London >> terrorist attack

[rach 1]

Just heard about them evacuating Birmingham as well last night. I suppose the whole of the country is in "on full alert" as they say now and more of this can be expected.

 

[Yuki's Passion 1]

Japan is probably one of the US biggest supporters, maybe not with man power, but certainly financially.

 

I cant help but think that Japan is at the top of the list to get attacked as well

[brit-gob 9]

Where next I wonder. Japan must be somewhere on the list but I'd think Japan provided more problems than many other countries. Rome perhaps?

[Curt 1]

Perhaps the next target for the US is Londonistan:

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1526616,00.html

[muikabochi 208]

How's the vibe in London then now, London dudes?

[2pints-mate 0]

 Quote:

Originally posted by muikabochi:
How's the vibe in London then now, London dudes?

Wary.

[me jane 0]

 Quote:

Originally posted by Curt:
Perhaps the next target for the US is Londonistan:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1526616,00.html

unbelievable

[BagOfCrisps 24]

I suppose generally uneasy, people looking around more than before. Depends on the people of course, some people taking it worse than others. There's this secretary in our office who looks like she's brickin' it constantly.

[damian 0]

 Quote:

Originally posted by me jane:

 Quote:

Originally posted by Curt:
Perhaps the next target for the US is Londonistan:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1526616,00.html

unbelievable

I watched a UK investigative tv program (I think it was called Panorama) about the bombings. They suggested that London had never been bombed due to an unwritten rule that had a specific name (can't remember it). The idea was that terrorists agree among themselves not to bomb a city that affords them an accommodating environment. A bit like the 'don't shit in your own nest' rule.

[Ocean11 0]

It now appears that the attacks had nothing whatsoever to do with Iraq, and anybody who thinks that is out of their mind. It is because of our taste for cricket, scones and Fiesta magazines.

[damian 0]

The hypocrisy of Blair, the unthinking public and the media is quite incredible. How many civilian Iraqi people have the US and British Army killed? 100,000 charred bodies. Their families cry as well, they have funerals, they bleed and scream in burning pain just like we do. I do not expect to encounter greater hypocrisy in a long time. This happens to innocent Iraqis every single day. Obviously I do not condone any such bombings, but I can't call them murderous bastards without mentioning what we are doing in Iraq.

[Honest John 0]

Seems to me that while Bush is using these attacks to reinforce his position on Iraq whenever he speaks, Blair is keeping all mention of Iraq out of what he's saying.....

[Davo 1]

"Grist to the mill" isn't that how the saying goes? Bush, at least in some small way, must be happy that this happened. It goes some way toward legitimizing his position-or so he thinks.

 

I was surprised to see people in the street in Iraq who were voicingt compassion for the London victims. After all the toll in London, while not insignificant by any means, is comparable to two weeks worth of suicide bombing in Iraq.

 

Japan is one big fat target waiting to happen. I don't like the way there is almost no security in Osaka.

[sunrise 0]

Yeh well, there will soon be chipped gaijin cards to stop that....

 

Is London really as bad as the Americans in that article Curt posted are saying, or are they trying to put pressure onto the Brits to take away more freedoms like they're slowly working on in the States? Or is it a bit of both perhaps? Don't sh*t where you eat also makes sense. That it happened in the first place is horrible. That hypocritical governments might trying to use it to their advantage is not so nice either.

[damian 0]

I have seen footage of a large group of young and old Muslim men outside a large Mosque in central London (Regent Park Mosque). They were hysterically calling for more heads to roll (referring to the Iraqi beheadings), Americans to be defeated, Jihad to be declared, infidel something or other etc etc. It was very free speech.

 

One of my initial and likely ignorant impressions of Britain is that the door is quite wide open to anybody, that the country is full of interracial hatred, and that the masses of the white working class are almost no longer a balancing factor. At this point I make no judgement about the merits of my observation.

 

Further to my 'don't sh*t in your nest' comment, I now remember that the reporter described the arrangement as notionally being one of 'the police wont harass you if you don't bomb us'. This was of course one mans opinion and I have no idea if it is or is not a universal given in the equation.

