Monday, April 18, 2005

Terror on the Holloway Road pt3


Fun with Photoshop pt23
Originally uploaded by StefZ.


The Holloway Road is not a very nice place.

True connoisseurs of London squalor will undoubtedly agree. It'€™s the kind of place where staff in fast food restaurants get knifed to death during disputes over money-off vouchers for pizzas.

As such, the Holloway Road really isn't up there with the Twin Towers or the Pentagon in the list of locations most likely to be targeted by a ruthless international terror network.

Nobody would notice.

Besides, you would run more than a slight risk of slaughtering more of the Brethren than the Infidel.

So, the news that the Wood Green Ricin Terrorists were planning to bring the fiery Scimitar of Allah to bear on London N7 comes as quite a surprise. In less serious circumstances it would be comical.

No, actually it is comical.

Apparently, the conspirators schemed to bring Christian Capitalism to its knees by smearing ricin on car door handles along the Holloway Road. Actually, the jury at the recent trial decided that there wasn't actually any conspiracy at all and only convicted one man, Kamel Bourgass.

In addition to the fiendish car door handle attack, history's first one man conspiracy also planned to:

  • Infect tooth brushes with ricin, reseal them in their packaging and plant them in chemists
  • Spray people on the Underground with water pistols filled with cyanide made from cherry pips
  • Smear pedestrians with Nivea face cream mixed with nicotine

The handful of shattered, surviving Londoners were then to be finished off with fragmentation bombs made from green potatoes.

For f*cks sake.

Potato bombs. I ask you ...

This whole story is so desperately pathetic I really don'€™t know where to start. I could start with a list of the terrorist materials recovered by the police from the flat in Wood Green. Wood Green, sounds quaint doesn't it? For those not familiar with Wood Green, it too is a pit of place and hasn'€™t seen any wood or green for a long time now. Anyway, highlights from the police'€™s impressive haul include:

  • Three toothbrushes
  • Potatoes
  • Some ciggies
  • Rotten meat
  • Curry Powder
  • Nivea face cream
  • Cherry stones and apple pips
  • Fruit
  • A funnel
  • A mortar and pestle
  • Other, sundry, kitchen utensils
  • A coffee pot containing traces of a suspicious brown powder (later found to be coffee)

In fairness, the police did also find some castor beans, acetone and a recipe for making ricin from said acetone and castor beans.

No one is denying Bourgass didn't toy with the idea of producing something nasty.

But there is a world of difference between a disaffected lunatic, piss-balling around with some useless recipes downloaded off the Internet and a conspiracy of ruthless and highly trained global terrorists.

Ricin is an assassin's poison, not a terrorist's. For ricin to work effectively you have to inject it into your victim. Getting them to eat it is a poor second and smearing it on door handles is just plain daft. Besides, Bourgass hadn't managed to make any ricin. Our government said he did but none was found. The bloke was an idiot and was working to a dodgy recipe provided by the legendary Kurt Saxon; a US based free thinker and all round loon himself (Believe me, I tried some of his recipes years ago, strictly for 'fun and information purposes only'. They don't work. I even half suspect that Kurt isn't a real person at all and is really the front for a cunning FBI operation designed to have lunatics and potential terrorists remove themselves from the gene pool by following 'Kurt's' dodgy instructions but, at this point, I digress).

There's a delightful inversion at work here. When a bona fide lone nutcase is actually caught by the authorities he's identified as being part of a shadowy conspiracy. Yet, when people suspect shadowy conspiracies behind murders, the authorities tell them that they are the work of lone nutcases.

Life is, as they say, complicated.

Conspiracy or not, we've got criminal gangs from just about every corner of the Earth blasting away at each other with Desert Eagles and Tec-9s all over London, yet the government and police are obsessing about a nutcase, or nutcases, armed with Supersquirters and carrier bags full of rotting fruit.

Why would they do that?

Let me explain ... in a bit

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