Car bombs in London

hucks

Your Message Here
you think it'll change europe's mind about the war if this keeps up?

I'm not sure "Europe" has an opinion on anything. This stuff might not even get reported in Greece or Portugal. The concept of "changing Europe's mind" isn't really meaningful, Europe's too diverse.

As for whether it'll change minds in the UK - the population of the UK is pretty anti the war anyhow. This would probably harden some in their opposition, but mainly confirm most in theirs. I don't think it changes anything re the war, as such.

For the record, most of the people I've chatted to over the last 24 hours are much more of Mistersloane's view than Martin's. Laughing it off. The sense is that this is the IRA in the 70s-90s again. Which, granted, was minimal fun, but it wasn't A THREAT TO OUR WAY OF LIFE, which is how today's papers would have it.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
i figured hysteria wouldn't give way. you all are lucky
 

Eric

Mr Moraigero
you think it'll change europe's mind about the war if this keeps up?

but this doesn't have anything to do with the war, does it? at least not in the sense that the war is doing anything to stop terrorism. why would it make people support the war???
 

east

Member
Pretty much agree with Hucks that acts like this won't change anyone's opinion; they'll just reinforce their original one.
 

bassnation

the abyss
I'm not sure "Europe" has an opinion on anything. This stuff might not even get reported in Greece or Portugal. The concept of "changing Europe's mind" isn't really meaningful, Europe's too diverse.

As for whether it'll change minds in the UK - the population of the UK is pretty anti the war anyhow. This would probably harden some in their opposition, but mainly confirm most in theirs. I don't think it changes anything re the war, as such.

For the record, most of the people I've chatted to over the last 24 hours are much more of Mistersloane's view than Martin's. Laughing it off. The sense is that this is the IRA in the 70s-90s again. Which, granted, was minimal fun, but it wasn't A THREAT TO OUR WAY OF LIFE, which is how today's papers would have it.

that's all very well, but its still a bit too close for comfort. i'm often in that part of the west end. it might not "threaten our way of life" but there might have been a threat of ending my own, or someone i know.

people actually died in all those ira bombings you casually dismiss as "minimal fun", you know.
 
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Nomadologist said:
you think it'll change europe's mind about the war if this keeps up?

That it coincided with Blair's appointment (by the US-dominated Quartet group) as Middle East 'peace envoy' (applauded by Israel's Zionists), should be of concern to those still desperate to rationalise justifications for the illegal invasion ond occupation of Iraq that I assume you are here calling "the war." As the majority of Europe's population, as with that of the rest of the world, have consistently been opposed to that war, even before it started, by "Europe's Mind" you actually mean - essentially - the current Gordon Brown-led UK Government, this its first acid-test of foreign policy commitments: as we've just witnessed in their predictably PR-reactionary response to this - by comparison to the hundreds of attacks and air strikes against Iraqis every day - non-event ("the public must be more vigilent" instead of "our policies are directly provoking these desperate acts") that 'mind' continues to be an extension of, controlled by, the current US Adminsitration, and so, what will change is that Brown's Britain will yet further isolate itself from the rest of Europe, and even more so from the Arab and Muslim world. [Mind you, at first I thought it was due to some bungling, drunken incompetents on a mad Laddish joyride as an over-reaction to the also coincidental introduction of the smoking ban in England ... ]

hucks said:
For the record, most of the people I've chatted to over the last 24 hours are much more of Mistersloane's view than Martin's. Laughing it off. The sense is that this is the IRA in the 70s-90s again. Which, granted, was minimal fun, but it wasn't A THREAT TO OUR WAY OF LIFE, which is how today's papers would have it.

Fun? For the circa 6 million Irish residents in Britain, the most discriminated-against minority grouping, during that whole period, for whom the IRA campaign in England was used by "our way of lifers" to legitimate the most sickening racial apartheid and oppression, that description might be subject to challenge. So I'm not so sure that the word 'fun' was, as a result, included in their political evaluations. Did your anecdotal straw poll include any of Britain's 2 million Muslims, per chance, or does 'our way of life' refer exclusively to that phantasmatically beleaguered minority we call WASPS?
 

vimothy

yurp
Fun? For the circa 6 million Irish residents in Britain, the most discriminated-against minority grouping, during that whole period, for whom the IRA campaign in England was used by "our way of lifers" to legitimate the most sickening racial apartheid and oppression, that description might be subject to challenge. So I'm not so sure that the word 'fun' was, as a result, included in their political evaluations. Did your anecdotal straw poll include any of Britain's 2 million Muslims, per chance, or does 'our way of life' refer exclusively to that phantasmatically beleaguered minority we call WASPS?

