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London Bombings
Article not published on fish.co.uk, July 2005.
As the second round of bombs fails to go off in London, Steve Tomkins asks what bin Laden wants from us.
London was lucky today. Four bombs, resulting in one injury and a few broken bus windows.
Perhaps that should make it a good day, but it isn’t. This seems rather more unsettling than the attack of two weeks ago.
I think on 7 July I felt, “This is what we’ve been waiting for. There was an attack on New York, one on Madrid, one in Bali, one in Istanbul - now we’ve had ours. At least it’s out of the way now, and no one I know was hurt.” But now suddenly it seems it’s not out of the way. It’s open season.
It’s not just a bombing, it’s a bombing campaign. The roads are a nightmare, the tubes are up the spout, and for once traffic problems don’t seem so important.
Many people in the last couple of weeks have talked about the special dauntless spirit of Londoners. I don’t really buy that. If you live in a place affected by violence - and London of course isn’t anything like one of the worse - you only have two options: get out of there, if possible, or carry on with your life, in the knowledge that the chances of you being personally touched by bombing are remote - smaller than the likelihood of losing someone to a road accident in the case of London.
For those who grew up in London in the 70s and 80s there is a certain kind of deja vu about the bombings. It reminds you of the days when city life was not just about black cabs, red phone boxes and Andrew Lloyd-Webber musicals, but unattended bags and IRA semtex in bins, buses and cafes. It’s just that the bags are no longer unattended.
Perhaps there is some help in knowing that we’ve been here before, or somewhere like it, before that two-year hiatus between the Good Friday agreement and 9/11. It’s just on a new scale now.
The new enemy seems a lot more frightening than the IRA. Al-Qaeda is a far larger network, the willingness of its recruits to make suicide attacks makes defence harder, and their motivation seems impenetrable. Everyone knew what the IRA wanted to achieve, but how many of us could say what - if anything - bin Laden’s demands are?
Well, perhaps a little background information can help here then, making the threat, if not any less, at least less incomprehensible.
Ironic as it may seem, the jihad that bin Laden declared against the US in February 1998 was officially a defensive one. He called on all Muslims ‘to kill the Americans and their allies - civilians and military - … in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam’.
So bin Laden’s professed aims are not to conquer or convert, but to liberate Arab lands from what he sees as US imperialism. The presence since 1990 of US troops in Saudi Arabia, a holy land of Islam (and bin Laden’s home), is an abomination of desolation in a great many Muslim eyes, and probably bin Laden’s single greatest grievance. A 2002 intelligence report suggested that 95% of Saudis aged 25-41 support bin Laden’s campaign.
This suggests that for western forces to have invaded and occupied the Muslim land of Iraq as a tactic in the “war on terror” is counterproductive, to put it generously - even before the atrocities of Abu Ghraib came to light.
My quote from bin Laden’s fatwa also mentioned the al-Aqsa Mosque as a target for liberation. This is the site that makes Jerusalem a holy place for Islam, and the grievance here is more longstanding. Many Muslims resent the fact that Israel-Palestine is ruled by Jews, quite apart from the treatment of Palestinian Muslims by the Israeli government and army.
When the state of Israel was established in 1948, many Muslims saw it as yet another European invasion of Islam, and immediately attacked Israel. The vast amount of support - financial, military and political - that Americans give to Israel is another reason why the US is the Great Satan of Islamic radicals like bin Laden.
These are the three great grievances of Islam against the west - Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Palestine - and they are shared, bitterly, by many millions of Muslims. If that seems like an exaggeration, recall the scenes of jubilation in Muslim communities from the east end of London to the West Bank on 9/11. The Egyptian newspaper Al-Arabi reported “overflowing happiness” throughout the developing world in response.
Messrs Bush and Blair say that al-Qaeda's members are a lunatic fringe who ‘pervert the peaceful teachings of Islam’, with no aim but to destroy western freedoms. This is not true.
The truth, as we can see, is both more frightening and more hopeful. The frightening thing is that bin Laden - however extreme his methods may be - is not an isolated figure but voices the resentment and righteous anger of a vast army of Muslims. What is hopeful is that their ambitions are clear, concrete and sane. Bin Laden himself may be a mass murderer, but Islam is a people the west can do business with.
