When I read a BBC story about new ‘airport style’ security procedures that may be introduced to music venues and sport stadia following the Manchester Arena Islamic bomb attack, a song popped into my head. The song was ‘Those were the days’ by Mary Hopkin. As far as I can see and maybe as future historians will see it, Britain’s security infrastructure can be divided into how things were before Islam established itself in the United Kingdom and what things are like now.

Now Britain has faced terrorism, mostly Irish Republican terrorism, prior to the arrival of the ideology of Islam, but the responses to previous terrorism threats were proportionate to the threat that these Irish Republicans posed. Groups such as the Provisional IRA knew that the most certain way to make a pariah of their cause was to intentionally target civilians who were not on one side or the other in the Troubles. Yes the IRA targeted Protestants in Northern Ireland just as the Loyalists targeted Catholics there but it was not the indiscriminate terror of the sort we see coming from the followers of the woefully misnamed ‘religion of peace’.

Because of the need to be strategic with targeting, the IRA mostly concentrated on military, economic and government targets along with symbols of Britain and British authority in Ulster. However I concede that the IRA did kill civilians but civilians were often not the IRA’s primary target at least on the mainland. Because the public and the security forces knew what sort of targets the IRA would go for, security could be increased only in those areas where it was absolutely needed. Of course the security precautions against the IRA did cause inconvenience, rubbish bins were removed from parts of the public transport network and there was extra security in sensitive areas such as the City of London, but there was never any need for the sort of comprehensive security procedures that are being proposed following the Manchester Arena attack.

Now in the days where we face an Islamic terror threat, a threat that is growing more serious by the day, Britain finds itself needing to put in place the sort of security procedures that will be familiar to the citizens of countries that are on the front line in the battle against violent Islamic savagery. We are having to institute the sort of security that we see in countries such as Israel for example where armed guards searching customers are a routine sight in bus stations, pubs and other places where the public gathers.

I doubt very much that the IRA would have carried out an attack like that on the audience at Manchester Arena nor the London Bridge attacks nor the 7/7 bombings nor any other of the gruesome killings that have been carried out by the followers of Islam. If the IRA had carried out such attacks it would have been strategic suicide. Not only would ordinary citizens and subjects on both sides of the Irish border have turned on the IRA in disgust, but there was the known danger that Britons would, in their anger, turn against the long established Irish minority in the United Kingdom. Such a policy by the IRA would also have invited a massive retribution by the British state both in Ulster and in the rest of the United Kingdom. To give an example of how sensitive the IRA was to public outcry, following a bombing at the Olympia exhibition centre in March 1976, the public reaction to the IRA was so harsh that they suspended their mainland bombing campaign for a short while.

Such strategic and public relations considerations do not apply to Islamic terrorism. The perpetrators of such terror care not for strategic or PR matters, all they want to do is to kill as many non Muslims as they can in order to feed the blood-lust of their deity ‘Allah’. They don’t care if they die in the process of their attacks, unlike IRA terrorists and neither do they care whether or not their target is military or related to the British state. If Muslim terrorists can’t kill a British soldier or a police officer then they will settle for killing children, it’s all the same to them after to them we are all just mindless unbelieving ‘kuffar’.

The bringing in of what is being called ‘Martyn’s Law’, so called after a victim of the Islamic bombing of the Manchester Arena marks a major step change in the levels of security and security related inconvenience that ordinary Britons will be subjected to, because of the increasing threat of violent Muslims carrying out terror attacks. It is an indication of just how endangered we are by Muslim extremists.

I must admit that it is almost laughable to look at the cognitive dissonance being expressed by government over the issue of Islam and Islamic violence. We get told, often under the threat of imprisonment, to treat Islam as a ‘religion of peace’ whilst at the same time the Government is having to put in the sort of unprecedented security measures that Martyn’s Law represents.

I’m old enough to remember the days of the Irish Troubles. On one occasion I was on my lunch break from the photographic studio that I worked at in the West End when the Regents Park and Hyde Park bombings were carried out by the IRA. The whole building I was in shook because of the force of the explosions and I suddenly found myself surrounded by frightened and anxious people. But in the aftermath of this and other IRA atrocities in the capital, I didn’t recall the need for the sort of security that you would find at an airport. Yes there was an increase in bag searches and more police on the streets and some minor security related inconveniences, but we all knew that the chance of being caught up in an IRA attack or having a random Irishman suddenly want to kill a civilian Briton was pretty small. We can’t be so complacent or think the same way when it comes to Islamic terror. Any non-Muslim in the UK is a potential target for Islamic terrorists.

During the Irish Troubles I could travel in relative freedom around London, go to concerts, get on train, go to an art gallery, football match or a museum without too much trouble. I was not, as is the case now, having to face the sort of security procedures familiar to those who live in Israel, where in places like Hebron where 70% of the Muslim residents there are said to be supporters of the genocidal Hamas organisation.

Now like any other reasonable person I accept that not every Muslim individual is a terrorist or a potential terrorist. I’m also mindful that one of the first rescuers to enter the tunnel at Edgware Road following the 7/7 bombings was a Muslim man called Mohammed, but I have to admit that Islam the ideology is producing an awful lot of individuals who are a threat to us. This was never the case with the Catholic Church or Catholics in mainland UK. Although I’ve been in Irish pubs where discreet collections were taken ‘for the boys’, meaning the IRA, there was never any evidence that I could find which suggested that Catholic churches here were churning out terrorists. This is something that I’m afraid that we cannot say when it comes to Britain’s mosques. Too many mosques are indeed hotbeds of extremism and do churn out those who want to kill Britons for ‘Allah’.

When the British government was faced with IRA terrorism they went in hard and dealt with it, imprisoning those they could and killing the terrorists when necessary. There was, if I recall correctly, no policy of appeasing the communities from which the Republican terrorists came from, nor were there any exhortations from the State to treat Irish Republicanism as an ideology of peace. This is a significant difference to how Islam is treated by the UK Government, where it is treated as untouchable and immune from criticism.

The fact that we now have to go through the sort of security rigmarole that we see at airports just to go to the football or a concert, should tell us all we need to know about the scale of the threat that we face from the more violent followers of Islam. I know it may sound strange to some, but knowing the great extent of the Islamic terror threat to all of us not just some of us in Britain, makes me look back at the threats of the past and realise that despite being murderous, the threats from Irish Republicanism were not a fraction as indiscriminate as the threats posed by Islamic terrorism. The late 1970’s and early 1980’s seem relatively peaceful when compared to today. Those were the days alright, the days before the violent death cult of Islam became established on these islands and became a threat to us all.