Jihadism: three articles

Waging the war of words

There's no shortage of polemic for Islamic militants seeking to 'purify' their religion. Suhayl Saadi is depressed by what he discovers in bookshops and on the net

The Times July 23, 2005

IN POWER STRUGGLES, EVERY letter is a bullet, every word a bomb. So what might the London bombers have read? When I walk into most “Islamic bookshops”, I am struck by apocalypse. Texts of fire and brimstone abound; books of which John Knox would have been proud. Most such shops are run by miserabilist Islamist organisations.
Perhaps the young Islamists were studying Jihad in Islam (1930), by Maulana Maududi, the founder of the IndoPakistani political party Jamaat-eIslami. This book combined rigid theology with political theory in search of state power. Or perhaps it was the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones (1964) — a primer for political Islam. In Saudi Arabia, Qutb’s brother taught the “crusader” Ayman al-Zawahiri (author of Knights Under the Prophet ’s Banner), the chief ideologue to the leader of the “blessed avant-garde”, Osama bin Laden.
Through words, money and guns, this cocktail of fascism, anti-colonialism and puritanical Wahhabism hijacked the Salafi reformist movement which had been created to “purify” Islam. From the mid-1970s, inadvertently encouraged by the US and its Saudi and Pakistani client states, the concept of global jihad began to spread, crushing mystical and rational streams of Islam, establishing book chains, taking over mosques and severely destabilising Muslim society and culture. This intensified during the Afghan wars of the 1980s and 1990s. In this context, the continuing role of powerful, simplistic, mass-proselytising groups like the cultish Tablighi Jamaat — a Pakistan-based group — remains deeply problematic (Tablighi Nisab — Seven Essays).
The 1980s shift from economic to tribal consciousness, fuelled in the West by racism, hyper-materialism and social exclusion, generated a hybrid of individualism, monolithism, a cult of victimhood and political violence.
The trans-national production of madrassa stormtroopers reached industrial levels, while Islamist literature degenerated into the cheap “hate books” that today crowd bookshelves and the web, exhorting young Muslims to “become time bombs”: Jihad Unspun: 39 Ways in the Service of Jihad and Taking Part in It; Sawt al-Jihad (Voice of Jihad); Defence of the Muslim Lands; and The Islamic Legitimacy of the Martyrdom Operations.
Thought, theology and the word have become secondary. The driving force of “third-generation” jihadism today is simply the will to power. Its publications justify political statements by quoting the Koran or Hadith (sayings of the Prophet), but the tone is of supremacist rage.
The political party Hizb-ut-Tahrir — which is banned in some countries but operates openly in Britain — publishers of The Inevitability of the Clash of Civilisations and Democracy is a System of Kufr (an unbelief in Islam), describes a process of “culturing . . . a party structure from people . . . melted by Islam”. An existential dislocation between outward stability and a politically alienated core combined with an emptying of spirituality leads to its teenage readers becoming the drum-majorettes of Islamism.
With core concepts extant since Islam’s first century — as outlined in Islam in the Digital Age: E-Jihad, Online Fatwas and Cyber-Islamic Environments (Gary Bunt, Pluto Press) — the Islamist supremacist movement is a paragon of postmodernism, with its cyber-jihads and snuff movies. The sex industry has played a major part in the web, so it is deeply appropriate that the web has become the medium par excellence for the pornographers of the soul. Through links redolent of paedophile rings, one slips easily from soft to hard-core.
Sadly, it seems that what I — and the bombers — are unlikely to find in most Islamic bookshops are collections such as Shattered Illusions: Analysing the War on Terrorism (ed. Aftab Ahmed Malik, Amal Press), Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (ed. Omid Safi, Oneworld) or the works of the UCLA professor Khaled Abou el-Fadl, such as Islam and the Challenge of Democracy (Boston Review). And certainly not the former CIA shrink Marc Sageman’s Understanding Terror Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press).
There are other books that the London bombers might not have read, and which I have little hope of finding in the Islamic bookshop, but which ought to be there, if only because of their objectivity. Some of them are listed in the box below.
I leave the bookshop depressed, angry. Perhaps there can be too many words, and too few. Islamist terrorism was the logical outcome of 80 years of Western complicity, conflict and covert operations. The equally hardline approach of Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington would sometimes almost seem to urge strategic ahistorical terrorism on behalf of imperial power. Global populist resentment casts young people into the hallucinatory cyberworld of Islamism, and until there is a will to move beyond these dynamics the texts of illumination will remain unread by those who most need to read them — and there can be no peace, anywhere.
I want to scream at the shopkeeper, a man at least 15 years my junior, who had ticked me off for wearing a gold wedding ring. I want to tell him: it’s power, stupid, not theology! But I buy a paper instead and read about “The War on Terror”. It seems that once again I have passed through the looking-glass and am supping at a table of Mad Hatters. Perhaps the London bombers were reading Lewis Carroll. Or Mary Shelley. Or simply nothing at all.
Suhayl Saadi’s novel, Psychoraag (Black and White Publishing), was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. www.suhaylsaadi.com
Inside Islam
· Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (OUP)
· Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong (Modern Library)
· Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid (Yale UP)
· The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity by Tariq Ali (Verso)
· The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror by Stephen Schwartz, (Doubleday)
· My Jihad by Aukai Collins (Lyons Press)
· Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Skeptical Muslim by Ziauddin Sardar (Granta)

The cloud still over us all

In 1946 The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to an account of the bombing of Hiroshima. John Hersey’s classic reportage remains brutally relevant, says Eric Schlosser

The Times July 23, 2005

[see penultimate two paragraphs]

