The web is full of expressions of shock and outrage over what happened in London last week. While other people far more eloquent than me have said much that needed to be said, I’ll just add a few words.
The situation in Iraq is senselessly brutal and profoundly tragic. Innumerable thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children have died as a direct result of US arrogance and incompetence. Hundreds continue to die each week in the post-war turmoil that the US had amply been warned about.
Incomprehensibly Blair dragged a largely unwilling Britain into this morass. Before the war, in February 2003, hundreds of thousands of Britons marched in protest. It was possibly the largest protest of its kind in UK’s history but their prime minister decided to ride roughshod over the feelings of the majority of his countrymen.
And now we have 7/7.
What did these Britons of Pakistani origins achieve in killing innocent London commuters?
Will it stop the daily death toll in Iraq? No.
Will it change US policy in Iraq, Palestine or even Kashmir? No.
I imagine these suicide bombers already knew these answers. So that only leaves us with one logical motivation - revenge.
But how can anyone justify killing innocents to avenge the killing of other innocents? Especially by people who – unlike hundreds of millions of other Muslims – lived in a democratic, free and tolerant society. Clearly these men were not illiterate jahils.
One may suspect that these men no longer fitted in the society to which they were born. And, then one can only wonder about the bitterness and probable personal insecurities which led them to believe in a cause of such awful fanaticism. Mentally isolated from their community and absorbed by their warped sense of 'piety' they then inhumanly lashed out at their own countrymen in a fit of cold-blooded rage.
London bombing
London
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