There are some terrorist attacks that are so monstrous that they don’t just stick in your mind but you can recall exactly where you were when you first heard of them. For 9/11 I was sitting at my desk doing a Civil Service job, picking at my breakfast box that I’d got from the canteen and idly watching the news, as I sorted out what stuff and equipment I would need for the day. I recall seeing the initial reports of a light plane crashing into the Twin Towers turn into the horror of commercial jets being used as weapons by an Islamic terror group.
It was a similar story with another terror attack this time in 2004, when I was in a pub at the Shaftesbury Lane end of London’s Wardour Street and the news came on the TV of an attack on a school in Beslan in Southern Russia by Islamic Chechen terrorists. I remember standing up at the bar sipping at my pint and looking in mute horror at the images and the descriptions of what was going on at a school, thousands of miles from where I was standing. I saw images of the distraught faces of the parents whose children had been suddenly held hostage by Islamic terrorists, although at that time I didn’t know that the death toll when the siege and the attacks were over would be as huge as it was, with 354 dead with 186 of these deaths being of children. The attack came on the first day of the school year and allegedly had been long planned by the Chechen Islamic terror group, who were as bestial to both adults and children during the terror attack and subsequent siege as we can all imagine Islamic terrorists to be.
With the increased security protocols surrounding aviation that have been progressively imposed by various states since 9/11, it is less likely than it once might have been that terrorists, most likely Islamic ones as they are the primary danger source, would be able to seize aircraft in the UK and use them in a similar manner to how they were used on 9/11. Locked cockpit doors on commercial planes would prevent any terrorist from gaining access to the controls of an aircraft and better security screening technology alongside stricter airside security at airports makes a British 9/11 style attack much less likely than would have been the case prior to 11th September 2001.
However that doesn’t mean that other types of Islamic terror attacks are also less likely. With the ability for Islamic terrorists to access aircraft more or less removed, such terrorists will look for other softer targets. As we have seen in Britain, this shift to attacking softer targets has happened and we saw this at both London Bridge attacks, the Westminster attack, 7/7 and the Manchester Arena bombing. However these Islamic terrorists attackers have not yet targeted schools but I fear that it is only a matter of time before they will attempt such an awful thing.
There are persistent rumours going around social media at the moment which claim that, among the tens of thousands of Dinghy Invaders who have crossed the Channel, and others who have moved to the UK via both legal and illegal means, are members or supporters of the ISIS Islamic terrorist group. These rumours also state that the targets of these ISIS terrorists are going to be Britain’s infant and primary schools. It’s very important to say that at this stage these rumours are just that, rumours. There’s no hard evidence from what I can gather that there are ISIS operatives in Britain planning an attack on young children in our schools. However that doesn’t mean that we can sit back and relax about this issue. Even if ISIS types were not part of the Dinghy Invasion or had slipped into the UK in some other manner, Britain has more than sufficient in number and sufficiently deranged followers of Islam, who would be up for this sort of attack.
Because it is not an ‘out there’ thing to believe, or rather know, that there are members of a subset of the Islamic community that wants us and our children dead, it’s also not that ‘out there’ to wonder whether those murderous Islamic extremists who are already here might have been joined by compatriots who came here by invasion dinghy.
It is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that either a home grown or an imported Islamic terror group might one day to choose to attack a school. After all as we’ve seen from incidents such as the Manchester Arena attack and the 7/10 attacks on Israel, Islamic terrorists have zero moral problems with killing and maiming children. This is a much worse situation than Britain suffered when we were beset with IRA terrorism. Although children did end up being killed by IRA bombs, children were not their usual primary and chosen target and it would have been terrible political optics for them if they had had taken this path. But when it comes to Islamic terrorists, we cannot and should not make the naive assumption that they would behave similarly to how the IRA behaved. The Islamic terrorists will gladly kill children if they believe that the child is ‘kufar’, as their extremist ideology does encourage such Muslims to go out on indiscriminate killing sprees.
I don’t know where or when such an attack would happen, but it is not an impossible assumption to say that it could happen. Such an attack could ignite civil disorder, similar or worse to that which we saw after the Southport Atrocity, with possibly political and social problems emerging as a result.
However it would be better to prevent an attack by Islamic terrorists on Britain’s schools from happening in the first place. I’ve been to a few schools as a parent and because I have a child who was at one point the sort of boy who would give the late Major Pat Reid of Escape from Colditz fame a run for his money in the escaping stakes, I took a close interest in perimeter and access security at the various schools we visited. Although we were satisfied that the school we chose was escape-proof (unless he went all ‘Wooden Horse’ and dug a tunnel out), being secure enough to stop kids wandering out or oddballs coming in to the school grounds, which is fine, there were massive security holes that would not prevent a determined terrorist gaining entry and gaining access to the children.
For what should be very very obvious reasons, I’m not going to publicly describe those security holes but let’s just say they were big enough not to bother a determined Islamic terrorist (it’s most likely to be an Islamic terrorist who would do this sort of thing) or even deter them. Four or five armed men could easily breach much of the school security that I’ve seen in some of Britain’s more small town state primary schools, although Jewish schools in places like London are a different matter and have the sort of security that would not disgrace those at the ‘Secret Doughnut’ in Cheltenham. I dread to think what Islamic terrorists would do to many of the small town primary schools and the children inside.
It could be, unless the ladies and gentlemen of ‘Thames House’ prevent it, that Britain might have it’s own version of the Beslan Horror. It could be British parents trying to push through police lines to get to their children after an attack at their child’s school and British parents being shown on the television news walking behind small white coffins.
A British Beslan style attack is sadly not impossible, either for terrorists to carry out nor for such terrorists to slip through the nets cast by the Thames House. Therefore I believe that as the risk of such an attack is considerably more than zero, schools should up their game with security. Access control to sites need to be beefed up and security at vulnerable points should be greatly improved. I’d like to see more hardened CCTV fitted with uninterrupted power supplies, with footage being able to be monitored remotely by counter terrorism officers, more sensors on gates and more controlled vehicle access. Children should also be given instructions on evacuation and invacuation procedures, how to get out and how to hide in a protective safer space. Yes, this might make the school look ‘fortress like’, but a fortress might be needed to protect children from murderous Islamic terrorists. It may not be necessary for every school to make themselves into a simulacrum of many of Britain’s Jewish schools with that level of security, but I believe that school security needs to be far far better than it currently is.
When my child goes back to school, because the security situation in Britain is getting more seriously bad by the day, I’m going to have a word with my child’s school about the security holes I’ve observed on this school’s premises. Maybe other parents should do something similar and talk to their child’s school about what the school is doing to protect the children in their care from terrorism? It would be better to work together to push schools to improve their security than have a school and its children become the victims of a successful Islamic terror attack of the sort that occurred in Beslan.
Links
IMDB page on the 1950 POW escape movie ‘The Wooden Horse’.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043147
Wiki page on Beslan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan_school_siege
Wiki page on the late Major Pat Reid