At 8AM ON AUGUST 6, 1945, AIR raid wardens in Hiroshima gave the “all clear” signal. The three American planes flying above the Japanese city seemed to be on a reconnaissance mission. People emerged from basements, went outside, returned to work. Fifteen minutes later one of those planes, a B29 Superfortress, dropped the first atomic bomb used on a civilian population. The bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy”, exploded above Hiroshima with a force equal to 20 million tons of TNT. Temperatures at the point of detonation reached more than 500,000C. Roughly half of the city’s population was killed or seriously wounded in an instant. Everything within three miles was heavily damaged. Windows shattered as far as 12 miles away. The prevailing wind at 8.15 had been about 5mph, but within moments of the blast 40mph winds created a firestorm. Dust and debris rose 70,000 feet (21,000m) into the air. US government investigators later concluded that Little Boy had performed “exactly as according to design”. Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the B29, watched Hiroshima vanish beneath a mushroom cloud and recorded in his journal: “My God, what have we done?”
Three days later Nagasaki was destroyed by an atomic bomb called “Fat Man” — and the day after that, the Japanese leadership decided to surrender. In the United States the Bomb was proudly viewed as a technological marvel, the “ultimate weapon” that had ended the Second World War and saved the lives of thousands of American servicemen preparing to invade Japan.
Newspaper accounts dwelled on the awesome power of the atomic bomb, the details of its construction, its potential in future warfare. William Shawn, the managing editor of The New Yorker, thought that a crucial aspect of the story was being neglected: what was it like to have one of these bombs dropped on your city? Shawn asked the American journalist John Hersey to write about the bomb’s impact on ordinary people in time for the first anniversary of its use. Hiroshima , the book that emerged, proved to be not only one of the most influential literary works of the 20th century — paving the way at The New Yorker for other classics of long-form reportage, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood — but also a work that’s unfortunately relevant today, amid the nuclear proliferation, and sacred terrorism of our age.
Hersey was the right man for the job, a war correspondent who knew Asia well. He was 31 and had been born in Tsientsin, China. He learnt Chinese before he learnt English. He later attended Yale and Cambridge universities, then worked as an editor at Time magazine. After Pearl Harbor, Hersey covered the war for Time and for Life and wrote several books based on his experiences in combat. His first novel, A Bell for Adorno (1944), the tale of an American officer assigned to govern a small town in Sicily, won a Pulitzer Prize.
Hersey visited Japan for several weeks late in the spring of 1946, interviewed Hiroshima survivors, returned to the United States, wrote furiously, and submitted a 31,000-word manuscript to The New Yorker. It followed the lives of six people — a filing clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, the owner of a private hospital, a young widow, a surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital, a German Jesuit priest, and a pastor at the Hiroshima Methodist church — from the moment of the bomb’s detonation through the nightmare and devastation of the following year. Without preaching or moralising, Hersey described what happened to the people of Hiroshima. The facts spoke eloquently for themselves. He had originally hoped that the article would run in four parts. Instead Shawn persuaded The New Yorker’s editor, Harold Ross, to devote an entire issue to the piece.
Readers expecting The New Yorker’s usual light-hearted fare were stunned to find a lengthy description of what an atomic bomb does to people. Aside from advertisements and the “Goings on About Town” section, the magazine was devoted entirely to Hersey’s account. When the issue hit the newsstands in August 1946 it sold out within hours. No other magazine article has had such a profound effect. It presented a reality that most people had suspected but had been suppressed. It created sympathy for an enemy recently despised. It took the wind out of American triumphalism and created grave doubts about the atomic bomb. A month later the American Broadcasting Company cancelled half an hour of its programming for four nights so that actors could read the article over the radio. The text was broadcast by the BBC and by radio networks in Canada and Australia. In October, the article appeared as a book, Hiroshima. Hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed free by the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Hiroshima is full of apocalyptic scenes and imagery: a city in flames; voices crying out from the rubble; the dead and dying silently lying on the grass in a bucolic park; burn victims, horribly disfigured, wandering through streets like zombies; clothing patterns seared into the skin by the sudden flash; the lone surgeon in a six-hundred bed hospital, crammed with ten thousand people, bandaging wounds like an automaton. But the book is much more than a catalogue of the grotesque. It is a page-turner, a true story that continually defies belief. Hersey shows the horror but never lingers too long. For all the death and despair, in the end Hiroshima is oddly life-affirming. It is the story of six survivors. In an afterword written in 1985, Hersey describes the mundane lives later enjoyed by a few of these victims. Their perseverance suggests that the capacity to endure can overcome the instinct to destroy.
Hiroshima has grown more timely in the four decades since its publication. Today some of the most moderate and sober members of the American foreign policy establishment believe that a nuclear weapon is likely to be used against civilians during the next decade. In the worldview of radical Islamicists, New York City, London, and Washington, DC, constitute an axis of evil. William Perry, who was Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration, thinks there’s a 50-50 chance that a large city will soon be destroyed by a nuclear bomb.
Graham Allison, the founding dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, says the likelihood is greater than that. In his recent book Nuclear Terrorism (Times Books, USA, 2004), Allison gives an unsettling account of what would happen if a ten kiloton bomb (less powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima) exploded in Times Square. About half a million people would be killed instantly. Allison’s website, www.nuclearterror.org, shows what such a bomb would do to any city in the United States, once you type in its zip code. According to former Governor Thomas Kean, who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, Osama bin Laden has not only studied Hiroshima, but has already tried to obtain nuclear weapons, convinced that the destruction of an American city would lead the United States to remove its troops from the Middle East.
Hersey died in 1993, having written more than two dozen books. None of them, however, approached the grandeur of Hiroshima. Six years ago the journalism school at New York University compiled a list of the 100 most important works of American journalism. I generally can’t stand such lists, but I agree with the ranking that Hiroshima was given: No 1. (Silent Spring was No 2; Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting, No 3.) Hiroshima confronts one of history’s most important events with fierce honesty and compassion. “Few of us have as yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon,” the editors of The New Yorker wrote in August 1946, making their justification for giving Hersey’s article so much space: “and everyone might well take time out to consider its terrible implications”.
Eric Schlosser’s most recent book is Reefer Madness . . . and Other Tales from the American Underground (Penguin)

Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide

Thomas L Friedman

New York Times July 22, 2005

I wasn't surprised to read that British police officers in white protective suits and blue gloves were combing through the Iqra Learning Center bookstore in Leeds for clues to the 7/7 London bombings. Some of the 7/7 bombers hung out at the bookstore. And I won't be surprised if today's bombers also sampled the literature there.

