This has been an excellent week for Muslim psychopaths. First, Abu Qatada - “Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe” - has been given leave to stay in Britain by the European Court of Human Rights - and has also been bunged some money to compensate him for having been banged up in the first place.

And no sooner have we cleared the champagne flutes away and banished our hangovers after this celebration than it is reported that Binyam Mohamed is on his way back too. Binyam has been in Guantanamo Bay for a while, having been accused by the Americans of wandering around the Hindu Kush looking for infidels to murder, like a sort of well-armed Norman Wisdom with a grievance. He says he’s innocent and has been tortured by America’s flunkeys.

Binyam is an Ethiopian who was never awarded full citizenship here, so it’s a real stroke of luck that we end up with custody of the man. Old Abu, meanwhile, is wanted on terrorism charges in half of Europe and Jordan as well, but the European Court has decided in our favour: we can keep him while it mulls things over for a while.

Qatada was the supposed inspiration and spiritual guide for the fabulously inept shoe bomber Richard Reid, the chap who tried to blow up an aeroplane with explosives hidden in his trainers but forgot to take a lighter with him and couldn’t manage to strike a match properly. Qatada also believes that Muslim states should have no truck with infidel cockroach western democracies, although he seems to have quite enjoyed living here these past few years, denouncing the Jews and playing jihadist war games on his PC.

In this he is a little like the giggling, bearded Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who railed against our filth and decadence for years until he was peremptorily deported to Lebanon, whereupon he immediately pleaded to be allowed to return home to his semi in Edmonton, in case he was blown to pieces by an Israeli shell. No, mate, you stay where you are: should have been a bit nicer while you were here, shouldn’t you? There is a certain train of thought that insists all these people should be either imprisoned indefinitely or deported to one or another dusty Middle Eastern satrapy, where their views might accord with those of a greater proportion of the population. My own view is that they shouldn’t have been allowed into the country in the first place.

In almost all cases we knew they weren’t the sort of people with whom you might share a convivial weekend, but were implacable Islamists who loathed us even more than the countries from which they fled. But in most cases we couldn’t send them back because those countries might treat them in an uncivilised manner - pulling out their fingernails, shooting them in the back of the head and so on.

The fact that each arriviste yearned for regimes in their native countries even more unpleasant than the ones from which they had escaped, and also to blow us up at the same time, cuts no ice with international law. International law, then, must change. It was constructed in less barbarous times - the times of Hitler, Stalin, people like that.

Once here, though, and granted citizenship, they should be given due process. Treating people decently and with due process is about our only trump card in this wearying and debilitating battle against the jihadists. They, of course, think our adherence to the letter of the law is a weakness to be derided, which is why it is such a propaganda coup when they really are transgressed against, when they are treated differently from how we would treat any suspected criminal. So much for your democracy, they say.

Abu Qatada should not have been allowed into the country, but once here he should not have been imprisoned indefinitely when there was clearly insufficient evidence to convict; the same applies to Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, still incarcerated in Belmarsh while the Americans cobble together evidence against him by fair means or foul.

If we are stupid enough to let them in, then we should be stupid enough to treat them like normal human beings too.

+ Children at a junior school in Cambridgeshire were asked to write down as many rude and obscene words as they could think of, as part of some ill-conceived campaign against bullying. Parents weren’t too happy. One mother said she was disgusted “when my 10-year-old showed me an exercise book with words like c***sucker, d***head and fat arse rewarded with a tick from the teacher”.

Meanwhile, in a similarly fatuous attempt to combat Muslim extremism, pupils nationwide are to be asked to empathise with suicide bombers, to see the world as a nihilistic Islamic psychopath might see it.

Schools have long since given up on inculcating a sense of right and wrong in their pupils; the whole notion is outdated and, frankly, authoritarian. Which is something to be thankful for when a 12-year-old child screams “fat arse” at you and then detonates himself. At least he was able to empathise.

Big Rat and fries, please

The quicker their economy expands, the bigger grow their rats. This creature - the size and shape of Tessa Jowell - was harmlessly lumbering along the streets of Fuzhou, on China’s east coast, scattering pedestrians in its wake, until apprehended by a certain Mr Xian, pictured, who swiftly grabbed it by the scruff of the neck, stuffed it in a sack and scarpered.

One assumes that by now it will have been eaten. It is not racist to say that Chinese people eat rats because sometimes they do eat rats. Usually, though, they prefer them smaller - the size and shape of Hazel Blears at most.

Harman clutches at pie in the sky

Ever since it destroyed the economy, the government has been looking around for something important it can bugger up next. It has now found the right target: pies.

In future, by government edict, pies sold from canteens to public-sector workers will have less pastry in them, because the health department has decided that pastry is bad for you. As the only jobs left in Britain soon will be in the public sector, that means everybody will be affected.

This government has always loathed pies, unless they are made with filo pastry and contain spinach and pine nuts. New Labour loathes pies in the same visceral way Thatcher loathed secondary pickets.

That is why Harriet Harman will never become party leader, because she has a face like an empty pie-case in which the pastry has not been sufficiently pricked - the dough becomes damp and lumpen. The MPs look at Harriet and all they see is an ill-constructed pie on legs, screeching at them about women’s rights.

+ First they sealed off the road. Then the brave policemen, clad in breathing apparatus and nuclear, biological and chemical warfare gear, advanced on the pungent mystery substance. Then - sheer terror, the stuff of nightmares - a woman officer got a drop of the substance on her arm. She was rushed to hospital, sirens screaming out across the London night. Evacuation of the entire district was only moments away when they found out that the brown liquid was . . . HP Sauce. Still, nobody hurt, nobody dead: another success for the Met.

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