It looks like the London bombings may have been suicide attacks after all. The Times has all the facts, rather than Sky News (the British version of Fox) speculation.
Property belonging to three of the suspects has been found at three of the bombsites and investigations have led to the arrest of a man in northern England after raids in Leeds which seem to have turned up a cache of explosives.
With the news that all the bombers seem to have been British, the extreme right has trotted out a whole slew of opinion on Britain in general and London in particular being a "hotbed of Islamist terror". While it is true that the Moslem community are waking up to the fact that they have not done enough to defeat the teror-mongers, that same extreme rightwing must also shoulder some of the blame for the polarization which has proven a fertile ground for Islamic extremism.
Here again is the London Times, detailling the findings of reports into racial rioting in the home area of the London bombers back in 2001. The investigations were shocked by the "depth of polarisation" and found found communities whose lives "often do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote meaningful interchange". The white and ethnic minority communites were effectively living “parallel lives”.
This retreat behind ethnic lines was also documented by a separate independent inquiry into Bradford. The inquiry by Lord Ouseley, the former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), discovered a city fragmenting along ethnic, religious and cultural lines. Schools were places of "virtual apartheid” where racial conflict, harassment and “Islamophobia” thrive.
Communities had little, if anything, to do with people outside their race or religion. White people believed that there was favouritism towards the ethnic minorities and a “white flight” of the middle class had left an “underclass” of poor whites. At the same time Muslims said that they were the victims of prejudice.
The reports also pointed the finger at those who wished to axploit this polarisation. For those non-British readers unfamiliar with the British National Party (BNP), they are a small but vocal group of far-right bigots - remnants of the "little Englanders" who yearn for the days of the Empire and white supremacy. The are particulary strong in the Yorkshire heartlands where their brand of xenophobic nazism plays to the generalised fear of the unknown.
the Europhobia blog gets right to the heart of the matter:
If you were a young Muslim, British born, being told by a party that professes to be the party of Britain, of the nation, that you were not and never could be British, how would you feel? Would you feel included in society? Would you feel any love for your fellow countrymen? Would you even consider them your fellow countrymen?...
It would take an extended campaign of lies and distortions to convince me that Britain is anything other than Great, even while I can see its flaws. This is precisely what the Muslim population of West Yorkshire have been subjected to by the BNP for the last decade.
It is in the BNP's interest for Britain's Muslim youth to rise up and cause trouble - it would, in their view, prove their twisted take on this country to be right. And so the BNP have been doing their best to provoke, to raise hatred, to cause the people they have long claimed to be dangerous into actually acting in the ways that Griffin and his kind have always professed that they would.
Already, the BNP's policy has begun to work. After "retaliatory" attacks on Mosques in London and Liverpool over the last few days, the anti-Muslim violence has now spread, with more attacks reported in London, Birkenhead, Bristol and elsewhere today. They have already started to use images of the destroyed bus on their political campaign material, in one of the most callous propaganda actions I can remember.
The BNP are as happy about these attacks as those who support the terrorists are. The BNP have benefited more from the attacks than anyone. If the bombers were from West Yorkshire, the BNP helped provoke these attacks as much as anyone.
Yet these prenicious and small-souled people get a great deal of backing from the US. When various BNP members, including their leader Nick Griffin, were arrested after being secretly taped admitting to crimes - including physical assault, possession of an illegal firearm and criminal property damage - motivated by their bigotry commenters on the Free Republic report of the arrests were quick to agree with the idea that Islam is, whether moderate or extremist, a "wicked religion". Other American rightwingers were quick to paint the arrest as an assault on free speech, ignoring the fact that Griffin had been arrested for criminal damage as well as the charge of "incitement to commit racial hatred". The latter charge was the only one they mentioned.
Sites such as Jihadwatch and others all tacitly supported bigotry and, yes, terrorism by looking the other way. In some cases, the support isn't at all tacit. It's instructive to compare the comments on supposedly non-bigoted extreme rigfhtwing sites and those of self-confessed neo-nazi groups. There isn't any difference between them.
The American rightwing is quick to point the finger at anyone who questions the current administration's chosen course in waging the war on terror. They accuse dissenters of aiding terrorists by giving the latter publicity and showing the West is not united on how to win the war. Yet they then blithely turn and aid terrorists of their own stripe. They do so out of fear of the unknown and the different. They do so out of a closet bigotry and cry foul when that bigotry is shown for what it is. They do so out of a wish to seem brave - but as the people of London have shown this last week there is a true bravery beside which theirs is seen as the hollow sham it is.
In so doing it is they, not the left, who are aiding terrorists. Both their own xenophobic, craven and fearful kind and the extremists of Islam who also hope to capitalise on fear, division and polarisation.
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