Iqra not only sold hatemongering Islamist literature, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, was "the sole distributor of Islamgames, a U.S.-based company that makes video games. The video games feature apocalyptic battles between defenders of Islam and opponents. One game, Ummah Defense I, has the world 'finally united under the Banner of Islam' in 2114, until a revolt by disbelievers. The player's goal is to seek out and destroy the disbelievers."
Guess what: words matter. Bookstores matter. Video games matter. But here is our challenge: If the primary terrorism problem we face today can effectively be addressed only by a war of ideas within Islam - a war between life-affirming Muslims against those who want to turn one of the world's great religions into a death cult - what can the rest of us do?
More than just put up walls. We need to shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it appears. The State Department produces an annual human rights report. Henceforth, it should also produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report, which would focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others.
I would compile it in a nondiscriminatory way. I want the names of the Jewish settler extremists who wrote "Muhammad Is a Pig" on buildings in Gaza right up there with Sheik Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, a Saudi who is imam of Islam's holy mosque in Mecca. According to the Memri translation service, the imam was barred from Canada following "a report about his sermons by Memri that included Al-Sudayyis calling Jews 'the scum of the earth' and 'monkeys and pigs' who should be 'annihilated.' Other enemies of Islam were referred to by Sheik Al-Sudayyis as 'worshipers of the cross' and 'idol-worshiping Hindus' who must be fought."
Sunlight is more important than you think. Those who spread hate do not like to be exposed, noted Yigal Carmon, the founder of Memri, which monitors the Arab-Muslim media. The hate spreaders assume that they are talking only to their own, in their own language, and can get away with murder. When their words are spotlighted, they often feel pressure to retract, defend or explain them.
"Whenever they are exposed, they react the next day," Mr. Carmon said. "No one wants to be exposed in the West as a preacher of hate."
We also need to spotlight the "excuse makers," the former State Department spokesman James Rubin said. After every major terrorist incident, the excuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed. When you live in an open society like London, where anyone with a grievance can publish an article, run for office or start a political movement, the notion that blowing up a busload of innocent civilians in response to Iraq is somehow "understandable" is outrageous. "It erases the distinction between legitimate dissent and terrorism," Mr. Rubin said, "and an open society needs to maintain a clear wall between them."
There is no political justification for 9/11, 7/7 or 7/21. As the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen put it: "These terrorists are what they do." And what they do is murder.
Finally, we also need to shine a bright light on the "truth tellers." Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers' words also need to be disseminated globally. "The rulers in these countries have no interest in amplifying the voices of moderates because the moderates often disagree with the rulers as much as they disagree with the extremists," said Husain Haqqani, author of the new book "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military." "You have to deal us moderates into the game by helping to amplify our voices and exposing the extremists and their amen corner."
Every quarter, the State Department should identify the Top 10 hatemongers, excuse makers and truth tellers in the world. It wouldn't be a cure-all. But it would be a message to the extremists: you are free to say what you want, but we are free to listen, to let the whole world know what you are saying and to protect every free society from hate spreaders like you. Words matter.

More comment re London 7/7

A warning from the past that the BBC does not want us to hear

Charles Moore

Daily Telegraph 16 July 2005

A small news item this week announced that BBC Radio 4 had dropped its dramatisation of John Buchan's Greenmantle from the schedule. It contained "unsuitable and insensitive material" at this difficult time. A different reaction, you may remember, from the one the BBC displayed to another of its programmes: Jerry Springer - the Opera.
Quite a lot of Christians complained that the material there was unsuitable and insensitive (Jesus, so far as I recall, was shown as an adult wearing nappies), but the broadcast went ahead anyway. The BBC said that it would not be dictated to. Faced with potential Muslim anger, its courage is less visible.
It is a pity that we are not allowed to listen to Greenmantle, particularly just now. As many Buchan fans will remember, it has some things to say about religion, conflict and the interests of this country.
The book appeared in the middle of the First World War, and one of its propaganda purposes was to get America in on our side (which happened the following year, 1917). This explains the otherwise superfluous presence of a character called Mr Blenkiron, a fat, brave, dyspeptic American, who joins the heroes' clandestine struggle against Germany.
The details of the plot are almost unimaginably silly, but such is the power of the story-telling and of the book's big idea that the reader hardly notices. The big idea is that, to win in the East and thus to win the whole war, Germany needs to annex the dreams of Islam ("I fancy religion is the only thing to knit up such a scattered empire... There is a jihad preparing").
To do this, Germany needs to control a mystical Muslim figure who can "madden the remotest Moslem peasant with dreams of Paradise". The Germans seek such a man in the mysterious Greenmantle. But the true, "honourable" Greenmantle is dying, and the Germans have a devilish scheme for passing off a false holy man (I won't give away the twist) under his colours.
The plan is foiled by Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot, a "wonderful fine horseman, with his firm English hunting seat". When Sandy turns to the German arch-villainness and says, "You must know, Madam, that I am a British officer," she realises that her game is up.
One message of the book is the importance of understanding cultures different from our own. This produces a sympathy with Islam. Sandy, who knows "something of the soul of the East", explains that: "The Turk and the Arab came out of big spaces, and they have the desire of them in their bones. They settle down and stagnate, and by and by they degenerate into that appalling subtlety which is their ruling passion gone crooked.
"And then comes a new revelation and a great simplifying. They want to live face to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priestcraft... It isn't inhuman. It's the humanity of one part of the human race."
The problem comes, Buchan/Arbuthnot says, when this longing for purity is perverted. The "simplicity of the ascetic" is usurped by "the simplicity of the madman that grinds down all the contrivances of civilisation". The danger comes when "you can get the same language to cover both". Isn't that quite a good way of encapsulating our problem today?
True, we are not facing direct threat from another nation. There is no war. But in some ways, the situation is more dire, because the threat is in our midst. As we now know, some of our own, native citizens have successfully conspired to kill us and themselves, because they listened to that "same language". They found people, not just in Pakistan, but in Yorkshire, who would pour it into their ears.
So there has to be a huge purging of language, a careful sifting of what is legitimate from what is evil. And whenever the evil is found, it must be punished. At present, the trend is still the other way. The language is like a river in spate - muddy, turbid, full of flotsam and jetsam.
This muddle of language is not confined to the extremists, and therefore is not easy to isolate. The Leeds Grand Mosque, for example, is, so far as I know, a mainstream institution. Its leaders have readily joined in the condemnation of the London attacks.
But if you read their Friday sermons you find that running through many of them is a constant streak of paranoia, dark talk of a wicked "Great Middle East Plan", of "threats and conspiracies which are devised against Islam".
One sermon on "youth", young men like the three down the road who planted the bombs, tells the teenagers at which it aims how marvellous were the military conquests carried out by the young followers of the Prophet and how today "Your Islam, your religion, is being targeted".
No, sermons like this do not say that the hearers should go out and kill people, and no doubt the preachers do not believe that they should, but they do not say that they should not kill, and they stoke up anger. How much can you incite anger, and then throw up your hands in horror when young men take their rage to a bloody conclusion?
On the Today programme on Thursday, Inayat Bunglawala appeared on behalf of the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain. He condemned the "killing of all innocent people" which sounds fine, but leaves room for dispute about who is innocent and allows you to get in your pitch about other killings.
Sure enough, Mr Bunglawala's next shot, unprompted, was to attack Israel for making "nauseating" political capital out of the blasts. Asked about the support for suicide bombing by a leader of the Muslim Association of Britain (an affiliate of the MCB), he said that "I understand why he feels such pain for the Palestinians".
Asked why his MCB colleague had attended a memorial service for Sheikh Yassin, the spiritual leader of the terrorist organisation Hamas, Mr Bunglawala said that Yassin had been a "renowned Muslim scholar".
Translate the muddy language. The murder of British citizens is seen as an occasion to criticise Israel. Support for suicide bombers, though regrettable, is in effect defended; and one leader of the bombers, it is said, should be respected in death, because he was a Muslim scholar.
What is happening to a religion when its scholars are telling people to kill others and themselves? The BBC is notoriously shy of using the word "terrorist" about people who plant bombs: would "renowned Muslim scholar" be a useful substitute?
I said earlier that we are not facing a direct threat from another nation, but one does notice that, for western Muslims, the word "nation", in sermons and teaching, seldom means the country in which they reside and of which they are usually citizens, but the faith of which they are a part.
That creates a tension, does it not? When Sandy Arbuthnot rejects the wicked German's temptation to join her jihad, he says "I am the servant of my country, and her enemies are mine. I can have neither part nor lot with you." When will that message be heard in every British mosque, every Friday?

