Jeez, What Would Have Happened If He Was Singing "Whiter Shade Of Pale"??

I try to keep an eye out for strange stories, somehow I missed this humdinger. It seems that over on Airstrip One, the police and defense forces have new targets in "De War On Terrah!" Besides shooting people for going to work, that is.

From Reuters
Man held as terrorism suspect over punk song
Wed Apr 5, 2006 9:58am ET168

LONDON (Reuters) - British anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash, police said Wednesday.

Detectives halted the London-bound flight at Durham Tees Valley Airport in northern England and Harraj Mann, 24, was taken off.

The taxi driver had become worried on the way to the airport because Mann had been singing along to The Clash's 1979 anthem "London Calling," which features the lyrics "Now war is declared -- and battle come down" while other lines warn of a "meltdown expected."

Mann told British newspapers the taxi had been fitted with a music system which allowed him to plug in his MP3 player and he had been playing The Clash, Procol Harum, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles to the driver.

"He didn't like Led Zeppelin or The Clash but I don't think there was any need to tell the police," Mann told the Daily Mirror.

ANTONINO D'AMBROSIO in his April 20th posting at The Nation On-Line has a great Op-Ed on this idiocy. (Full Article Here)

"London Calling" is a song about terrorism, but not the kind we have become so familiar with after 9/11. Written in 1979 by the late Joe Strummer, it describes the looming threat of nuclear catastrophe, environmental disaster, starvation and war. The threat or terror of nuclear destruction was something that deeply concerned Strummer because it seemed to him that some world leaders treated it as nothing more than a game. "You had Ronald Reagan campaigning on building up nuclear arms.... He said the West is losing the arms race to Russia, the 'evil empire'.... It was like toys to them or a movie where nothing bad would really happen," Strummer told me when I interviewed him in 2002. Sound familiar?