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.