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RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Comedy terrorists? If only they were

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As Gerry Adams said famously in another context: 'They haven't gone away, you know.' Yesterday, these four wannabe jihadists from Luton were jailed for a total of 44 years.

They had planned to send a remote-controlled toy car packed with explosives under the gates of a Territorial Army base.

Woolwich Crown Court was told that the antics of this home-grown terror cell read like the script of the satirical movie Four Lions. Their mug-shots resemble that 'Comedy Terrorist' who gatecrashed Prince William's 21st birthday party at Windsor Castle.

They went on military-style manoeuvres in the countryside, where they were spotted jogging in formation and using logs as pretend weapons.

Ringleader Mohammed Sharfaraz Ahmed suggested sky-diving, horse-riding and paragliding would be 'good jihad training' and thought bungee-jumping would be a great way to overcome his fear of heights.

Zahid Iqbal (l) and Mohammed Sharfaraz Ahmed (r) of the four wannabe jihadists from Luton

 Syed Farhan Hussain (l) and Umar Arshad (r) were jailed for a total of 44 years

This stuff is straight from the You Couldn't Make It Up files. Bring on the bouncy castle.

It would be all too easy to laugh out loud at this Islamist version of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. After all, their deranged terror plot was a long way from fruition.

The court heard that they'd got their ideas from an online Al Qaeda fanzine called Inspire, which sounds like a jihadist's version of When Saturday Comes.

Defending counsel for one of the four said their plans were 'generalised, ill-formed and never settled' and dismissed the toy car bomb as 'completely unfeasible'.

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Certainly, on the surface it all seems a bit Fantasy Island. But then start picking away at the superficial idiocy and it turns out they were deadly serious. And I mean, deadly.

Ahmed had spent a week at an Al Qaeda camp in Pakistan, but was sent home because his Arabic wasn't good enough.

His co-conspirator Zahid Iqbal acted as a 'facilitator' for would-be jihadists to travel to Pakistan for terrorism training.

This tends to suggest that far from being 'unfeasible' and therefore, by implication, non-threatening, their intentions were murderous. We're not talking a fortnight at Butlin's in Skeggy.

Those responsible for the murder of bus and Tube passengers in 2005 also underwent some kind of 'training'

Predictably, the local BBC news interviewed neighbours who attested that these were nice, family boys who kept themselves to themselves.

That chap from the Luton mosque, who they always wheel out when the English Defence League are in town, admitted that Ahmed (or it may have been Iqbal) had shown 'extremist' tendencies but said he didn't think it was his job to report his suspicions to the Old Bill.

So it's as well that someone did alert the authorities, otherwise we could be looking at a re-run of the July 7 London Transport attacks somewhere down the line.

Just because they come across as a bunch of clowns, it doesn't mean they're not capable of pulling off another 'spectacular'.

Those responsible for the murder and maiming of bus and Tube passengers in 2005 also underwent some kind of farcical 'training' in the countryside. If memory serves, it was white-water-rafting in Snowdonia.

It is to the eternal credit of the security services that we haven't experienced a similar atrocity since. But as the old cliche has it, the terrorists only have to get lucky once, etc.

We simply have to look across the Atlantic this week to realise what could have happened had this hapless gang of losers from Luton ever got lucky.

Three people were killed and 170 injured by two bombs planted at the Boston Marathon in Massachusetts. Those responsible are said to have taken their bomb-making instructions from the same Al Qaeda 'cookbook' as the Luton cell.

Inevitably, parallels have been drawn with the 9/11 attacks. But in execution the Boston bombing was reminiscent of the kind of terrorist outrages perpetrated in Britain, first by Irish republicans and latterly by Al Qaeda affiliates.

I can't have been the only person to reflect, in a shame-faced fashion, that when the IRA were regularly blowing up men, women and children in London, Birmingham, Belfast, Manchester and Warrington, they were being bankrolled in part by misguided, sentimental sympathisers in the Irish-American community in Boston.

