Gerard Henderson, and a grave misnomer leads to shattering lone wolf insights ...

There's stupidity, and then there's Barnaby Joyce, and his epically incoherent piece for the Herald And not a stop to think, as government ignores water.

Seizing on the current flooding, he pronounces:

Third, I recently made an announcement on the Murrumbidgee near Griffith that the Coalition would ask a panel of engineers to determine the most appropriate and cost-effective sites to construct dams. These decisions will be based not on political considerations but solely on an engineering basis. We know full well that a decision is never easy when dealing with water.

Solely on an engineering basis? This is as dumb as predicating a solution to the Murray Darling basin without reference to the communities living within it. Oh wait, it was the Liberal government that devised the Water Act ...

Naturally, the famous little sir echo, otherwise known as the anonymous editorialist for The Australian, chimes in with Resilience in facing catastrophe:

Whatever the objections of green extremists, such policies must include more dams, much larger dams and underground water storage facilities.

The notion that the country can be utterly dammed and damned so that floods can be mitigated, or ended, is a bit like Miranda the Devine's routine proposal that all the bush should be burned down so that there can be an end to bushfires.

There's plenty more nonsense in Barner's outburst:

Fresh water is the source of renewable wealth, affordable food, green lawns and clean cars. Let us make water as accessible and affordable as possible, and move on from the present naive water policy of building nothing new, shutting down towns or taxing it.

Never mind the incoherent English involved in taxing it - we think he means taxing water, not taxing water policy.

But green lawns? Lawns? So Australia can become a giant bowling green or cricket ground, and we can all ride around on motorised mowers? Sheesh, now there's a splendid vision. Why I bet in Alice Springs they're wildly excited about putting a dam on the Todd River so that the town can luxuriate in green lawns ...

Meanwhile, on a totally unrelated matter, Gerard "the prattling Polonius" Henderson spends a goodly amount of time in The intelligence and the luck that saves us from murderers lathering himself up into a pedantic and semantic frenzy:

The bombing of a Coptic church in Alexandria, Egypt, at the weekend, apparently by a radical Islamist, was widely reported as a suicide attack. This is a serious misnomer.

A serious misnomer? Standing by for pedantry assault:

The intention of a person who commits suicide is to kill himself or herself. The aim of the perpetrator of the crime in Alexandria was to kill as many Christians as possible. This is murder. The act is perhaps best described as suicide/homicide.

Oh yes, you can just see the subbies racing around embracing suicide/homicide in their headers, and when there's no actual deaths resulting from a suicide bomber - save perhaps the bomber - then perhaps we can settle for a 'suicide/indecent assault with a common weapon' attack. Or perhaps if the attack utterly fails, we might have 'attempted suicide with attempted assault on a pair of underpants, or a pair of shoes". (yes watching Four Lions can make anything seem funny).

The concept of a suicide attack seems utterly to escape the pedant in Henderson, which means intelligent readers must revert to the Wiki on suicide attack for a decent informative read, perhaps with a refresher course on the infamous kamikaze (divine wind) suicide attacks deployed by Japanese pilots towards the end of the second world war.

Back then the world had no problem understanding that a Japanese pilot embarking on a suicide attack had the deaths of others in mind ...

Never mind, once a pedant has a bee in his bonnet, the bee must surely buzz, and so Henderson grandly concludes his piece thus:

The sad fact is that some of these dangerous fools commit, or conspire to commit, suicide/homicide.

While others conspire to murder elegant English, a much less heinous crime, but a crime all the same.

Of course the rest of the column is just a chance for Henderson once again contentedly chew on the Islamist cud as a source of terror, and brood about how John Howard and his anti-Terrorist Act can enter the house of the lord justified (sssh, not a word about how much we paid out to that Haneef chappie for the pleasure of getting it wrong), and how the intertubes is spawning a vast army of lone wolves.

What all these activities have in common is that they were apparently the work of a ''lone wolf'' or, rather, a number of lone wolves. The term has been used by Dr Sajjan Gohel, of the Asia-Pacific Foundation.

Henderson utterly confuses himself by quoting Roshonara Choudhry as an example, but Choudhry wasn't a suicide/homicide type, so much as a simple-minded assailant who determined on taking out a British Labor MP with a six inch kitchen knife. Perhaps we can now call her a homicide/homicide type ...

And then he compounds the confusion by citing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as another case, when there is clear evidence that the underwear bomber didn't need to hang around on the intertubes for inspiration, when he had the help of lectures at Iman University. Abdulmutallab posted his confused ramblings on the intertubes, but at the same time he managed to get himself noticed by MI5 for radical links and "multiple communications" with Islamic extremists, including meetings and training in Yemen with variant al-Qaeda extremists, not to mention actual meetings with Anwar al-Awlaki. He was the one who invented the suicide/underpants homicide label ...

It's all very well to talk about al-Awlaki as the bin Laden of the Internet because he had a blog and a Facebook page, but the notion that lone wolves roaming the intertubes are the source of recent problems is to seriously misunderstand the way that fundamentalists can get hold of likely minds and groom them for mischief.

Henderson proceeds to cite the Australian cases Operation Pendennis and Operation Neath as supporting Gohel's lone wolf thesis. Or is that Gohel's thesis about al-Quaeda's failing strength as terrorism central? Because it wold be hard to imagine a less likely example of "lone wolfism" than the work done by radical cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika and six of his followers, according to even the most superficial reading of the case (and for sensationalist coverage, where else to look than the Herald Sun's Terror Down Under?)

A couple of years ago the former head of Victorian coppers was quoted thus:

As for Benbrika: "It is fair to say that Benbrika preyed on the vulnerability of young men, under the cloak of religion as a means to extol his own extremist version of Islam.

"Extremists use various tools to exert a considerable amount of influence, including advice provided under the guise of religion."

And it turns out that in the Operation Neath case, the notion of 'lone wolfism' dependent on the intertubes for radicalising literature also takes a dive, involving as it did some eighteen people, with a core of hardliners ...

It's a new definition of lone wolfism to think of the term embracing a team fantasising about storming Holsworthy barracks and turning it into a killing field, with enough men to make up if not a platoon, then at least a decent squad or section, with actual leadership, if we want to go military in the discussion (yes, finally catching up with The Pacific and what a disappointment it is compared to Band of Brothers).

It was about this point that I wondered, as I often do, what I was learning from reading Gerard Henderson, and the answer as usual was diddly squat or bugger all ... 'lone wolfism' springing up thanks to the intertubes, and suicide attacks being formally designated suicide/homicide?

Does this mean that the virulent work of Wahhabist fundamentalists - sponsored directly by Saudi Arabia, the so called allies of the United States - or the followers of the likes of Sayyid Qutb, who scribbled long before the intertubes came into being, are once again given a 'get out of jail' free card in the interests of 'lone wolfism'?

Well banzai to all that.

Oops, I see now that a banzai (ten thousand years) charge (shattered jade) mustn't be called a suicide attack but a suicide attack with homicidal intentions ...

Suddenly reading Barners about the damning of Australia seems like a way to rest the mind ...

(Below: a Japanese plane, found here, in a typical suicide/homicide attack in the second world war).