Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘7/7’

July 7, 2005, this was the scene in London. Less than 24 hours after the city jubilantly celebrated being awarded the 2012 Olympics, terror struck on the London public transport network, claiming 57 lives and shaking the city, country and world to the core.

There was little evidence of the scene a year ago as I rode the Underground around London last week. There are posters up everywhere urging vigilance about things like unattended baggage or suspicious characters, much like those in the New York City subway, but for the most part it seemed to be business as usual (complete with typical line delays and suspensions wreaking commuter havoc).

One year ago, people were reacting in shock and horror. But today, even as memorial services are held, what has changed? Can we really say that things have improved, any more than we were able to say so a year, or two, or three, or four after the 9/11 attacks rocked New York? Whether people are fearful of threatened “anniversary attacks”, still mourning personal losses, or trying to come to grips with “what it all means”, it’s hard to find any lessons to learn here. Maybe that is the lesson after all; terrorism is senseless and teaches us nothing beyond what we already knew, that it is terrible and must be wiped out. Maybe to reach for any other lessons is to attribute too useful a purpose to such a senseless act. I don’t know, and I don’t pretend to have the answers.

Today, London and the whole world remembers. Another senseless anniversary, another senseless tragedy.

Via Damian Penny, this disgusting tidbit:

Advisers appointed by Tony Blair after the London bombings are proposing to scrap the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day because it is regarded as offensive to Muslims. They want to replace it with a Genocide Day that would recognise the mass murder of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia as well as people of other faiths.

[ . . . ]

The committees argue that the special status of Holocaust Memorial Day fuels extremists’ sense of alienation because it “excludes” Muslims.

[ . . . ]

Ibrahim Hewitt, chairman of the charity Interpal, said: “There are 500 Palestinian towns and villages that have been wiped out over the years. That’s pretty genocidal to me.”

I’d call it chutzpah of the worst kind, but that would be an insult… to the term.

The British ambassador to Israel, Simon McDonald, reaches out to Israel in an article in Maariv and rips into Ken Livingstone for his spoutings since 7/7:

Other opinions widely reported in Israel reflect neither the views of the British Government nor of the British people. Ken Livingstone speaks only for himself on this issue. His views about Israel are wrong. Government Ministers have made that plain. Tony Blair and Jack Straw have repeatedly condemned terrorist attacks against Israelis. A solitary opinion must not be allowed to poison a strong and healthy relationship between two allies. [ . . . ] A combination of mis-reporting and of Livingstone’s maverick opinion cannot be allowed to weaken the Israel-UK friendship.

Via Imshin, who shares my opinion that opinions like Livingstone’s — while not unique — are thankfully in the British minority.

Back in 2003, a stir was caused by this New York Times op-ed that, seemingly flying in the face of logic, argued that poverty doesn’t cause terrorism:

The stereotype that terrorists are driven to extremes by economic deprivation may never have held anywhere, least of all in the Middle East. New research by Claude Berrebi, a graduate student at Princeton, has found that 13 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers are from impoverished families, while about a third of the Palestinian population is in poverty. A remarkable 57 percent of suicide bombers have some education beyond high school, compared with just 15 percent of the population of comparable age.

This evidence corroborates findings for other Middle Eastern and Latin American terrorist groups. There should be little doubt that terrorists are drawn from society’s elites, not the dispossessed.

Impossible, people said. That can’t be right. It just doesn’t seem logical that people would strap bombs to their bodies and blow themselves up unless they were driven to it by total, utter hopelessness. Despite the fact that the 9/11 hijackers were far from poor, people simply didn’t want to believe it.

Now, two years later and the debate has been reignited with the London terror attacks and the realization that the bombers were British. Meryl points to an article in the Washington Post that discusses how the 7/7 terrorists were not products of poverty or despair, but middle-class, educated and privileged:

What will stop this revolt of privileged Muslims? One possibility is that it will be checked by the same process that derailed the revolt of the rich kids in America after the 1960s — namely, the counter-revolt of the poor kids. Poor Muslims simply can’t afford the rebellion of their wealthy brethren, and the havoc it has brought to the House of Islam. For make no mistake: The people suffering from jihadism are mostly Muslims.