Or that the Irish terrorists behind mass slaughter in Britain are now the very same 'statesmen' who were dancing on Mrs Thatcher's grave this week.

Those behind the Boston Marathon bombs 'took their making instructions from the Al Qaeda "cookbook"'

I wonder if those blood-soaked brothers, the aforementioned Adams and his oppo Martin McGuinness, felt even a shiver of remorse when they learned of the explosions in Boston on Monday. The fundamental difference is that the IRA did have a negotiable game plan. And there was a deal to be done which fell short of their ultimate goal.

Al Qaeda's stated aim of a global sharia state really is unachievable, no matter how many bombs they plant, no matter how many people they murder.

You can't do deals with an ideology that brainwashes young men born and raised in Britain to kill their fellow citizens in the name of a perverted, politicised version of one of the world's great religions.

What we saw in London in 2005 and again in Massachusetts this week is murder for murder's sake. Whoever was behind the Boston bombing has, as yet, claimed no responsibility nor issued any demands.

The reaction in America, however, is different from 9/11. Yes, the country is united in grief and a determination to punish the perpetrators. But the attack also exposed the bitter political divide that has emerged in the U.S. in recent years.

    More from Richard Littlejohn...   RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: When they said fight them on the beaches, Dave... 27/05/13   RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Toytown jihadists and a lack of political willpower 23/05/13   RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: The paying public are sick and tired of being ignored and patronised. So who are the real swivel-eyed loons? 20/05/13   The truth at last! Peter Mandelson admits Labour 'sent out search parties' to bring migrants here after losing the votes of the working class, writes RICHARD LITTLEJOHN 17/05/13   So that's why they called it an oil rig! 16/05/13   When did an 8-month jail sentence become eight weeks? 13/05/13   We're riding along the crest of a rave: How far is Julie Bentley prepared to go in order to make the Guides more 'relevant' to 21st-century Britain? 09/05/13   Arrest first - ask questions later: How dawn raids and ransacking houses became standard operating procedure 06/05/13   RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Proof no good deed ever goes unpunished 02/05/13   VIEW FULL ARCHIVE

After 9/11 there was a unity of purpose, a quickly identified common enemy in the form of Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts.

Now, there is a reluctance to attribute blame. Barack Obama's supporters are hoping against hope that the Boston bombing was not the work of Al Qaeda.

On the 'liberal' website Salon, a sort of online version of the Guardian, one sick 'respected' commentator even wrote that he wished the attack was the work of a white, Right-wing, Tea Party-style extremist like Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber.

That's because the American Left - which is well to the right of our own Labour Party and half the Coalition, for that matter - wants to demonise its opponents as 'extremists'.

If Boston was the work of Al Qaeda it would invalidate Obama's narrative of winning the 'war on terror' by withdrawing troops on the ground in favour of lobbing drones at 'high-value' targets and 'reaching out' to allegedly moderate Muslim countries.

The Right, too, needs bogey-men. It would like to portray Obama as a covert Muslim, soft on Islamist terrorism, tough on global warming.

Whoever was responsible, Boston has made America jumpy. In the wake of Monday's attacks, someone has been sending the deadly poison ricin through the post to senators and the White House - another echo of the 9/11 aftermath.

When the fertiliser factory exploded in Texas yesterday, the inevitable early fears were that it was another terrorist incident, rather than another Flixborough accident.

If or when the truth emerges, the appalling attack in Boston has nonetheless demonstrated vividly that terrorists don't have to fly planes into tall buildings to make a seismic impact.

All the tools they need are a mouse-click away on the internet.

The Luton gang planned to strap explosives on to a toy car. The Boston bombers used domestic pressure cookers to maximise their carnage.

In our inter-connected world, a loner in a bedsit above a kebab shop in Luton can have a butterfly effect around the world.

And in late-breaking news, FilmFour has cancelled a planned showing of Four Lions scheduled for Monday. The reason?

In the movie, the home-grown jihadists plot to blow up the London Marathon.






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