{"id":2523,"date":"2010-07-07T22:45:28","date_gmt":"2010-07-07T21:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2010\/07\/07\/london_bombings_fifth_anniversary_post"},"modified":"2025-10-08T11:49:24","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T10:49:24","slug":"london_bombings_fifth_anniversary_post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2010\/07\/07\/london_bombings_fifth_anniversary_post","title":{"rendered":"London bombings: fifth anniversary post"},"content":{"rendered":"

I refuse to call them 7\/7. The first time I saw that was on the front page of the Times the next day. It seemed quite clear to me that this was their way of linking the event to 9\/11, making it look like the UK now really stood next to the USA as a fellow victim of terrorism (or just "terror"), that we were all the more justified in "standing by them" in their wars and disregarding any notion that the last government's slavish adherence to American policy may have had anything to do with it or that there may have been any legitimate grievances even if they were acted on wrongfully. Now, it seems that there is to be no public commemoration and neither the current mayor of London, Boris Johnson, nor David Cameron are to appear in person at the wreath-laying ceremony<\/a>. Clearly, the mood has changed.<\/p>\n

The event was held at the "7\/7" memorial site in Hyde Park — what must be one of the ugliest memorials, consisting of 52 steel pillars representing those who died. Survivors and their families laid flowers by the pillars, and a wreath was laid in the name of Cameron, who as already stated was not there personally. The government claims that they did not hold any kind of official event because survivors and their families had said that "after five years, they no longer look to government to lead the commemorations. They prefer to remember their loved ones in their own way". However, the father of one of the dead called it "disappointing" and a woman who lost her leg at Aldgate said that a group she belongs to had contacted the Department for Culture, Media and Support to ask what they were planning to do and was told "they were not prepared to do anything because there will be plenty of anniversaries".<\/p>\n

Clearly, the mood has changed somewhat; it seems that the new government isn't willing to claim the mess of the old one as its own, even though they actually supported both the Afghan and the Iraq war. Perhaps they suppose that getting rid of New Labour marks some sort of fresh start, but some of the worst aspects of how the attack affected the atmosphere in the UK could be seen in the Tory-associated press and think tanks. It hasn't been the Daily Mirror, for the most part (as dreadful a paper as it's become since the departure of Piers Morgan), which has spread the inflammatory stories about this and that concession being made to Muslims at others' expense, which often prove to be wholly or partly untruthful.<\/p>\n

We saw another of them yesterday: a swimming pool whose windows had been obscured with translucent film because, supposedly, Muslims had complained that people could see them in a state of semi-undress from outside. However, according to the Daily Mirror, most<\/em>, as opposed to all, of the complaints came from Muslims according to a local council official. The blog Tabloid Watch exposed the story<\/a>, which originated with a small number of complaints which got reported in the local media and were repeated in the stories in the national press, along with quotes from a spokesman for the "Taxpayers' Alliance" who seemed not to have been to the affected swimming pool (the TPA did not respond to enquiries as to whether he had been). The point is that the majority's needs appeared to have been sacrificed to an unworthy minority, when in fact the number of complaints about the film on the windows had been tiny.<\/p>\n

There was story after story about Muslims receiving "special treatment" and the general attitude seemed (and to some extent still seems) as though Muslims weren't worthy of decent treatment, let alone special treatment. Besides the "special treatment" front-page outrage stories, we've seen the front-page rants against niqabi<\/em> women, the "insiders" with disparaging things to say about Muslims and what Muslims say when in each other's company, several of whose stories didn't add up and at least one of whom was proved to be a liar. We've had the think-tank "exposés" based on inaccurate information supplied by people with an axe to grind, and we had the lengthy, defamatory articles in the Telegraph and Spectator, in the latter case by writers hired by Boris Johnson, now mayor of London. None of it was entirely new (the ravings of Harry "Will" Cummins in the Sunday Telegraph<\/em> appeared a year before the bombings) but it certainly escalated, and it appeared that Muslims were fair game.<\/p>\n

Labour responded weakly with a "religious hatred" law, ostensibly an extension of the existing race-hate law to religious groups, but it was watered down by abusive or insulting words being removed as criteria, leaving only threatening ones. Surely, the criteria should be whether the claim is true or not: a generalisation about a whole group based on a small group from among them, or where more than one group is involved but only one is mentioned in a story, or other important facts are played down or an unverifiable claim is presented prominently as fact, and the effect of the story is to attract hostility to a particular group, it should surely meet the criteria for religious hatred and some sort of sanction should apply, and if the guilty party is a newspaper, the sanction should include suspending their circulation.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the reason nobody really wants to commemorate the bombings is that people realise that British culture gained nothing much positive from it; in fact, it caused an awful lot of bitterness as various groups attacked others on certain blogs and in newspaper articles for supposedly using "root causes" to justify acts of terrorism. It brought about no significant political change, and when an innocent person was gunned down by police on the Tube two weeks and a day later, not a single person even lost their job. All in all, given the poisonous effect it had on the culture, no good can really come of reminding people of it again, so leaving the ceremony to the families was probably the best idea.<\/p>\n

I wrote about my day that day here<\/a>; there is an article on the subject on MuslimMatters<\/a> today and a review by Peter Oborne of a new book on the effect of the bombings on the Muslim community here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I refuse to call them 7\/7. The first time I saw that was on the front page of the Times the next day. It seemed quite clear to me that this was their way...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london_bombings"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-EH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2523"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41558,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2523\/revisions\/41558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}