Via Sam Rosenfeld, John Gibson turned in a column today that's the deranged spawn of mother ignorance and father idiocy, it's as uninformed and obviously incorrect as I've seen these things get:
The bombings in London: This is why I thought the Brits should let the French have the Olympics (search) — let somebody else be worried about guys with backpack bombs for a while.
But, all Thursday proved is that they come to get you anyway. And, by the way, they come and get their own too:
So here's John Gibson's mental timeline of the bombings:
July 6th: London gets the games. Yay London!
July 6th, afternoon: A terrorist cell puts into action their plan to bomb whoever got the Olympic Games. They import materials, download train schedules, case drop-off points, and plan the attack. In 8 hours.
July 7th, 8am: Bombs go off.
Idiot. The bombs were timed to disrupt the G8 conference, not the Olympic announcement. Terrorist attacks can't change locale on a dime -- they need to be planned and rehearsed, the materials acquired and assembled, the terrorists trained and briefed. It's not like popping to the kitchen to make a sandwich. (Update: some don't think Gibson was connecting the announcement and the attacks. I'm not so sure, but I see the interpretation that puts it in doubt. All other points about Gibson's total ignorance on French/English counterterrorism and Muslim relations stand).
But inability to conceive how a terrorist attack works aside, only someone wholly ignorant in Euro-Muslim relations would think France hasn't been dealing with Islamists. Indeed, it's actually been Britain who decided they'd better just open the gates and try to curry favor with extremists by offering them a near no-questions-asked sanctuary. France, on the other hand, closed their borders to radical Islamists and quickly earned the undying enmity of the jihad movement. I quoted yesterday from Gilles Kepel's Jihad to make this point, and if John Gibson is reading, he should go absorb that graf. But today, let's go to the Washington Post:
