Giving Mutallab seat 19A at Schiphol was a mistake that should lead to repaired airline security strategies. Homeland Security agencies worldwide have naturally stepped up their vigilance in case there are any other nut-exploding nutters out there with the same thing in mind.

One should not forget that it’s the failures of the likes of Al Qaeda bombers Mutallab, Reid, al-Owhali and (Hizb ut Tahrir’s) Bilal Abdulla, amongst many others, which go so far to show that the bogeyman (however brainwashed) is frail and fallible - something the hysteria of 9/11 too often implied he was not. Every bully is ripe for crushing - in every bully there hides a scrawny coward.

The extreme Islamist movement (as with other extremist movements like the BNP and Extreme Left) is full of scrawny cowards. The future promises to continue to teach the extreme Islamists a tough lesson until they snap out of their unrealistic, anti-social, dreadful plans for a world run by bearded Islamist nutters (a grim world where Sports Illustrated features a series of vomit-inducing Yvonne Ridley burkhini photographs and Lord Ahmed is promoted to Caliphate Transport Minister; his mantra “Don’t bother to stop - keep moving.”)

2009 has been a dreadful year for Al Qaeda and this next decade looks even grimmer for the terrorist network which has zero chance of fulfilling its chief goal of taking over a failed state. As Russia and China start to exert a heavier hand on the world’s tiller, so Guantanamo will come to be seen as a Butlin’s holiday camp for captured Al Qaeda cadres.

Both the Russians and the Chinese have their own inimitable way of dealing with human rights lawyers and other leftie nonses who kick up a fuss about the treatment of irredeemable Islamist psychopaths without having a better solution for these human explosives. Though Russia has its fair share of Islamist problems already within its borders, it is time for China to start looking for extremist Islamist prey abroad and exerting its influence in co-operation with the Allied powers in places like Afghanistan and through its existing power enclaves in Africa. If China focused half as much energy on combating Islamist terrorism as it does on diplomatic snubs, the Islamists are done for.

Closer to home, Harriet Harman enjoyed her last chance to have a pop at non-doms ahead of Labour’s anticipated election defeat. A pointless and embarrassing charade when the non-doms she was trying to get at pay more UK tax monthly than a leech like her has put in the public purse in a lifetime. 2010 will hopefully say Adieu rather than Au-Revoir to lightweights like her and the beginning of the end of her crazy, society-splitting quotas set by race, gender and sexual preference.

The Tories should find any legislative document with Harman’s signature on it and erase any of her changes - anything she touches she gets so terribly wrong. Her pointless “equality-enforcing” Qangos distinguishing between men and lesbians, blacks and whites and Caucasians and Hispanics - plenty of savings to be made there, Mr Osborne.  We are all equivalent without having people to daily remind us.

Shocking that someone like Harman, who has been in government for so long, can’t understand the dangers of all-encompassing tax ceilings on Britain’s brightest and richest - or admit to the Labour Government’s incessant use of offshore havens for gross-roll-up on its staff’s own cash.  Shocking that someone as talentless as Harman should stand in for a Prime Minister at PMQ - but less shocking when you consider that the Prime Minister she is standing in for is Gordon Brown, the unelected bottler running a fag-end government which had used up the genuine talent it had (save David Miliband and Mandelson) when Blair left.

2010 will surely go down in history as the start of a period of reflection on one of the worst Prime Ministers Britain has ever seen. Meanwhile Tony Blair will run rings around the Iraq inquiry and Labour will realise just how much it misses its Tory public schoolboy who dared to wear red.

*

A couple of relatively trifling Editor’s footnotes to 2009 (read on only if you really have nothing better to do):

It was pointed out to me last week that my old friend Abul Taher (formerly of the Sunday Times) wrote a piece for the online Guardian on New Year’s Eve about the arrest of counter terrorism researcher Glen Jenvey on suspicion of inciting religious hatred against Jews. I’m surprised news of this arrest took so long to surface when it happened way back in October 2009.

I won’t comment here on a case yet to reach the courts, except to say that this is a sorry stall in Jenvey’s counter extremism efforts - a serious dip in form I can only think was caused by a lack of money rather than any intended incitement. The man is no racist. I worked with Jenvey back in 2006/early 2007 (as did Taher) and back then he was sharp (the best extremist video and audio hunter out there) and certainly had no need or desire to fake anything, let alone a news story.

Of course, Jenvey’s bizarre fall has cast aspersions on other stories he’s been linked with. One or two 2009 pieces certainly seem a tad suspect. His fall has been a wake-up call to those engaged in exposing (particularly Islamist) extremism -  that sources must be waterproof and that newspapers are often readier to print than to check sources as thoroughly as they should. (I hear Jenvey was on his way down for other reasons before his fakery began - that’s a real shame and I hope personally things improve for the man).

Jenvey’s fakery was his (and possibly anyone else’s who worked directly alongside him in early 2009).

Meanwhile many others who are engaged in exposing extremist Islamism - me and colleagues included - have been accused by the pathetic quisling far left of fakery too. Their narrative goes: 911 was a fake, so every other War on Terror story is some Big Brother Black Flag fabrication thought up by Bilderberg. Of course - apart from Jenvey’s Jewish Hitlist piece - no fakery has been found and we have simply added these narrow-minded, paranoid, extreme Islamist allies to our long list of targets. 2010 - annus horribilis for the quisling Far Left.

I have been very open in the part I played in Jenvey’s downfall in 2009. I chose to use a recording in my possession - which revealed Jenvey as the author of a fake posting on an Islamist web forum - to prove once and for all that his story was a fake. Without emission of that recording, Jenvey may have gone on to cause further mayhem and there could have been serious societal consequences to his faked evidence.