Further thoughts on yesterday’s bombings

It’s the end of the day after London’s first experience of al-Qa’ida-style terrorism; the death toll continues to rise (although they do not believe it will reach 100), and the media is full of reports of missing people and the bravery of the emergency services. The fingers are, as expected, being pointed at al-Qa’ida although not much is definitely known about what led up to the incidents other than one man with “olive” skin was seen in an agitated state fidding with something in his bag not long before the Tavistock Square bombing.

It should be clarified that one, rather than two as previously thought, of these attacks directly hit a Muslim district, namely the Edgware Road bomb. The other was travelling on the Circle Line from Aldgate, not Aldgate East, to Liverpool Street, meaning that it had come along the Thames from the West End through the City. The line through the East End, where the Asian Muslims live, is the Hammersmith and City line through Aldgate East. (Then again, it’s possible that the culprits did not know the bombs would explode at Aldgate and Edgware Road.)

Various incidents of hostility to Muslims have been reported, including an arson attack on a mosque in Leeds and abusive phonecalls to mosques and Muslim organisations. I mentioned to people I had instant-message conversations with yesterday and today that the proof of the pudding would be jumu’ah today, and there has been, to my knowledge, no trouble. The worst is expected tonight from drunks tonight after the closing of the pubs around 11pm. I don’t fear a mob backlash, because for that you need people to whip up the mob, and the sort of people who would do something like that are held in no great esteem in London, and may be looking at imminent jail time for race hate offences. I am more worried about this being used as an excuse to step up “security” by curbing civil liberties.

I must say, I am getting pretty annoyed with the recurrent attempts to establish “7/7” as the name for this event. This convention was used for the 9/11 attacks because there was no other succint way of describing them. This was the first time I heard the Madrid bombings referred to as anything other than “the Madrid bombing” or something like that. This incident was not exactly 9/11 anyway and I don’t entirely buy the al-Qa’ida story, for reasons John B spells out here:

The bombs were far too rubbish to be the work of a global terror network with any kind of supply chain: the terrorists didn’t even have any Semtex, hardly killed anyone ([less than] 100 people is rubbish if you’re aiming to maximise casualties), and didn’t cause any property damage. And the amount of collaboration and organisation required was negligible: “blow trains up around 9AM tomorrow. See ya”.

This morning the possibility of all the attacks being the work of a single person was even mentioned, although they have now ruled that out. But the last terrorist attacks we had in London – a series of pipe bombings – turned out to be the work of a single attacker, namely David “I’m a nazi and I like killing people” Copeland.

Even if the attacks were the work of more than one person, it doesn’t necessarily point to al-Qa’ida, even if those responsible were Muslims. This was the first attack in which it would be obvious to any local Muslim that Muslims would be in the front line (the embassy bombings in east Africa, for example, were done during the morning prayers, when it was imagined that Muslims would be off the streets and in the mosques). The attack was on purely civilian targets, rather than military (eg. the Pentagon, the USS Cole), political (Washington) or economic (the WTC), and the damage caused was relatively minor (a bus and a few train carriages, rather than a bridge or a power station, or any other whole building).

Then again, it might not matter who did this, because whatever evidence does come up is likely to be used as an excuse to blame it on al-Qa’ida, despite the weakness of previous al-Qa’ida links: that suicide note, which appeared to have been written by a non-Muslim without basic Islamic knowledge, which debunks any Israeli link, and what the English-language media has so far not told us about last year’s Madrid bombings:

For their part, the conservatives have, since then, devoted all their strenuous efforts to defending their record. They also insist that too many question marks remain about the 2004 attacks – the physical perpetrators were petty Madrid-based criminals; the explosives used were sold by traffickers in northern Spain who are suspected to have supplied Eta too; regional police authorities had known about those dealings since 2001 but had not acted. A local Socialist party official had even been visiting a suspected Islamist terrorist in jail. Ties between the suspected terrorists and the Moroccan secret services have surfaced.

Bear in mind: the worst atrocities of the Algerian civil war were massacres of Muslims carried out by members of the security services pretending to be “Islamic terrorists”.

The political comment has included some unsavoury material. As tasteless as George Galloway’s assessment that the bombing was a result of British participation in Iraq must have seemed coming just hours after the attacks, I can’t think why else terrorists of the al-Qa’ida stripe would hit London. I’m sure some people would have taken it to be a gleeful “I told you so” message, though I’m not so sure; the attacks were in, or fairly near, his constituency, after all.

Worse is the asinine comments by people trying to disprove any link by pointing out that 9/11 happened before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t know if everyone has forgotten, but they came after a decade of sanctions against Iraq leading to numerous children dying due to lack of essential medical equipment, after the raid on the medicine factory in Khartoum, the long-term stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia, and long-term aid to Israel, among other provocative actions. We see the same refusal to link what happens to us with what our governments do in the countries where the terrorists apparently come from. One can expect the right to act like this – to forcibly discourage anyone from questioning the actions of “their” politicians; one has to wonder why people on the left would jump in with them and display similar selective blindness and defamatory vitriol.

But again, I’d like to voice my continued opposition to any anti-libertarian “security” measures which might be pushed through on the back of these attacks. The last time such things happened, in the 1970s, resulted in a number of people doing years of jail time for bombings in which they were not even remotely involved – and that was when there was a campaign, rather than just one incident! There were the embassy bombings, and then nothing else. There was 9/11, and then nothing else. Madrid, and then nothing else. We can’t assume that this is part of a campaign! We can’t let fear get the better of us! I honoured what my mother told me, that I shouldn’t go to London, but someone was trying to persuade me not to go even to Croydon to get my hair cut. I have heard of two incidents in the past when a bus got the top deck ripped off it, and they were caused by the driver going into a low bridge or a building by mistake! (One of these was in Aberystwyth in October 1996 when I was a student there.) If you get injured or killed on the bus or train, an accident is by far the most likely cause. If we talk about not being cowed by terrorists, and then sign our liberties away, we prove ourselves to be mealy-mouthed cowards.