This follows a discussion I was having on a web forum – yet another variation on the tired, endless debate on the “root causes” of terrorism and the people who argue that if we could just solve world poverty, we’d get rid of the recruits for all the jihad training camps in one fell swoop.

Now, I’m all for solving world poverty. It’s a nice dream, and it’s great that beauty queens get up and promise to attain it – along with world peace – in pageants around the world. But it’s time for us to realize once and for all that the notion that terror comes from poverty is utter hogwash.

Increasingly, terrorists aren’t poor people with nothing to lose, blowing themselves up because their lives are so miserable. The 9/11 bombers were engineers and scientists with American educations and jobs. The 7/7 bombers were also educated middle-class Britons. These weren’t people at the end of their ropes. They weren’t motivated by desperation. No, these are people born or educated in our cultures who are, for some reason, turning against it and deciding instead to attack it.

So if the terrorist aren’t being motivated by poverty, then perhaps they’re motivated by lack of freedom? That’s a fine theory as it goes, suits the Bush agenda of spreading democracy nicely, and works well when we look at terrorists in autocratic regimes. But how can you explain the British bombers, who lived in a very free society and chose to attack it? How do you explain the fact that the most extremist wings of Islamist political groups are emerging in Western countries?

This CBC column starts off well enough in doing just that, before taking the typical CBC turn and arguing that the world should capitulate to the terrorists’ demands to make them less angry. But let’s ignore that for a moment and focus on the actual valid points being made here (and yes, there are a few):

Go to any university campus in Canada’s larger cities and you’ll see the first seeds of a conservatism being born in young Muslims. For example, at the University of Toronto’s Muslim Students’ Association, male members won’t make eye contact with the females, they won’t address them, won’t sit next to them, and, worst of all, the female students pray behind the male students, even though in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, men and women pray side by side.

This separation between the genders is not happening at the universities in Karachi, Cairo or Dhaka, but for some reason, it is happening among Muslims in the West. While these “social regressions” may not seem like a big deal, they are emblematic of a larger trend towards rejecting everything that is western.

Like I said, from there the article isn’t much help, because it goes off into its appeasement arguments quite predictably for something published by the CBC.

So then what’s the solution? If they are blowing stuff up not because they’re poor, desperate or oppressed but because they’re comfortable, educated and free, then what’s the next step in the war on terror? How can we fight people who know our culture, understand it, are born and raised in it even, and then turn on it so vehemently? If we want to identify and fight the true “root causes” of terror, where do we go from here?

There is an interesting small point in the CBC article that perhaps wasn’t focused on enough:

Ali says that these youth just want to have a voice that opposes foreign occupation and wars in their countries but, unfortunately, moderate Muslim leadership is lacking, so they join hard-core fundamentalists groups, not necessarily because they are religious, but because it’s the only organized response out there.

I’d argue that right there is the starting point. The first and most pressing problem is a lack of a strong moderate Muslim leadership. We’ve all argued that the voices of moderation are too few and too weak to outweigh the voices of the extremists.

But this is a bit of a different spin on the issue. The argument here is that young people of any culture are just looking for a place to fit in, to get involved, to forge an identity. This is true of any culture in a multicultural society. Religious groups, community groups or social groups play very valuable roles in the lives of nearly everyone.

But if the only – or most readily available – options available to young Muslims are extremist political groups, then the indoctrination of this sort of hatred will only get worse.

Maybe that’s a place to start, then. An alternative voice. Another way for young Muslims to get involved in religious, community or political issues. Another sort of cultural identity, one that has nothing to do with hating the west or blowing stuff up. The one that everyone keeps assuring us exists, but that we see so little of. In short, “religion of peace” needs to be more than just a slogan used by Muslims to attempt to convince us on the outside; it needs to be what’s “cool” on the inside. It has to become cooler to be into peace than into militancy. After all, everyone has a need to belong somewhere. Maybe it’s time people started having better things to belong to.

I don’t know any of the the answers here. I don’t even know most of the questions. But maybe – just maybe – that’s a place to start.

