DAR AL HARB - U.K.- SCOTLAND: WHY IS SCOTLAND IN THE SIGHTS OF JIHADISTS?!?

Scots, Unscathed by IRA, Learn to Live With Terror (Update1)
By Rodney Jefferson

July 2 (Bloomberg) -- Scotland, untouched by successive U.K. bombing campaigns by the Irish Republican Army and al- Qaeda, must come to terms with becoming a target after the attack on Glasgow airport, one of the country's top terrorism experts said.

"We shouldn't regard ourselves as immune,'' Paul Wilkinson, chairman of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrew's University in Scotland, said in an interview today. "It would be a mistake to assume this is a one-off. We have to be prepared for a series of attacks.''

Police in Scotland arrested two more suspects today in connection with a June 30 attack on Glasgow International Airport in which a Jeep Cherokee with two men inside crashed into the terminal entrance, bursting into flames. Coming one day after two attempted car bombings in London, the government raised the U.K.'s terrorist threat assessment to "critical,'' the highest level, meaning an attack is expected imminently.

The incident was the first direct attack on the country, striking at Scotland's largest city, its busiest airport and the birthplace of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Scotland, like the rest of the U.K., has been subject to tighter security at airports and public buildings and police have arrested terrorism suspects in places such as Edinburgh.

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Why Scotland is in the terrorist bombers’ sights
by IAIN MacWHIRTER

So, Scotland is finally in the front line of international terrorism. It is almost 20 years since the last terrorist incident in Scotland - at Lockerbie in 1988 - and that atrocity was not specifically directed at this country: Pan Am 103 simply fell to earth. The car which shattered the glass in Glasgow Airport on Saturday also shattered any complacent illusions that Scotland had some sort of immunity from terrorist attack.

This was Baghdad in Abbotsinch - a gas cylinder car bomb of the kind common in the Iraqi capital, and which has produced obscene carnage there. That it failed to do so here is down to a combination of chance and security. We may not be so lucky next time.

For Gordon Brown, newly installed in No 10, it means the terrorists have opened a new front in his own Scottish backyard.

Sensibly, Mr Brown moved swiftly to involve the SNP leader, Alex Salmond, in the anti-terror Cobra committee to prevent any sense of grievance emerging north of the border about the government being more concerned with London lives than Scottish ones.

But Scotland has been left with a sense of "why us?" We're different, aren't we? We're not really a part of the Anglo-American military axis. A small nation, subordinated to a larger partner in the UK, too marginal to bomb. The IRA never took its war here because many Republicans believed Scotland to be a Celtic country also under the English yoke and therefore not responsible for British military actions in the province (a curious attitude bearing in mind the brutality of Scottish soldiers in the Black and Tans during the Irish civil war).

Similarly, Black September-style Palestinian terrorists in the seventies and eighties didn't have a casus belli against Scotland, and Scottish politicians such as George Galloway were considered friends of the PLO. And the new Islamist militants of al Qaeda were thought to be focused on English targets, specifically London, which they regard as one of the nodes of the pan-Christian crusade against Islam.

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Pertinent Links:

1) Scots, Unscathed by IRA, Learn to Live With Terror

2) Why Scotland is in the terrorist bombers’ sights