The sobering of America US foreign policy is getting better - and that's partly because Iraq has got worse

Timothy Garton Ash

Guardian June 30, 2005

[See the last paragraph]

To return to America after an absence of six months is to find a nation sobered by reality. The reality of debt and lost jobs. The reality of rising China. Above all, the reality of Iraq.
This new sobriety was exemplified by President Bush's speech at Fort Bragg on Tuesday night. Beforehand, as the camera panned across row upon row of soldiers in red berets, the television commentator warned us that the speech might last a long time, since it was likely to be interrupted by numerous rounds of heartfelt applause from this loyal military audience. In fact, the audience interrupted him with applause just once. Once! Lines that during last autumn's election rallies drummed up a certain storm ("We will not allow our future to be determined by car bombers and assassins") were now met with a deafening silence. Stolidly they sat, the serried soldiers, clean-shaven, square-jawed, looking slightly bored and, in at least one case that I spotted, rhythmically chewing gum.



Article continues

Bush ploughed on with his sober, rather wooden speech, wearing that curious, rigid half-smile of his, with the mouth turning down rather than up at each end. A demi-rictus. The eerie silence made him look, at moments, like a stand-up comic whose jokes were falling flat; but of course this was no laughing matter. Afterwards, the same television commentators who had warned us to expect rounds of applause speculated, with an equally authoritative air, that the White House had suggested restraint to this audience, so it would not look as if the president was both requesting blanket coverage from the television networks and exploiting the nation's military for the purposes of a party-political rally. But then perhaps soldiers who actually risk their lives for Bush's policies in Iraq, and have lost comrades there, would not have been in a great mood to applaud anyway. Afterwards, as he mingled with the troops in the hall, their faces showed little more than mild curiosity at the prospect of meeting their commander-in-chief.
Bush's Fort Bragg speech once again presented Iraq as part of the global war on terror - the Gwot. He mentioned the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks five times; weapons of mass destruction not once. We have to defeat the terrorists abroad, he said, before they attack us at home. As freedom spreads in the Middle East, the terrorists will lose their support. Then he made this extraordinary statement: "To complete the mission, we will prevent al-Qaida and other foreign terrorists from turning Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban - a safe haven from which they could launch attacks on America and our friends."
Consider. Three years ago, when the Bush administration started ramping up the case for invading Iraq, Afghanistan had recently been liberated from both the Taliban and the al-Qaida terrorists who had attacked the US. There was still a vast amount to be done to make Afghanistan a safe place. Iraq, meanwhile, was a hideous dictatorship under Saddam Hussein. But, as the United States' own September 11 commission subsequently concluded, Saddam's regime had no connection with the 9/11 attacks. Iraq was not then a recruiting sergeant or training ground for jihadist terrorists. Now it is. The US-led invasion, and Washington's grievous mishandling of the subsequent occupation, have made it so. General Wesley Clark puts it plainly: "We are creating enemies." And the president observes: our great achievement will be to prevent Iraq becoming another Taliban-style, al-Qaida-harbouring Afghanistan! This is like a man who shoots himself in the foot and then says: "We must prevent it turning gangrenous, then you'll understand why I was right to shoot myself in the foot."
In short, whether or not the invasion of Iraq was a crime, it's now clear that - at least in the form in which the invasion and occupation was executed by the Bush administration - it was a massive blunder. And the American people are beginning to see this. Before Bush spoke at Fort Bragg, 53% of those asked in a CNN/Gallup poll said it was a mistake to go into Iraq. Just 40% approved of how he has handled Iraq, down from 50% at the time of the presidential election last November. Contrary to what many Europeans believe, you can fool some of the Americans all of the time, and all of the Americans some of the time, but you can't fool most Americans most of the time - even with the help of Fox News. Reality gets through. Hence the new sobriety.
I don't want to overstate this. One is still gobsmacked by things American Republicans say. Take the glorification of the military, for example. In his speech, Bush insisted "there is no higher calling than service in our armed forces". What? No higher calling! How about being a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, an aid worker? Unimaginable that any European leader could say such a thing.
None the less, here are a few indicators of the new sobriety. First of all, neocons are no longer calling the shots. As a well-informed Washingtonian tells me, the nominations of Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank and John Bolton to be ambassador to the UN actually show they have been kicked upstairs. There is little talk now of proud unilateralism and America winning the Gwot on its own. Everyone stresses the importance of allies. Bush quoted with approval Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, on our shared interest in a stable Iraq, and proudly averred that "Iraqi army and police are being trained by personnel from Italy, Germany, Ukraine, Turkey, Poland, Romania, Australia and the United Kingdom".
The state department, under Condoleezza Rice, is setting out to repair old American alliances and to forge new ones. One of America's most dynamically developing alliances is with India, a country in which America is also much loved. If anyone in Foggy Bottom (the wonderfully named neighbourhood of the state department) feels a twinge of schadenfreude at the crisis of the EU, they are not showing it. They want a strong European partner too. On Iran, which even six months ago threatened to become a new Iraq crisis, the US is letting the so-called E3 - Britain, France and Germany - take the diplomatic lead. Even with the election of a hardline Iranian president, military options are not being seriously canvassed. And if the European diplomacy with Iran does not work, what is Washington's plan B? To take the issue to the United Nations! What a difference three years make.
Schröder is right, of course. It would be suicidally dumb for any European to think, in relation to Iraq, "the worse the better". Jihadists now cutting their teeth in Iraq will make no fine distinctions between Washington and London, Berlin or Madrid. Any reader tempted to luxuriate schadenfreudishly in the prospect of a Vietnam-style US evacuation from Baghdad may be woken from that reverie by the blast from a bomb, planted in Charing Cross tube station by an Iraq-hardened terrorist. But it is a fair and justified historical observation that American policy has got better - more sober, more realistic - at least partly because things in Iraq have gone so badly. This is the cunning of history.

