we are up against. Looking at Team Jihad's mug shots is like turning on Dumbo-Vision. Mohammed Saud looks like a distant cousin from an Ernest P Worrell film. Anzal Hussain looks like in another lifetime he would've been the spring break bro who'd end up having his balls shaved in the middle of the night. Omar Khan looks like a semi-sentient flatpack wall unit, while Jewel Uddin just looks way too dumb and lazy to ever get off his ass and do something radical. Which, in a way, is how he turned out. Half-arsed.For the equally moronic EDL, on the other hand, this is the big propaganda breakthrough they'd been hoping for: and they didn't have to make it up. Even at that Dewsbury rally, supporters can clearly be seen holding banners proclaiming: “Monitor The Terrorist Training Schools”. Imagine an EDL supporter dying from a jihadi terror nail-bombing while still clutching a banner that says "Monitor The Terrorist Training Schools", his told-u-so warning now extending beyond the grave, as newspaper after newspaper splashes it on the front page, and their mob becomes the rallying point for a generation of newly-radicalised muscly thug determined to "do something" about more than just a spurious mega-mosque on Canvey Island.Had they succeeded, what Uddin and his mob would have done was fire the first shot in what both parties really wanted: race war. EDL versus Radical Islam in an unbackable conflict between different flavours of the same sort of asshole, slightly less palatable than a boxing match between Max Clifford and Piers Morgan, where all sensible observers can really say is: “I don't care who wins. I just hope they inflict a lot of pain on each other.” “Give peace a chance, normally, yes. But let's give war a little go too and see whether maybe it can kill two birds with one stone, eh?” It hasn't quite come to that, but if we weren't already depressed, then this week's trial has shown us that the only thing between us and all-out race war is Tommy Robinson's need to spend more of his Saturday afternoon in the tanning salon. Not great news, overall.
