Last Straw

Lucky for that “War on Ter­ror” thing ay? Ter­ror­ist incid­ents have increased year on year since Bush took power in 2001. Before that they were decreas­ing year on year. My mother man­aged to phone me today from New Zea­l­and, to check I hadn’t been blown up. She advised that I take care with my words.

The first hint I received of some­thing amiss in Lon­don this morn­ing was full bus loads of people drift­ing end­lessly past my bus stop, and a long walk to work. This after­noon there has been tens of thou­sands of people walk­ing the streets of Lon­don in the absence of pub­lic trans­port. On the BBC there has been incess­ant report­ing that people “can’t believe this has happened.” Yeah right, it’s no damn sur­prise and Lon­don­ers know it. Today’s just extra spe­cial because the bombs were poin­ted the other way, just like Septem­ber 11.

Hav­ing elec­ted as Prime Min­is­ter a man who is argu­ably a war crim­inal I must say I find it dif­fi­cult to muster up the kind of sym­pathy that would usu­ally befit a nation in times like these, just as I found it dif­fi­cult to muster up sym­pathy for the U.S. as a nation on Septem­ber 11. Then as now the over­whelm­ing feel­ing is one of grim pre­dict­ab­il­ity. I have dulled empty feel­ings for those in the middle of it all, just as I do for hun­dreds of thou­sands — in fact mil­lions — of Iraqis, Palestini­ans, and end­less other peoples killed by the gangs we call our gov­ern­ments. It’s just a little dif­fi­cult to get emo­tional about every killing when they hap­pen in the num­bers they do. Am I meant to be more emo­tional today because they’re Westerners?

After return­ing to Lon­don from Iraq in March 2003 I often found myself down at the local pub in dis­cus­sions with people who were, one, con­fid­ent they lived in a demo­cracy, and two, indif­fer­ent about the inva­sion of Iraq. I’ve always found it a little dif­fi­cult to deal with such indif­fer­ence. “At the end of the day,” I used to say to them, “you can enjoy your pint of beer in the sun and ignore the mur­der­ous actions of your so-called demo­cratic gov­ern­ment in faraway lands, but don’t go com­plain­ing when someone comes look­ing for some justice in the form of a bomb under your ass.”

And from what I’ve gleaned today they’re not. Many Brits seem to know the score.

Whether this was the act of MI6/MI5 oper­at­ives or the so-called “Al-Qaeda,” Blair has blood on his hands. And while we’re going to be hear­ing a lot about “us” and “them,” there’s little doubt in my mind that the con­nec­tion between the death of “their” babies and the death of “ours” will never be made in the com­ing media storm. Instead it will be Blair to the res­cue!! Bring on 1984!!

Accord­ing to Wiki­pe­dia, a per­son using the name “Nur al-Iman,” pos­ted to the jihadist web­site Al-Qal’ah (Fort­ress), a state­ment issued by “The Secret Organ­isa­tion Group of Al-Qa’ida of Jihad Organ­iz­a­tion in Europe.” In the state­ment, the group claims respons­ib­il­ity for the Lon­don attack. The fol­low­ing is a trans­lated text of the state­ment (minus all the god stuff):

Nation of Islam and Arab nation: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge against the Brit­ish Zion­ist cru­sader gov­ern­ment in retali­ation for the mas­sacres Bri­tain is com­mit­ting in Iraq and Afgh­anistan. The heroic mujahideen have car­ried out a blessed raid in Lon­don. Bri­tain is now burn­ing with fear, ter­ror and panic in its north­ern, south­ern, east­ern, and west­ern quarters.

We have repeatedly warned the Brit­ish gov­ern­ment and people. We have ful­filled our prom­ise and car­ried out our blessed mil­it­ary raid in Bri­tain after our mujahideen exer­ted strenu­ous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the suc­cess of the raid.

We con­tinue to warn the gov­ern­ments of Den­mark and Italy and all the cru­sader gov­ern­ments that they will be pun­ished in the same way if they do not with­draw their troops from Iraq and Afgh­anistan. He who warns is excused.

Mike Mar­qusee writes for Coun­ter­punch:

Blair has already appeared on tele­vi­sion to address the nation … Even by Blair’s stand­ards, it was a per­form­ance of naus­eat­ing hypo­crisy, as he sought to seize the moral high ground in rela­tion to viol­ence and destruc­tion that he him­self helped unleash.

Foment­ing and exploit­ing fear has been a spe­ci­al­ity of the Blair regime. Asylum seekers, teen­agers wear­ing hoods, mil­it­ant Muslims, anarch­ists, pae­do­philes the list of tar­gets is lengthy and fright­en­ingly flex­ible. Whenever there is a need to dis­tract people from the impact of the government’s neo-liberal eco­nomic policies, from its fail­ure to rebuild the pub­lic sec­tor, from its mis­be­got­ten for­eign adven­tures, a new scape­goat is con­jured up. The bomb blasts may aid this pro­cess, but there is also reason to hope that this time there will be sub­stan­tial pub­lic resistance.

I hope so Mike, I hope so.