Is the pen mightier than the sword in Saudi Arabia?

Saudi Stories: The writer

Bill Law, Reporter, Saudi Stories

BBC website 11 July, 2005

Hamza al-Mizeini describes himself as "an ordinary guy, not a brave man", but this softly-spoken professor of linguistics is anything but ordinary.
Articles Mr Mizeini has written over the past two years condemning the slide into extremism at his own university and within the Saudi education system provoked the wrath of religious conservatives.
"I wrote about some religious and social issues that got parts of the establishment very angry. They wanted to settle a score with me," he told me at his home in a suburb of Riyadh.
His opponents bombarded him with hate-filled emails and text messages. He received numerous death threats, including one from a fellow academic.
The writer ignored the threats and kept writing. Early in 2005, though, he found himself hauled up in front of the Sharia court.
Courageous stance
Mr Mizeini had become the pawn in a behind the scenes power struggle between the liberal-leaning Crown Prince Abdullah, the effective head of state, and the conservative religious authorities who control the country's judiciary.
The conservatives hoped to use the Mizeini case to silence their critics.
And they were gambling the government would stick to its official line of non-intervention in Sharia court rulings.
Six times over several months Mr Mizeini went before the judge and six times with enormous courage said simply: "You have no jurisdiction over me."
He cited regulations established by the crown prince that say any dispute between writers and others in the newspapers must be settled at the information ministry, not the court.
"This is what I kept telling the judge," he told me with a glint of amusement in his eyes.
Rush to judgment
Anxious to be seen as not openly intervening but frustrated by the persistence of the religious hardliners, Crown Prince Abdullah wrote a letter directing the case be dropped.

Knowing the letter was on its way, the judge abruptly brought Mr Mizeini's appearance forward.
"I asked the judge what the rush was, why he was bringing me to the court that day. And he said: 'Well, today is a suitable day.'"
The judge ordered Mr Mizeini to produce the letter from the crown prince.
"He knew that it was impossible for me to get a copy, and he said: 'If you don't bring me a copy, I'll issue my verdict.'
"I said: 'Look, I'm just telling you that Prince Abdullah issued his order. This is your job. Do whatever you like.'"
The judge promptly passed a sentence of 75 lashes and two months in jail.
Responsibility
The lashes were to be administered all at once which - had the order been carried out - could well have killed the slight and ageing Mr Mizeini.
When the writer challenged the judge again, he upped the sentence to 200 lashes.
But this time the hardliners had gone too far. Just hours after the verdict was passed, an angry Crown Prince Abdullah ordered it set aside.
Mr Mizeini says he will keep writing. "It's not a choice, it is a responsibility."
And what of the hard-line conservatives who tried to silence him?
"What made them strong in the past was that they were the only voice. They win when there is just one voice. Now there are many voices and they cannot win."

Link to other Saudi stories on: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4671393.stm

Bill Law writes here each Monday to accompany his series which is broadcast on Tuesdays at 0930 BST on Radio 4.
Saudi Stories programmes will also be available online at Radio 4's Listen again page.

An example of Mr Al Ma[i]z[e]ini’s articles:

Reforming Saudi Arabia's curricula

Hamza Qablan al-Mazini,

Al Watan 4 June 2004


Defenders of preserving the curricula currently followed in Saudi Arabian schools-including the curricula used in religious education-always use the same arguments to fight their corner, says Saudi commentator and academic Hamza Qablan al-Mazini in the Saudi daily al-Watan.
SERIOUS PROBLEMS: But these arguments do not stand up to close scrutiny, and are soon exposed as contradictions designed to divert attention away from the serious problems facing education in the country, as well as to sow doubts about the intentions of those calling for reform and to question their integrity.
I have already discussed one of these arguments (viz. that genuine reform must begin with scientific subjects such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, etc.) I proved that this particular argument was nothing more than a contradiction.
In this article, I will discuss several other contradictory arguments furthered by opponents of reform; I will prove that these arguments are too weak to stand in the way of reforming religious education in Saudi Arabia.
One of these inconsistent arguments goes like this: Those calling for reforming religious education are simply lackeys of the United States, which began calling for such reforms after September 11 in order to temper Muslim anger directed against it. According to this argument, traditional religious education deepens hatred of the United States by describing it as an aggressor bent on destroying Islam and humiliating Muslims.
But this is a spurious argument at best; it is an unjustified attempt to smear critics who at any rate are no less devout Muslims than those who pretend to defend religious curricula in their present form.
I do not want to appoint myself as a defense lawyer for reformers, for they can defend themselves better than I can. But I want to elaborate on my own experiences, not to defend myself, but to prove how weak these arguments really are.
One fact that disproves what the critics say is that I have been calling for reforming our education systems long before September 11 2001.
-I wrote a personal letter to the education minister more than eight years ago, suggesting a number of ways for reforming the education system. I even volunteered to serve on any committee formed by the ministry for this purpose. I subsequently received a reply signed by one of the minister's deputies telling me that my suggestions have been referred to the committee specializing in reforming Arabic language teaching; I have yet to hear about what happened to my suggestions.
-I wrote an article in al-Watan in which I opposed the principle of teaching primary school pupils English-on practical rather than ideological grounds.
-I wrote an article in Asharq al-Awsat on February 26 2000 (19 months before the attacks of 9-11) severely censuring what the education minister had to say about those who criticized the kingdom's education system. My article caused consternation in some quarters, and I was the subject of a fair bit of abuse.
Therefore, my criticism of the Saudi education system has nothing to do with September 11, the issues raised by the attacks, or with the positions adopted by the current U.S. administration regarding education in the Arab-Muslim world.
It therefore becomes clear that the argument saying that those criticizing education in general (and religious education in particular) are only doing the Americans' bidding is patently untrue-at least as far as I am concerned.
At any rate, my record shows that I am not a member of 'America's party.' In spite of my admiration for many aspects of American scientific, cultural, political, and social life, and in spite of the gratitude I feel for the excellent education I got in American universities, I share (with many American and non-American) observers a loathing for the arrogant and aggressive policies pursued by successive U.S. administrations against the Arab and Muslim nations.
I despise America's blind acquiescence to Israel's policy of aggression against the Palestinian people and the Arab nation in general.
To prove my point, I have translated many of Noam Chomsky's articles and lectures criticizing American foreign policy, especially post-September 11. I also translated statements made by many American and European politicians and intellectuals opposed to the foreign policy pursued by the current administration. Many of these translations were published by al-Watan.
In 2003, Cairo's Madbuli Press published a book I wrote containing translations of articles critical of American foreign policy.
NOT AN AMERICAN LACKEY: All these activities disprove the accusation that I am a lackey of the United States.
Another falsity advanced by opponents of reform is that our education system cannot be an incubator for terrorism, since if that were true, we would now have hundreds of thousands of terrorists in our midst.
This allegation lacks the essential statistical element that would have made it trustworthy, and can therefore be refuted with ease. It is not too hard to prove that our current curricula contribute toward producing extremists. Religious curricula in particular give teachers so inclined the legal justification they need to encourage extremism in their students. Present rules allow teachers to bring inciting tapes and other materials to schools, and to encourage students to listen to them, discuss them, and hold seminars around them-all of which provide fertile breeding grounds for extremism and recruiting future terrorists.
It was only thanks to God's mercy that more of our students did not end up as extremists. Some people are more easily influenced than others.
Another proof of the false nature of these accusations is the fact that those who defend current school curricula equate extremism with terrorist acts and other forms of violence-then allege that those who commit such acts were influenced from outside the kingdom.
Anyone with a close knowledge of domestic Saudi affairs realizes however that the sources of extremism are largely homegrown. Many of the sheikhs who have been issuing inflammatory edicts are still based here in their own mosques and among their students and supporters. Some of them even have their own websites.
Many extremist websites full of hatred not only towards non-Muslims but towards Muslims as well, are run by Saudis.
One aspect of domestic extremism is the phenomenon of accusing Saudi writers of apostasy, hypocrisy, secularism and subservience to the United States. Many moderate Saudi writers and sheikhs regularly receive threatening phone calls and emails. Saudi weeklies are full of inflammatory articles encouraging violence and extremism. In fact, the climate inside the kingdom is characterized by a worryingly high level of hatred and verbal violence.
The most important question that has to be asked is: Where does the ideology that nurtures such extremists come from?
Any sane person would undoubtedly admit that our schools with their teachers steeped in extremist culture have always been the primary source of such ideas.
Another falsity propagated by the enemies of reform says that extremism is not exclusive to Saudi Arabia, but is also prevalent in other countries such as Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco-conveniently overlooking the fact that many extremist movements outside the kingdom look to Saudi clerics for inspiration. A close look at the rhetoric used by non-Saudi extremists reveals that it is based on the extremist religious rhetoric prevalent in Saudi Arabia. In fact, many non-Saudi extremists studied in Saudi Arabia at the hands of Saudi sheikhs. Some of them embraced extremist ideology while they were in this country.
What I am trying to say here is that falsities can never help us solve our problems; we have to face up to them with honesty and frankness. We have to admit that our programs of religious education in their present form can (and frequently do) lead to extremism. We then have to remedy the situation.
Finally, even if we absolve religious education in this country of extremism, we cannot absolve it of failing to immunize young people against falling into the hands of extremist groups that exploit religious curricula for their own ends.