Actually, I have never seen my father (NI Catholic) racially discriminated against, in Britain or Belfast, even during flash-points in the "troubles". FWIW I think the real failures were made when the UK government overreacted to the early civil rights marches (and really, the position of Catholic people in NI was a total disgrace), and with their policy of internment (which also helped re-create the IRA).

"Threat to our way of life" - obviously, if Britain responds to the terror threat with draconian legislation and a clamp down on civil liberties, then our way of life will have been affected.

However, I think "threat to our lives" also works.
 

vimothy

yurp
Although I find the Observer hard to read nowadays, this Sunday's issue was pretty good. I am impressed with Jason Burke, he always seems very sensible on irhabi (would be) murderers like these.

Eight key issues already emerging from the attacks:

1. Islamic militants are almost certainly responsible.

2. The attacks are linked.

3. The bombs are amateurish.

4. No suicide bombings.

5. Plots involve British citizens or immigrants who have spent some time in the UK.

6. Too much can be made of the 'Iraq link'.

7. Bands of brothers.

8. Message to the UK.

- http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2115971,00.html
 

vimothy

yurp
And even better was this article by Hassan Butt, a British ex-Islamist and former member of Al-Muhajiroun and the wider international Islamic terror network (he describes the British Jihadi Network in which he was involved and which featured murderers like Mohammad Sidique Khan). It is probably the best most bravest bit of writing I have seen in the Observer since the Martin Amis piece. Butt acknowledges that there is an authentically religious aspect to jihad, and it is this religious nature that must be engaged with if we are to defeat the ideas which drive Islamist attrocities, and an international and revolutionary aspect that seeks a large Islamic empire and sharia law. In effect Islamism combines a twisted (but - importantly - still plausible) reading of Islam with the kind of revolutionary idealism that had rich teenagers from Germany killing innocent civilians in the 1970s:

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

Friday's attempt to cause mass destruction in London with strategically placed car bombs is so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that it is likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, yesterday on Radio 4's Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: 'What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.'

He then refused to acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam.

I left the BJN in February 2006, but if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombings, and I were both part of the BJN - I met him on two occasions - and though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain, our own homeland and abroad, was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would eventually bring Islamic justice to the world.

How did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting this (flawed) utopian goal? How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion? There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a dualistic model of the world. Many Muslims may or may not agree with secularism but at the moment, formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion. There is no 'rendering unto Caesar' in Islamic theology because state and religion are considered to be one and the same. The centuries-old reasoning of Islamic jurists also extends to the world stage where the rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) have been set down to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

What radicals and extremists do is to take these premises two steps further. Their first step has been to reason that since there is no Islamic state in existence, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr. Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world. Many of my former peers, myself included, were taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief. In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.

This understanding of the global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain. For decades, radicals have been exploiting these tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state for their benefit, typically by starting debate with the question: 'Are you British or Muslim?' But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Islamic institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology. They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex topic of violence within Islam and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace, focus on Islam as personal, and hope that all of this debate will go away.

This has left the territory of ideas open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, every time mosque authorities banned us from their grounds, it felt like a moral and religious victory.​

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2115891,00.html
 
Point taken. A dumb comment. I'm not wasp, tho

It isn't so much that it was a 'dumb' comment, it's more that, since 9/11 (and in response to it), Anglo-Irish relations have been completely so transformed, and to such an extent that it is so easy to forget (revise) the radically different - hostile - relations and conditions that existed in the preceding decades. [Paisley and Adams have moved from being violently radical internecine extremists on the margins of power to being consensual, conservative liberal pro-capitalist pragmatists at its very centre in just a few years ... while the Irish now own half of London, and Paisley is a sudden 'celebrity' among (formerly Republican) Irish Americans].

Not a wasp ... a dissensian?
 
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