Evan Coyne Maloney on London bombings

[Pete]

Wake Up, London Calling

http://brain-terminal.com/posts/2005/07/08/london-calling

By Evan Coyne Maloney

Brain-Terminal.com

 

Dr. Laurence Buckman describes what he saw when he arrived on the scene of the bus bombing in the London terrorist attacks:

 

 

My first impression was about the amount of blood. The whole of the front of the building was covered with blood - quite high up, I suspect that was because the upstairs of the bus had been blown off.

It reminded me of a friend's story on September 11th. He was standing in the World Trade Center plaza as people started jumping out of the burning towers. Each time a body hit the pavement, he reported, blood would splatter upwards against the buildings, streaking all the way up to the second floor.

 

On TV, streams of Londoners somberly snaked through the streets, stranded by the city's lock-down. It was my own September 11th walk home, just set against a backdrop of older buildings. New York and London are now blood brothers.

 

A coordinated attack against a major subway system was, unfortunately, only a matter of time. The real surprise isn't that it happened, but that it took so long. This article, over a year old, presaged the London attacks (emphasis mine):

 

 

Prior to 9/11, terrorists bombed the Paris metro and released poison gas in the Tokyo subway system. In addition, since 9/11, counterterrorism agents have broken up plots to launch a cyanide attack on the London Tube and bomb railway stations in Dresden and Madrid.

In the United States, the rail network has also been repeatedly targeted. On July 31, 1997, the NYPD launched a pre-dawn raid on an apartment in Brooklyn, New York, after receiving information that two men living in the apartment planned to bomb the New York City subway system. During the raid, police discovered nail-studded pipe bombs, one of which, in the words of a senior law enforcement official, was "all set and ready to go." NYPD Commissioner Howard Safir remarked, "these individuals intended to take these bombs onto subway trains, set them off, and the probability is that they and many others would have been killed."

 

The vulnerability of the New York City subway system again came into focus in September 2003, when Time magazine reported that Saudi Arabia had detained a terrorist with extensive knowledge of a plot to launch a poison gas attack on the subways. In April 2003, news broke that another captured terrorist, Al-Qaeda operations head Khalid Sheik Mohammed, had informed interrogators of an Al-Qaeda plan to target Washington D.C.'s metro.

 

The warnings from Mohammed and the detainee in Saudi Arabia roughly corroborated an October 2002 FBI statement that "information from debriefings of Al-Qaeda detainees as of mid-October indicates that the group has considered directly targeting U.S. passenger trains, possibly using operatives who have a Western appearance." The statement also noted, "recently captured Al-Qaeda photographs of U.S. railroad engines, cars and crossings heighten the intelligence community's concern of this threat."

 

The information gleaned from the detainees, coupled with the foiled 1997 Brooklyn bombing plot, make clear the peril posed to the U.S. rail system. When this bleak picture is merged with the international threat assessment, it seems likely that the horrors of Madrid may be repeated in the not so distant future.

 

9/11, 3/11, 7/7, whatever the date, wherever the attack, this is all part of the same war. No matter what the claims, this is not some sort of retaliation for Afghanistan or Iraq. Western civilization has been under attack by radical Islam since the late 1970s. The ultimate aim is not withdrawal from Afghanistan or Iraq--although al Qaeda would celebrate victory if we cut and run--these attacks represent a battle in a larger war, likely to last decades, initiated by radical Muslims who seek the absolute destruction of Western society as a whole.

 

Those who believe that our foreign policy alone is what inspires these attacks aren't paying attention. It is our culture as much as anything that the Islamists abhor. It is our freedom of expression, our tolerance for different lifestyles, it's our television, our movies and our music that the Islamists want to eliminate. When their mullahs are in charge, among the first things banished--under threat of death--are these artifacts of Western culture. Get caught dancing? Be prepared to be stoned to death in front of a stadium crowd. Want to wear a skirt? Get ready for your "honor killing." It is the invasion of our culture--not our armies--that caused jihad to be declared against us.

 

To the terrorists, only a global caliphate will suffice, one in which every citizen of the world lives under the harsh restrictions and brutal penalties of strict Islamic law. Because of telephones, television, radio, satellite, web and e-mail, any outside culture--even if it is half a world away--can corrupt the purity of Islamic rule. A culture like ours is impossible to keep out, so the only solution is to end it completely. Such a belief is festering in Europe itself, the birthplace of Western civilization. Last spring, London's Evening Standard found a group of home-grown Muslims praying for London to be attacked:

 

 

"As far as I'm concerned, when they bomb London, the bigger the better," says Abdul Haq, the social worker. "I know it's going to happen because Sheikh bin Laden said so. Like Bali, like Turkey, like Madrid - I pray for it, I look forward to the day."

[...]

 

t was the events of 11 September that crystallised [sayful Islam's] worldview. "When I watched those planes go into the Twin Towers, I felt elated," he says. "That magnificent action split the world into two camps: you were either with Islam and al Qaeda, or with the enemy. I decided to quit my job and commit myself full-time to al-Muhajiroun." Now he does not consider himself British. "I am a Muslim living in Britain, and I give my allegiance only to Allah."

 

There are plenty of people here and across Europe who believe the threat is imaginary or will otherwise subside with a few tweaks to American foreign policy. Such people are in deadly denial. Europe is particularly vulnerable. Many European politicians seem to shy away from strong domestic anti-terror policies; they don't want to risk alienating the large Muslim voting populations. (Taking a stand to defend your country might get you voted out of office, you see.) So, the proudly tolerant Europeans tolerate extremist madrassas preaching murder and teaching terror right in the hearts of their own cities.

 

There is no politically correct way to defend yourself.

 

Ignoring an enemy that's plotting to kill you is nothing more than slow-motion suicide.

 

Lack of delivery capability is the only reason the attacks in London are not replicated in every Western city every day of the week. The only reason suitcase nukes haven't yet been detonated in midtown Manhattan is that the opportunity has not yet presented itself to the people who pray for it to happen. Maybe we should hear a little more about that on the evening news instead of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Yes, let's not become like the enemy, but let's not reduce ourselves to a quivering mass of self-doubt, either.

 

There's a real war going on out there, and the enemy isn't each other. If we can just stop assuming we're the problem, we might actually stand a chance of victory. But if we waste time navel-gazing in a world that contains wealthy terrorists and starving nuclear powers, we will ultimately be killed in our own streets in a way that'll make September 11th look like a verbal reprimand. And if you don't think that's a possibility, then you really don't know the enemy.

[Ghost of BiB]

There's a real war going on out there, and the enemy isn't each other. If we can just stop assuming we're the problem, we might actually stand a chance of victory. But if we waste time navel-gazing in a world that contains wealthy terrorists and starving nuclear powers, we will ultimately be killed in our own streets in a way that'll make September 11th look like a verbal reprimand. And if you don't think that's a possibility, then you really don't know the enemy.

 

 

There is an awful lot of the truth here. Dreamers, dream on.

[VABills]

There is an awful lot of the truth here. Dreamers, dream on.

377949[/snapback]

Look shiny things.

 

Ding.

 

Did you say something?