London 7/7/05

London bombs need calm response


By John Simpson BBC world affairs editor

BBC website 11 July 2005

Last Monday, when I wrote here that it was going to be quite a week, I didn't know the half of it.
I thought it would all be about the G8 summit at Gleneagles and the announcement of the 2012 Olympics.
Last week the single most-used word on the main search engines of the world was 'London'.
Now that the bombs have exploded, and thousands of newspaper pages and entire days of air time have been devoted to the horror of it all, and to the poor, decent people who are dead and missing, and to the misguided criminals responsible, perhaps we can stand back from it all and catch our breath.
Communal therapy
In advanced societies, media overkill is a necessary part of getting over something like this.
After a while, even we journalists get tired of going over the same thing again and again, and slowly the grip which the horror has had on us relaxes. It's a form of communal therapy.
Last week, when I listed the extraordinary events that were going to take place, I left one out: in some ways the most extraordinary of them all. It was the celebration to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Only four days after a savage series of bomb attacks in central London, half a million people turned out in the streets to applaud as the Queen, in an open car, led a parade of veterans down the Mall to Buckingham Palace.
When President Bush visited London last year, his security people insisted that the threat was so great he would have to drive in an armoured limousine from his apartments at the back of Buckingham Palace to a formal meeting with the Queen at the front of the building. If there is journalistic over-kill, there is also security over-kill.
Fortunately the Metropolitan Police, who refused to close down the traffic in large parts of central London during President Bush's visit, advised the Queen last week that it would be entirely safe for her to parade slowly down the Mall in the open.
It's important to keep everything, even security, in proportion.
The huge crowds who watched and joined in Sunday's parade were London's answer to all the fear and anger and excitability of the past few days; a Churchillian hand-signal to the bombers.
Walking in the hot sunshine in the Mall with my family, I could see that the people round me felt much as I did: they were quietly celebrating their freedom. Not chanting or burning flags or screaming insults at enemies real or imagined, just enjoying themselves.
And if there were people who were stupid or inadequate enough to make threatening calls to Muslim organisations, or shout at Muslims in the street (or - such is their ignorance - at Sikhs as well) we saw no sign of them in the Mall.
Undercover killings
When the big IRA bombing campaign first hit London in the 1970s, a famous columnist of the time, Bernard Levin, advised his readers to respond to the bombs as a refined hostess might respond to a dinner-guest who belched loudly at the table: just ignore it, he said.
At the time it seemed to me effete and mannered. Now I see it was exactly the right advice.
The first British response to IRA violence was the worst. The IRA was identified as an enemy which had to be destroyed.
In 1972, the British Army fired into the crowd at a big demonstration in the city of Derry, killing 14 innocent people.
There were undercover killings of IRA volunteers later, and a team of three IRA people were summarily executed when they were caught on an operation in Gibraltar.
All these things did was to convince many people in Northern Ireland that the British Government operated on the same low moral level as the IRA itself.
Fortunately, there was another strategy as well; and this one worked. It was to treat political violence like any other crime.
Painstaking police work caught the people who set the bombs; and when, in fits of panic and dishonesty, the wrong people were arrested and jailed, it was necessary to right the wrongs publicly - no matter how painful and damaging the results might be.
There are no short cuts to proper justice, just as there are no short cuts to decent government.
Slowly, people throughout Ireland realised that the IRA, and the Protestant militia groups which had grown up in imitation of them, had nothing to offer but violence and chaos. It was the effective end of the IRA.
Countering political violence isn't easy. It takes rigid self-discipline on the part of government and people. And it takes a degree of proportion and self-awareness too. Thursday was a terrible day for London; yet we mustn't forget that much the same number of people died that day in Iraq, and no one dedicated acres of newsprint to them.
We must hunt the bombers down, because they have committed a vicious crime against society. But we mustn't throw away the calm and self-possession which every decent society needs. It's not weakness; it's our greatest strength.

If It's a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution

By Thomas L Friedman

New York Times 8 July 2005

Yesterday's bombings in downtown London are profoundly disturbing. In part, that is because a bombing in our mother country and closest ally, England, is almost like a bombing in our own country. In part, it's because one assault may have involved a suicide bomber, bringing this terrible jihadist weapon into the heart of a major Western capital. That would be deeply troubling because open societies depend on trust - on trusting that the person sitting next to you on the bus or subway is not wearing dynamite.
The attacks are also deeply disturbing because when jihadist bombers take their madness into the heart of our open societies, our societies are never again quite as open. Indeed, we all just lost a little freedom yesterday.
But maybe the most important aspect of the London bombings is this: When jihadist-style bombings happen in Riyadh, that is a Muslim-Muslim problem. That is a police problem for Saudi Arabia. But when Al-Qaeda-like bombings come to the London Underground, that becomes a civilizational problem. Every Muslim living in a Western society suddenly becomes a suspect, becomes a potential walking bomb. And when that happens, it means Western countries are going to be tempted to crack down even harder on their own Muslim populations.
That, too, is deeply troubling. The more Western societies - particularly the big European societies, which have much larger Muslim populations than America - look on their own Muslims with suspicion, the more internal tensions this creates, and the more alienated their already alienated Muslim youth become. This is exactly what Osama bin Laden dreamed of with 9/11: to create a great gulf between the Muslim world and the globalizing West.
So this is a critical moment. We must do all we can to limit the civilizational fallout from this bombing. But this is not going to be easy. Why? Because unlike after 9/11, there is no obvious, easy target to retaliate against for bombings like those in London. There are no obvious terrorist headquarters and training camps in Afghanistan that we can hit with cruise missiles. The Al Qaeda threat has metastasized and become franchised. It is no longer vertical, something that we can punch in the face. It is now horizontal, flat and widely distributed, operating through the Internet and tiny cells.
Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent.
And because I think that would be a disaster, it is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult. It takes a village.
What do I mean? I mean that the greatest restraint on human behavior is never a policeman or a border guard. The greatest restraint on human behavior is what a culture and a religion deem shameful. It is what the village and its religious and political elders say is wrong or not allowed. Many people said Palestinian suicide bombing was the spontaneous reaction of frustrated Palestinian youth. But when Palestinians decided that it was in their interest to have a cease-fire with Israel, those bombings stopped cold. The village said enough was enough.
The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of jihadist attacks. When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel involving the prophet Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.
Some Muslim leaders have taken up this challenge. This past week in Jordan, King Abdullah II hosted an impressive conference in Amman for moderate Muslim thinkers and clerics who want to take back their faith from those who have tried to hijack it. But this has to go further and wider.
The double-decker buses of London and the subways of Paris, as well as the covered markets of Riyadh, Bali and Cairo, will never be secure as long as the Muslim village and elders do not take on, delegitimize, condemn and isolate the extremists in their midst.