4 more bombings on London transit have been reported:

Minor explosions using detonators only have sparked the evacuation of three Tube stations and the closure of three lines, a BBC correspondent has said.

Police cordoned off large areas around Warren Street, Oval and one of the Shepherd’s Bush Tube stations.

A route 26 bus in Hackney Road in Bethnal Green had its windows blown out by a blast. There were no injuries.

Police in London say they are not treating the situation as “a major incident yet”.

My first thought is this is too small-scale to be Al Quaeda again, and it sounds like lamebrain copycats. (Though anyone who would launch a copycat attack of one of the worst terrorist acts in history is, well, I can’t think of a rude enough word to describe them).

Details seem extremely sketchy at this stage. More to come, surely. I just hope everyone is okay.

Just a week after London was hit with one of the worst terrorist attacks in memory, the Guardian fawns over Hamas.

Sickening.

In the wake of yesterday’s bombings in London, one of the first announcements made from the G8 summit was a pledge of 3 billion in aid to the Palestinians.

Sure, because everyone knows the first thing we should do after being hit with a terrorist attack is give money to terrorists…

While reading online reactions, listening to the radio and hearing people speak today, something kept nagging at me. And that was this:

We can all (well, those of us who aren’t of the terrorist persuasion anyway) agree to be shocked, horrified and sympathetic when something like this happens. As far as that goes, we’re all united for about 10 seconds.

But then the next question is “what now?” And that’s where the divisions start, because that’s where everyone starts telling people that today’s attacks “mean” that… (insert their political viewpoint here).

Some examples:

• Anti-poverty activists are saying that today’s attacks “mean” that the fight to eradicate third-world poverty must be stepped up, because only that can solve terrorism.
• Anti-Americans are saying that today’s attacks “mean” that Bush’s foreign policies, especially in Iraq, are disastrous and responsible for the bombings today, since Blair is an ally of Bush.
• Defenders of the Iraq war are saying that today’s attacks “mean” that going into Iraq was the right thing to do after all, and that the world’s leaders should unite with the US and Britain.
• Socialists are saying that today’s attacks “mean” that the capitalist system is a failure and that only when true social harmony exists under a socialist system will terrorism be eradicated.
• I’m willing to bet that sellers of blue cheese are saying that today’s attacks “mean” that people should eat more blue cheese.

See what I’m saying?

The only thing that today’s bombings in London “mean” is that dozens of people are dead and hundreds more are injured in a cowardly attack. All the rest is just politics.

Britain has launched an intensive hunt for the terrorists responsible for today’s attacks to “bring them to justice”.

What would justice be for them, I wonder? A trial and sentencing to imprisonment or death? Torture? Mass murder?

No, I think justice – true justice – for them would be having to observe freedom persevere and win the fight.

These terrorists aren’t afraid of death and aren’t terribly bothered by imprisonment. Torture to them would be a propaganda tool. But what they truly fear – what they truly can’t stand – is freedom.

Justice would not be revenge, it would be victory.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone, in a statement this afternoon:

Finally, I wish to speak directly to those who came to London today to take life. I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others – that is why you are so dangerous.

To be fair, the rest of Livingstone’s speech was forceful and defiant in the face of terror. But I can’t help but wonder if he meant to stroke Al Quaeda’s egos with that statement, or if it was just an accident.

In the meantime, here’s CNSnews on why Livingstone is no Guiliani (via Israpundit):

London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s previous support of a Muslim cleric who advocates suicide bombings may cause him some embarrassment as he now must speak for the city in the wake of Thursday’s terrorist bombings.

Despite Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi’s support of suicide bombings and the targeting of American allies, Livingstone dubbed him a “man of peace” and a “moderate.”

The mayor invited Al-Qaradawi to London’s City Hall last year as an honored guest, and Livingstone appeared in a video shown at a solidarity conference for the sheikh on Feb. 17 of this year in Doha, Qatar. Livingstone has publicly defended the sheikh against critics in the media and various grassroots organizations.

Attacking Livingstone now may appear to be in bad taste. But in the coming days, as more people crawl out of the woodwork with their conspiracy theories, it’s useful to remember that appeasing terrorism can only ever lead to disaster.