by Seumas Milne
Two years on from the suicide bombings that devastated London's streets and
tube system, official Britain is still in the deepest denial about why this
country is a target for al-Qaida- style terror attacks. In the wake of the
abortive atrocities in London and Glasgow, there has been no shortage of
lurid media coverage of the "doctors' plot" that came so close to carnage,
nor of bombastic calls for the nation to stand firm against terrorists. The
Sun was yesterday handing out free union jacks to "fly in the face of
terror", while its heavyweight counterparts have been demanding ever greater
efforts by an increasingly intimidated Muslim community to demonstrate its
loyalty. Mercifully, the tone adopted by Gordon Brown has been less strident
than his predecessor's - he has avoided the rhetoric of the war on terror
and the shopping lists of new coercive powers favoured by Tony Blair in the
aftermath of the July 2005 attacks and last year's alleged transatlantic
airline plot.
But when it comes to the substance, there has been little change. The failed
bombings were, Brown insisted, an attack on "our British way of life" and
the "values that we represent", "unrelated" to the wars in Iraq or
Afghanistan or any other conflict. He compared the fight against the
bombers' ideology with the struggle against communism and called for a
similar "propaganda effort" to win "hearts and minds". In the days since,
this "it's nothing to do with the war" refrain has since been taken up with
gusto by large parts of the media. The pro-war Times and Telegraph have led
the field, with neoconservative commentators and politicians hammering home
the Blair-Bush message that terror is simply the product of an evil
ideology. Anyone who dissents or suggests a connection with Britain's
violent role in the Muslim world is portrayed as somehow soft on terrorism -
as the Liberal Democrats' Nick Clegg found when he tentatively referred to
Muslim grievances in the House of Commons earlier this week.
In an echo of Gordon Brown's cold war propaganda theme, defectors from
radical Islamist groups have been playing a prominent role in this campaign.
Rarely a TV debate goes by without Ed Husain, one-time member of Hizb
ut-Tahrir and now a British neocon pinup boy, or Hassan Butt, formerly of
the banned al-Muhajiroun group, insisting that this is all about people with
identity crises who are "hell-bent on destroying the west", . . .
Britain was not a target until it attacked the Muslim world. If the
bombers' real focus was, say, sexually liberal western lifestyles, they
would presumably be attacking cities like Amsterdam and Stockholm. . . .
Given Britain's role in the Muslim world, the surprise must be that there
haven't been more attacks. They have, after all, yet to reach anything like
the level of the campaign waged by the IRA. But that such attacks continue
is a central part of Blair's legacy - and the responsibility of a political
class that failed to hold to account those who launched an illegal war of
aggression with the most devastating human and political consequences. Until
the Brown government makes serious moves to end Britain's role in the
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the likelihood must be that the threat
will grow.
FULL TEXT
Robert Fisk, "The Reality of This
Barbaric Bombing," Independent, July 8, 2005
Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Terrorized by 'War
on Terror'," Washington Post, arch 25, 2007
["In this city, Muslims are more likely to be law-abiding than non-Muslims
and less likely to support the use of violence to achieve political ends
than non-Muslims," he told BBC Radio.--"London
mayor defends Muslims as bomb plot foiled," AFP, June 30, 2007]
Thomas L. Friedman, "At a Theater Near You ...," New York Times, July 4,
2007
John Pilger, "The
London bombs also belong to the new Prime Minister," johnpilger.com,
July 5, 2007
[Larry C. Johnson, a former senior US counterterrorist official for the CIA
and State Department who works as a consultant to governments on terrorism
issues, described the Friday episode as a "crock of crap":
" . . . gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of
Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real
high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second.
Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is
first and foremost an incediary. If the initial reports are true, the clown
driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an
Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons
of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying
shrapnel."--"Improvised
Un-explosive Devices?," nafeez.blogspot.com, July 6, 2007]
[There is nothing in Islam that advocates homicidal acts or mass killing. In
fact, while it's popular these days to demonize Islam as a violent faith, we
should recall that history's biggest mass murderers, Stalin, Genghis Khan,
Mao, and Hitler, were not Muslims. Auschwitz and the gulag did not come from
Islam. World wars I and II, the most murderous in history, were begun by
Christian nations and Japan.
. . . western governments have to face the fact that the wars they are waging
against the Muslim world are the primary generators of terrorism.--Eric
Margolis, "London and
Glasgow: Worse Than a Crime, a Mistake," lewrockwell.com, July 10,
2007]