This just in

Terrorism is a figment of our imagination. So says the looney British left (via Wretchard.) BBC2 recently aired a documentary, "The Power of Nightmares", that attempts to prove it.

Since September 11 Britain has been warned of the 'inevitability' of catastrophic terrorist attack. But has the danger been exaggerated? A major new TV documentary claims that the perceived threat is a politically driven fantasy - and al-Qaida a dark illusion. Andy Beckett reports.

You only imagined all those people dying in NY, DC and Pennsylvania. The USS Cole? An aberration. The embassies in Africa? Staged, fake events to consolidate political power. The first attack on the World Towers? A "one-off" event.

During the three years in which the "war on terror" has been waged, high-profile challenges to its assumptions have been rare. The sheer number of incidents and warnings connected or attributed to the war has left little room, it seems, for heretical thoughts. In this context, the central theme of The Power of Nightmares is riskily counter-intuitive and provocative. Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism, the series argues, "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media." The series' explanation for this is even bolder: "In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."

When I read this, I think of the looney toons who believe that the US flew remote-controlled planes into the towers in NY and there actually were no deaths. They're just hiding all those people somewhere so they can control our future.

This is what the left has come to. It's sad really. It's difficult to understand how rational, intelligent people can buy into theories like this, but there you have it.

Adam Curtis, who wrote and produced the series, acknowledges the difficulty of saying such things now. "If a bomb goes off, the fear I have is that everyone will say, 'You're completely wrong,' even if the incident doesn't touch my argument. This shows the way we have all become trapped, the way even I have become trapped by a fear that is completely irrational."

Do you get this? If a bomb goes off his theory still isn't wrong. His fear is that people will no longer buy in to his theory.

Well duh! Down here in the real world, where people actually live their daily lives Adam, a bomb going off is a sure sign that something isn't right. I know it's crazy to think that way, but people dying has that sort of effect on you.

The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.

Curtis' evidence for these assertions is not easily dismissed. He tells the story of Islamism, or the desire to establish Islam as an unbreakable political framework, as half a century of mostly failed, short-lived revolutions and spectacular but politically ineffective terrorism. Curtis points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation.

I suspect Nicholas Berg, were he still alive, might argue that Curtis knows not whereof he speaks. The sad list of other victims might also weigh in with a different opinion. The "idea" seems a bit more real when you're the one being "cleansed" from the corrupt world.

Bill Durodie, director of the international centre for security analysis at King's College London, says: "The reality [of the al-Qaida threat to the west] has been essentially a one-off. There has been one incident in the developed world since 9/11 [the Madrid bombings]. There's no real evidence that all these groups are connected." Crispin Black, a senior government intelligence analyst until 2002, is more cautious but admits the terrorist threat presented by politicians and the media is "out of date and too one-dimensional. We think there is a bit of a gulf between the terrorists' ambition and their ability to pull it off."

You have to wonder how the Aussies feel about being completely dismissed. After all, they are part of the "developed world" aren't they? Hundreds of them died in Bali. Do they not count?

Apparently not, if you're a snobbish, eurocentric jerk who can't conceive of a world outside your brandy snifters, crumpets and tea. The arrogance hangs like a putrid body in the air. It's amazing how you can write off thousands of people simply because they aren't in the same "class" as you presume to be.

Personally I wish these were the people al Qaeda went after. If enough of them died, the world would certainly be a better place.