One Day After

It's the day after the worst ever in a long line of terrorist attacks on London. It's the day after the second worst terrorist attack on the UK ever - the downing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 is still the worst. How are Londoners and Brits coping? What are their thoughts and feelings today?

Well, Gorgeous George and Tariq Ali of the Guardian have both been quick to say that the attacks were a consequence of Britain's involvement in the occupation of Iraq. Mostly nonsense, of course. The Iraqi occupation has undoubtably helped spead division and pushed some into the arms of the extremists, that much is acknowledged by all - hence the "flypaper theory". However, neither are particularly fast off the mark to include Afghanistan in their opinions because that was the virtuous war and neither want to really talk about how the attacks would have come anyway - London was always going to be a target if for no other reason than size and international stature.

The partisan Right, especially in the US, have been just as quick to call them appeasers. As if it helps any. As if anyone in Britain finds their partisan and deliberate myopia anything less than dismissively insulting.

Meanwhile, Canadian-with-opinions Mark Steyn and Amir Taheri are both vocal in British newspapers arguing that there is no sense to the Islamist's mission other than some great battle of ideologies which will admit of only one victor. That there must be, as another extremist likes to say, "no surrender". I will give Taheri credit for recognising that Islamists and Moslems are not congruent sets - Steyn gets none for his undisguised rabid sectarianism and single-minded pursuit of his own agenda for reasons identical to those of Galloway. Everyone on the right, I notice, is being awfully silent about the "flypaper theory".

The vocal partisans of the US Left are meanwhile busy bashing hard on Fox News for the poorly chosen words of commenters on that station. As if it helps any. As if anyone in Britain finds their attention to such piddling stuff at home any less dismissively insulting.

So here's a Brit's take on how the Brits think and feel about terrorism, bolstered by my own carefully chosen quotes from today's opinion leaders.

The British have had far more exposure to terrorism than the American people and it shows in their attitude. Yes, indeed 9/11 was a massive atrocity - far bigger on it's own than any single British event - but the "bigger so different" argument I have seen in a couple of American blogs today is spurious.

Since 1969, 3,600 British citizens in Northern Ireland have lost their lives due to a homegrown war of terror. There were 50 attacks which each killed more than five people, with an accompanying much larger number of wounded in many cases. Then there are the dozen or so major attacks on the British mainland that were carried out during the Irish "troubles", with 345 dead and hundreds injured.

The Brits know about immense, atrocious acts of terror - intimately and consistently for decades.

Which is why "The Thunderer", the opinion lead in the rightwing London Times, is today so revealing:

I DON’T normally travel to work by Tube. Yesterday I did. And as soon as they let me, I will do it again. So, I hope, will other Londoners who recognise their patriotic duty to resist the climate of fear that the terrorists hope to impose on us.

Our next journey to work will, with luck, take less than the three hours I endured yesterday. I finally made it across London to Wapping, after a complicated trek which included three miles on foot. But that’s fine. The only injury I sustained was a blister. Others were far, far less fortunate.

Those who were near the bombs or witnessed the carnage may take a long time to recover. The rest of us, though, owe it to ourselves, our city and our nation’s values to get right back on the Tube and pretend it never happened.

Al Qaida's real mission was to increase schisms between Moslems and the rest of the world. Bin Laden and his cohorts are praying for an indescriminate backlash which will further polarise the world and push even more Moslems into their camp. It's all about personal power and self-agrandisement, whatever political labels or theories may be hung around the self-interest. Terrorism always has been.

A terrorist organisation such as al-Qaeda calculates that, say, forty deaths can cause ten million people to live in fear, to cease to use the Tube, to think about moving out of London altogether. If true, that is a very effective hit rate. But it depends crucially on us fulfilling the role they have designed for us.

We don’t have to. We can show the terrorists — after all we did it to the Germans in the Second World War — that we won’t let their bombs change our way of life. We don’t have to be cowed. We can choose instead to be proud of our courage in the face of adversity, and of our determination to carry on our lives regardless. That is the true British spirit.

Yesterday an Islamist website linked to al-Qaeda claimed that “Britain is burning with fear”. Let us not give them the satisfaction of believing that. Let’s get back on the Tube, back on the buses and back on the streets. Britain deserves no less.

The staunchly socialist Glasgow Herald agrees and has a warning for those who would, through fear of what might be, stifle the plurality and free speech that work against the terrorist's mission:

It is a cruel paradox that terrorism is able to exploit open society, and the right it confers, to move about freely to seek to destroy that society and the values it cherishes. We need to defend our freedoms, but we must do so without eroding them. Identity cards, had they been in place, probably would not have prevented the bombings. There are enough warnings in the flawed anti-terror legislation to be very wary of reining in individual freedoms for a dubious and perhaps unattainable security aim. Intelligence is the key.

In fact, as the Independent newspaper shows by a collection of reactions, the point is well understood by every segment of the British population.

We must not be bullied into stifling debate. We must be free, still, to discuss whether involvement in Iraq is being conducted properly, whether the wider war in terror is being wages competently, whether sacrifices of personal freedom for the sake of that war are worthwhile. We cannot let the terrorists railroad us into the worst form of cowardice - giving up that which makes us free. For that would be the ultimate defeat. It would play into their hands by making the schisms in our modern, pluralistic world even wider and more exploitable.

Even the Telegraph's leader disagrees with Steyn's willing aquiesence to divisiveness:

Bin Laden's men fight with hate in their hearts. One of their intentions is to provoke hate in return - hate and fear. Londoners are bound to look a little differently at their fellow Britons in hennaed beards or burqas after yesterday. The bombers' greatest wish is that sorrow will turn into anger - anger that is directed at Muslims.
The calculation is that this will drive Muslims towards the bombers' own pitiless world view. The process, the theory runs, will culminate in an Islamist revolution that will sweep away the old regimes of the Muslim world and replace them with ideologically pure rulers.

But Britons will not let them fulfil their agenda. To make a sweeping generalisation, Americans too often look for someone to blame while Brits look to solve the problem however they may. The British populace already know that if the extremists can be sidelined then negotiated peace and healing can be accomplished. They are also well aware of how a single idiot with a loud voice can halt or even reverse that healing.

Look to the UK to continue to turn their backs to the dividers in open defiance of their actions. Look too for the UK to still favour negotiations to split the less rabid - the redemiables who will renounce violence if given half a chance- from the simply mad and egotistical. And finally, look too for very few of the mad and irredemiable to ever come to trial. Britain has always had a pragmatic approach to those people. No trial, no publicity but simply a "double-tap" in a dark and lonely place from a supremely-trained man in a balaclava who wears wings with the motto "Who Dares Wins" beneath.

Stoic, quiet pragmatism. It's the British way.