[Ocean11 0]

> After all the toll in London, while not insignificant by any means, is comparable to two weeks worth of suicide bombing in Iraq.

 

More like one busy day in Iraq.

 

> I don't like the way there is almost no security in Osaka.

 

Osaka is not a capital city, which seems to afford some protection (alright NY isn't either, but it had the WTC fetish target.) Nor did lots of security in London didn't stop the attacks.

 

> Is London really as bad as the Americans in that article Curt posted are saying

 

I read a book by an American terrorism expert nearly 12 years ago ("Final Warning") that warned that London was a centre for Islamic extremist hatred, and that no Western country had adequate Arabic specialists to monitor the propaganda available in bookshops in London. That was at a time when Islamicist terror only killed a couple of people every few years. So yes, London is as bad as that, and yes, the governments of the UK and US bear very heavy responsibility for failing to train agents who understand Arabic and Islam. They're still failing in that area too by all knowledgable accounts.

[Karnidge 2]

The announcement that the London bombings were the work of what police believe were British born Muslim suicide bombers sparked fears of a backlash yesterday.

 

As the direction of the anti-terrorism investigation became clear, a parallel operation was launched by police chiefs to brief community leaders and prepare for any reprisal attacks on Muslims.

 

Among those meeting at Scotland Yard yesterday was Azad Ali, who chairs the Muslim Safety Forum, where top officers and British Islamic leaders meet to discuss counter-terrorism and other policing issues.

 

After the announcements by police, Mr Ali briefed senior police officers in London about what is to come and how best to stop it.

Mr Ali believes the London bombings pose the biggest challenge to community cohesion Britain has faced in modern times.

 

"We fear a huge backlash," he said. "I am scared on two fronts. I'm scared that I could be the next victim of somebody indiscriminately killing me, and I'm scared that I may be the victim of somebody's indiscriminate hatred."

[rach 1]

From the soaraway sun:

 

"AN Islamic academic who says suicide bombings are justified will preach to young Muslims in London at a conference funded by British taxpayers, The Sun can reveal.

 

Egyptian-born Prof Tariq Ramadan has been banned from the US for endorsing terrorism. France has also barred him."

[rach 1]

Everyone I meet now it's "daijobu desu ka?" - I think people expect me to cancel my flight.

[minus 1]

I remember on the news the other day it said there was no noticeable drop in bookings or cancellations for London/UK... might change as the days go on though I suppose.

[scouser 4]

I'm getting the same. 'Anzen desu ka?' And some people seem to think Liverpool St Station is in Liverpool as well, adding to the confused conversations...

[Siren 0]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/comment/story/0,16141,1528127,00.html

 

It is an insult to the dead to deny the link with Iraq

 

Tony Blair put his own people at risk in the service of a foreign power

 

Seumas Milne

Thursday July 14, 2005

The Guardian

 

In the grim days since last week's bombing of London, the bulk of Britain's political class and media has distinguished itself by a wilful and dangerous refusal to face up to reality. Just as it was branded unpatriotic in the US after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington to talk about the link with American policy in the Middle East, so those who have raised the evident connection between the London atrocities and Britain's role in Iraq and Afghanistan have been denounced as traitors. And anyone who has questioned Tony Blair's echo of George Bush's fateful words on September 11 that this was an assault on freedom and our way of life has been treated as an apologist for terror.

 

But while some allowance could be made in the American case for the shock of the attacks, the London bombings were one of the most heavily trailed events in modern British history. We have been told repeatedly since the prime minister signed up to Bush's war on terror that an attack on Britain was a certainty - and have had every opportunity to work out why that might be. Throughout the Afghan and Iraq wars, there has been a string of authoritative warnings about the certain boost it would give to al-Qaida-style terror groups. The only surprise was that the attacks were so long coming.

But when the newly elected Respect MP George Galloway - who might be thought to have some locus on the subject, having overturned a substantial New Labour majority over Iraq in a London constituency with a large Muslim population - declared that Londoners had paid the price of a "despicable act" for the government's failure to heed those warnings, he was accused by defence minister Adam Ingram of "dipping his poisonous tongue in a pool of blood". Yesterday, the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy was in the dock for a far more tentative attempt to question this suffocating consensus. Even Ken Livingstone, who had himself warned of the danger posed to London by an invasion of Iraq, has now claimed the bombings were nothing to do with the war - something he clearly does not believe.

