Megrahi welcomed home

Despite what we wrote yesterday, when we were favourable concerning the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, we were as disturbed as anyone else to see him receive a hero's welcome when he arrived back in his homeland of Libya.

Megrahi received a hero's welcome upon his return to Libya. In the bottom right can be seen one of the many Scottish flags waved by those who greeted him - where the hell do you buy Scottish flags in Libya?

Right now, many Muslims unfortunate enough to live in those nations where the population must depend of state-controlled media for their news and information will view anything that appears to show Muslims "getting one over the Yanks" in a good light - many of those who greeted him on the tarmac yesterday would not claim to support Megrahi's actions which resulted in 270 deaths.

Do they even realise this is what he has done? Or could it be the case that Gaddafi's regime - which in recent years has decided to pretend it's friendly towards the west (and being the oil-whores we are, we believe them) - has not been entirely truthful when saying how many people died that night in 1988? Could it be that Megrahi's case has been subject to political spin, calculated to make the Libyan people see him as a political prisoner and a hero in Islam's struggle against the Great and Little Satans? After all, if you as a leader can get the population so riled up about something they become obsessed with it, they'll ignore whatever injustices are being committed closer to home (hmm - could that be why the main parties have chosen to neglect British concerns over immigration, perhaps? Maybe immigrants provide a convenient scapegoat for the public to blame everything on, rather than starting to realise the reason our country is in such a state is because of the gross negligance and incompetance of its leaders). For a man like Gaddafi, with the shocking human rights abuses that go on in his country, there'd be definite advantages in that. Is he really our friend? The UK and US governments would be wise to be very wary indeed in their dealings with Gaddafi.

Either way, we're just happy to see that the Scottish Government has the balls to run Scotland in the way that they see fit, rather than bending over backwards to do whatever Uncle Sam demands, like the UK Government show such willingness to do.

One thing though - it was noticeable that quite a few people amongst the crowd that turned out to welcome Megrahi home were flying the Saltire, the national flag of Scotland. What we want to know is, where the hell did they get them from? These were not flags made out a stick, a sheet of A4 and the kids' felt-tip pens; they were proper, professionally-made, correctly-hued cloth ones. Were they imported from Uganda, once Idi Amin lost his presidency in 1979 and his collection of Scottish stuff was sold off, then stored until the right moment? Is there a compnay that keeps a careful eye on the news and fills a fast container ship with whichever flags are about to be in the news and heads for the relevant nation at a high rate of knots - and if so, were they behind the inexplicably large numbers of Danish flags that were burned in the Middle East following the publication of satirical cartoons depicting Allah by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper? Or is there, bizarrely, a shop down some backstreet in Tripoli that sells Saltires? In the latter case, some businessman who has previously suffered what must be among the lowest sales figures ever recorded by any company is going to retire as a very rich man fairly soon.