We’ve globalised terror, but the solution is local

Simon Jenkins

Sunday Times 10 July 2005

[Extract]

The sane response to urban terrorism is to regard it as an avoidable accident, the doings of madmen. Fanatics and psychopaths have long been inclined to urban mayhem. Gracing them with a politico-religious cause merely awards them spurious legitimacy, as “political status” did the IRA. It aids their fundraising and recruitment. Accordingly I prefer the response given in The Times on Friday by RP Eddy, the former American counter-terrorism chief. He pleaded for less searching for panoptic international remedies and more attention to “first preventers”, to stopping the terrorist by better policing on the ground.
Most bombings since 9/11 have been the work of local, dysfunctional gangs with at best tenuous links to a fundamentalist Mr Big. Combating these gangs demands assiduous neighbourhood intelligence. It requires contact at street level with minority communities everywhere. Last week’s terrorists must live somewhere, eat somewhere and buy their materials somewhere. They are unlikely to be found among the bunkers, training camps, supercomputers and weapons of mass destruction that so mesmerise the West’s kit-obsessed security industry.
Yet such local policing has long been anathema to the Home Office’s target-setters. Nothing has put Britain more at risk than their campaign to get police off the streets and into cars and offices and onto computer terminals. On Thursday 1,500 constables were considered so surplus in London as to be sent north to “guard” the G8 potentates at their Gleneagles retreat.
The truth is that global is glamorous but detail is dull. The greatest fallacy follows from globalising the world’s ills and then tying them up in single bundles. We have been watching it all week. The world is portrayed as one family, alternately happy and unhappy. We are bidden to attend to global poverty, global warming, global terrorism, even global sport. We spend billions pretending to do something about them.
Thursday’s bombs invite the same inflation, that they are part of a global war on terror and therefore somehow beyond our control. They must not be given that importance. They are a crime, a failure of domestic policing yet one from which no city can be immune.
They are not politically significant. They do not impoverish millions or alter the balance of world power. They are not an act of war between states, actual or virtual. They in no way diminish Britain’s national security or way of life. We are too robust for that. Therefore the bombs do not justify some new illiberalism from Blair, Charles Clarke and the security lobby.
The cause of democracy is not damaged by terrorism. Bombs will always get through. But the menace of terror lies in the poison it can inject into the community, tugging at its freedoms and taunting its tolerance. To that menace, democracy must be immune.

Full text: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1688040,00.html

I resent your success. I hate you and your kind. So I bomb you

Roger Scruton

The Times 9 July 2005

[Extract]

In dealing with terrorism you are confronting a resentment that is not concerned to improve the lot of anyone, but only to destroy the thing it hates. That is what appeals in terrorism, since hatred is a much easier and less demanding emotion to live by than love, and is much more effective in recruiting a following. And when the object of hatred is a group, a race, a class or a nation, we can furnish from our hatred a comprehensive stance towards the world. That way hatred brings order out of chaos, and decision out of uncertainty — the perfect solution to the alienated Muslim, lost in a world that denies his religion, and which his religion in turn denies.
Of course hatred has other causes besides resentment. Someone who has suffered an injustice may very well hate the person who committed it. However, such hatred is precisely targeted, and cannot be satisfied by attacking some innocent substitute. Hatred born of resentment is not like that. It is a passion bound up with the very identity of the one who feels it, and rejoices in damaging others purely by virtue of their membership of the targeted group. Resentment will always prefer indiscriminate mass murder to a carefully targeted punishment. Indeed, the more innocent the victim, the more satisfying the act. For this is the proof of holiness, that you are able to condemn people to death purely for being bourgeois, rich, Jewish, or whatever, and without examining their moral record.
The tendency to resent lies in all of us, and can be overcome only by a discipline that tells us to blame faults in ourselves and to forgive faults in others. This discipline lies at the heart of Christianity and many argue that it lies at the heart of Islam too. If that is so, it is time for Muslims to organise against those who preach resentment in the name of their religion, and who regard the crimes of last Thursday as virtuous deeds, performed with God’s blessing, in a holy cause.

Full text: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,1,00.html then use search facility

We're still New Yorkers

By Nigel Farndale

Sunday Telegraph 10 July 2005

Something approaching the five stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - seemed to roil the hearts of Londoners on Thursday.
The denial phase was manifest in the rumours. I was at a school sports day in a London park when the mobiles of around 200 parents began ringing. Ten people killed in a train crash at Liverpool Street station - that was the initial consensus. Then fathers in suits, who had given up trying to get to work and had decided to come along to sports day instead, began arriving. They dismissed the rumours of terrorist involvement and talked of "a power surge" being to blame, even though, if pressed, few could have explained quite what a power surge actually was.
There was a vague, unfocussed feeling of excitement. With the first mention of bombs came nervy jokes about the French being bad Olympic bid losers. One thing about which all we rumour mongers were agreed was that a suicide bomber had definitely been shot by security forces while attempting to blow up Canary Wharf.
Back home in front of our television sets the feelings of violation and anger set in. This was our town those bastards were bombing - our "manor", as David Beckham had so whimsically called it a few hours earlier, in more innocent times. If asked in an opinion poll in the heat of that moment what we thought about internment for terror suspects most of us, I suspect, would have approved. Bulldozing of any mosques caught preaching hatred of the West? The sooner the better.
Bringing back hanging for terrorists? Make that public hangings - no, public hangings, drawings and quarterings… But the anger cooled to be replaced by feelings of helplessness and vulnerability.
What point is there in threatening fanatics with hanging when they are prepared to blow themselves up for their cause? And if they could do what they did with such apparent ease on the first day of the G8 summit, when we were on a reasonably high state of alert, then what?
A picture of Tony Blair taken just after he heard the news on Thursday suggests the same thoughts were running through his head. He is looking down at his shoes. Like a puppet who has had its strings cut, his arms are limp by his sides. He casts a short shadow in the morning sun. The urge to bargain at such moments must be strong: did we bring this on ourselves with the war in Iraq? Would it help if we followed Spain's spineless example and pulled our troops out?
Next came the depressing realisation that it could have been any of us on those Tubes, on that bus. A friend of mine walked through Aldgate Station three minutes before the bomb went off. How arbitrary the difference between his being alive and dead now seems. Had she not been at the sports day, my wife could well have been on one of those trains going into the City: her usual route, her usual time.
Finally, acceptance. We knew it was going to happen and it happened. And it would probably have happened anyway, without the Iraq war, just as 9/11 happened without it. The mayor of Paris got it wrong when he said "We're all Londoners now". After 9/11 we all became Americans, and that is what everyone in the West still is.