 

A week on from the London outrage, this official otherworldliness is once again in full flood, as ministers and commentators express astonishment that cricket-playing British-born Muslims from suburbia could have become suicide bombers, while Blair blames an "evil ideology". The truth is that no amount of condemnation of evil and self-righteous resoluteness will stop terror attacks in the future. Respect for the victims of such atrocities is supposed to preclude open discussion of their causes in the aftermath - but that is precisely when honest debate is most needed.

 

The wall of silence in the US after the much greater carnage of 9/11 allowed the Bush administration to set a course that has been a global disaster. And there is little sense in London that the official attitude reflects the more uncertain mood on the streets. There is every need for the kind of public mourning that will take place in London today, along with concerted action to halt the backlash against Muslim Britons that claimed its first life in Nottingham at the weekend. But it is an insult to the dead to mislead people about the crucial factors fuelling this deadly rage in Muslim communities across the world.

 

The first piece of disinformation long peddled by champions of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is that al-Qaida and its supporters have no demands that could possibly be met or negotiated over; that they are really motivated by a hatred of western freedoms and way of life; and that their Islamist ideology aims at global domination. The reality was neatly summed up this week in a radio exchange between the BBC's political editor, Andrew Marr, and its security correspondent, Frank Gardner, who was left disabled by an al-Qaida attack in Saudi Arabia last year. Was it the "very diversity, that melting pot aspect of London" that Islamist extremists found so offensive that they wanted to kill innocent civilians in Britain's capital, Marr wondered. "No, it's not that," replied Gardner briskly, who is better acquainted with al-Qaida thinking than most. "What they find offensive are the policies of western governments and specifically the presence of western troops in Muslim lands, notably Iraq and Afghanistan."

 

The central goal of the al-Qaida-inspired campaign, as its statements have regularly spelled out, is the withdrawal of US and other western forces from the Arab and Muslim world, an end to support for Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and a halt to support for oil-lubricated despots throughout the region. Those are also goals that unite an overwhelming majority of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere and give al-Qaida and its allies the chance to recruit and operate - in a way that their extreme religious conservatism or dreams of restoring the medieval caliphate never would. As even Osama bin Laden asked in his US election-timed video: if it was western freedom al-Qaida hated, "Why do we not strike Sweden?"

 

The second disinformation line peddled by government supporters since last week's bombings is that the London attacks had nothing to do with Iraq. The Labour MP Tony Wright insisted that such an idea was "not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense". Blair has argued that, since the 9/11 attacks predated the Iraq war, outrage at the aggression could not have been the trigger. It's perfectly true that Muslim anger over Palestine, western-backed dictatorships and the aftermath of the 1991 war against Iraq - US troops in Arabia and a murderous sanctions regime against Iraq - was already intense before 2001 and fuelled al-Qaida's campaign in the 1990s. But that was aimed at the US, not Britain, which only became a target when Blair backed Bush's war on terror. Afghanistan made a terror attack on Britain a likelihood; Iraq made it a certainty.

 

We can't of course be sure of the exact balance of motivations that drove four young suicide bombers to strike last Thursday, but we can be certain that the bloodbath unleashed by Bush and Blair in Iraq - where a 7/7 takes place every day - was at the very least one of them. What they did was not "home grown", but driven by a worldwide anger at US-led domination and occupation of Muslim countries.

 

The London bombers were to blame for attacks on civilians that are neither morally nor politically defensible. But the prime minister - who was warned by British intelligence of the risks in the run-up to the war - is also responsible for knowingly putting his own people at risk in the service of a foreign power. The security crackdowns and campaign to uproot an "evil ideology" the government announced yesterday will not extinguish the threat. Only a British commitment to end its role in the bloody occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is likely to do that.

[zebedee 1]

I would tell those people that now is probably one of the safer times to travel to the UK.

[Ocean11 0]

It seems now that cricket was not a factor. Perhaps it was Marmite that they objected to?

[Curt 1]

It's not difficult to see how people could object to Marmite.