7/7 - London Bombings
(Comments: tony.papard@btinternet.com)
So 'suicide' bombings have now come to Europe, and my home city of London.
This is an extremely worrying development, and I wonder where it will all end. How will the government, police, the courts and other Londoners/tourists deal with this situation?
Most of us Londoners have to travel to and from work by public transport every day. We got used to looking for unattended packages on buses, Tubes, trains, etc. from the days of the IRA, when all litter bins were removed from Underground stations and have never returned. But how do you prevent suicide bombings?
I worry about the possible backlash. Does this mean, for reasons of self-preservation and safety-first rather than for racist reasons, whenever we see someone of an Asian/Arab appearance carrying a rucksack, bag or package we will avoid that train carriage/bus? Where will this end? The BNP winning elections, and 'whites only' carriages/buses? The people who planned this atrocity, and carried it out, have attacked everybody, white and black, Asian, Arab, Christian, Jew, Muslim - all races and religions will have to bear the consequences of this terrible act.
Terrible as the bombings in London were, let us not forget the hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children killed in Iraq by the terrorists Bush and Blair. It is estimated that 100,000 Iraqis, many of them innocent civilians, have died so far in this latest Iraqi war.
To those who say 9/11 came BEFORE the Iraqi war, that is not correct. The current Iraq war started in 1991 after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait (which he claimed as a lost Iraqi province). It has continued uninterrupted ever since. After the first Iraq war, there were sanctions and no-fly zones with bombing raids against that country. As a result largely of sanctions, an estimated half a million innocent Iraqi civilians died, many of them children.
This in no way justifies the outrages committed in Madrid, London, New York, Bali and other places around the world by the terrorists, but it does perhaps put it in proportion, and help to explain what motivates certain misguided extremists to commit such terrible atrocities. Combined with the Israeli/Palestinian situation, and the American oil companies' exploitation of the oil reserves in Saudi Arabia, and now of Iraq itself, these extremists consider themselves to be 'at war'. Churchill, Bush, Blair and many other war-time leaders justified the killing of innocent civilians (now called 'collateral damage'), so we shouldn't be surprised if others, be it the IRA or the current terrorists, do the same.
Don't forget, Bush, Blair and others still have nuclear weapons, and are prepared to use them 'if necessary' to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, and maybe destroy the whole globe. So for these politicians to condemn 'terrorists' smacks of hypocrisy. They are ALL terrorists, and Bush and Blair on a bigger scale than most.
Another factor which stirred up the extremists were the terrible pictures of sadism and humiliation coming out of prison camps in Iraq and elsewhere, and the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American and British soldiers. Those who committed these acts, and who ordered them to be committed, must also bear considerable responsibility for the terrorist bombs in London and elsewhere.
The only way terrorism will be stopped permanently is to resolve the situations which breed terrorism. In the current situation this means pulling all American/British and other foreign troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, solving the Israeli/Palestinian problem by establishing a viable Palestinian state, and ceasing to prop up corrupt regimes in Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and elsewhere in order to extract oil and/or maintain American military bases.
Like it or not, by voting Blair and Bush back into power, the British and American people guaranteed that these terrorist acts would continue, in Iraq, in Britain and elsewhere. However, I would remind everyone that the majority of Britons and Americans did NOT vote for Blair or Bush - it was the quirks of our undemocratic electoral systems which put them back into power, not the majority of the electorate in these two countries, who voted for other parties/candidates or abstained.
Those of us who were always against the war in Iraq warned of the likely consequences, but the government wouldn't listen. Now we need new policies, and new leaders, to get us all out of this terrible circle of violence which we are in.
As I've written many times before on this site, it is NOT for USA or Britain to remove dictators, especially when they are very selective about which ones they remove. Saddam was supported by Britain and USA for years, and now dictatorial regimes in Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and elsewhere are still supported by these countries, because it suits them to do so.
What is needed is a permanent United Nations security force which can act in situations of threatened genocide, etc., to be controlled by the members of the UN by majority vote. No nation, be it USA, Britain or anyone else, is above the law.
ALL terrorism must be stopped and the criminals brought to trial. This includes those who organized the bombings in London and elsewhere around the world, and Bush, Blair and their cronies who should be brought for trial before the International Criminal Court.