London bombings - what they said Part 1 (July 2005)   07 July 05 was the day of the bombings. It was followed by many responses and commentaries. Here is a selection. 07 Jul 05 George Galloway, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow,  on behalf of the Respect Party - No one can condone acts of violence aimed at working people going about their daily lives. They have not been a party to, nor are they responsible for, the decisions of their government. They are entirely innocent and we condemn those who have killed or injured them. - We argued, as did the Security Services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings. - We urge the government to end the occupation of Iraq and develop a real solution to the wider conflicts in the Middle East.   07 Jul 05 Mike Marqusee in CounterPoint - The bomb blasts had been widely and repeatedly predicted. Londoners knew that by taking Britain into Iraq with the USA, Tony Blair had placed their city in the firing line. - Blair has already appeared on TV pledging to defend "our values" and "our way of life" against "extremism". He spoke of "civilised nations" resisting "terrorism". His "us" vs "them" worldview echoed Bush's. Tt was a performance of nauseating hypocrisy, as he sought to seize the moral high ground in a violent situation that he himself helped create.  - Fomenting and exploiting fear has been a speciality of the Blair regime. Asylum seekers, teenagers wearing hoods, militant Muslims, anarchists, paedophiles - the list of targets is long and flexible. Scapegoats are easily found whenever people have to be distracted from the impact of the government's neo-liberal economic policies, its failure to rebuild the public sector, from its foreign adventures.   08 Jul 05 Patrick Doherty in ZNet - The false answer to the 9/11 attacks, "because they hate our freedoms," was constructed carefully by the White House communications team. It laid the foundation for the war on Iraq and expanded the war on terrorism well beyond a proportionate retaliation on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. In truth Al Qaeda was targeting the United States because of our massive support for oppressive regimes in the Middle East. - For the London subway bombings, Tony Blair has already begun the spin in his statement from Gleneagles: "It's important that those engaged in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world." 08 Jul 05  Kim Petersen (ZNet) - A visibly shaken UK Prime Minister Tony Blair quickly enveloped himself and his country in the cloak of victimhood and responded defiantly: "It is important ... ...extremism on the world." [see quote above] But what kind of values have permitted the killings of 100,000 Iraqi civilians in the last just over two years? What of the 1 million Iraqis that were allowed to perish under the western-backed UN sanctions on Iraq from 1991 to 2003? - Do British values condone the arbitrary detention of its citizens without charge in Britain and the US gulags? Do British values condone the torture of its citizens by its ally and by its troops? Alluding to the Clash of Civilizations, Blair said, "We know that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, here and abroad, are decent and law-abiding people who abhor this act of terrorism every bit as much as we do." - Should not the "decent and law-abiding" Christian people of the UK also abhor the terrorism being wreaked on innocent Iraqis? Did the British people not elect Blair's party despite the leak of the Downing Street Memo that indicated the launching of aggression on Iraq was motivated by illegal regime change? - Blair continued: "It is through terrorism that the people that have committed this terrible act express their values, and it is right at this moment that we demonstrate ours." This is silly sophistry. The British establishment values have been amply displayed when Iraq was invaded in 2003, followed by a brutal occupation that continues to wreak terror into the lives of Iraqis. - Blair claimed insight to the terrorist motives. "I think we all know what they are trying to do -- they are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cower us, to frighten us out of doing the things that we want to do, of trying to stop us going about our business as normal, as we are entitled to do, and they should not, and they must not, succeed." But are Iraqis going about their business as normal? Are they not entitled to? Are Afghanis going about their business as normal? Why should the western imperialists be allowed to disrupt the way of life of other peoples? The numerous bombs, cruise missiles, cluster bombs, and napalm rained down on Iraqi civilians is no less terrorism. - Blair continued, "When they seek to change our country or our way-of-life by these methods, we will not be changed." The terrorists are obviously trying to change the British imperial mindset. The British have historically pursued an aggressive expansion of empire through which they terrorized and exploited many lands. This imperialism, now in the hands of the hyperpower, is clearly what the terrorists desire to end. - Blair stated, "When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated." President Bush had declared, "We will not yield to these people; we will not yield to the terrorists. We will find them and bring them to justice." This would seem to be the exact message the London-bombing terrorists are sending to the western state terrorists. They would like to bring the war criminals to justice. Blair went on: "We will show, by our spirit and dignity, and by our quiet but true strength that there is in the British people, that our values will long outlast theirs." 08 Jul 05, Paul Craig Roberts in CounterPunch - Did Londoners really believe that Muslims would not respond to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the slaughter, torture, and detention of Muslims?  Far more innocent Iraqi civilians, especially women and children, have been slaughtered than British and Americans.  Blair and Bush hypocritically claim the moral high ground of "civilized nations" and have denounced the attacks as "barbarism." - Why do Americans think it is heroic and honorable for our troops to massacre Iraqis with bombs, missiles, gunships, tanks, and heavy machine guns, but cowardly and barbaric when our victims fight back in the only way they can? 09 July 05 Robert Fisk in CounterPunch It's no use Blair telling us, "They will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear." They are not trying to destroy "what we hold dear." They are trying to force Blair to withdraw from Iraq, out of his alliance with the United States. The Spanish paid the price for their support for Bush while the Australians suffered in Bali. Blair called yesterday's bombings "barbaric"' but what of the civilian deaths in Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart by cluster bombs, innocent Iraqis gunned down at American military checkpoints. When they die, it is "collateral damage"; when "we" die it is "barbaric terrorism." 09 Jul 05, Sheldon Rampton in CounterPunch - George Galloway, a British MP and prominent anti-war voice, issued a statement in which he reminded that he had predicted "that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain." - Galloway had also said: "When the US armed forces, their backs guarded by our armed forces, reduced Falluja to rubble, not a whisper of horror was found in the House of Commons... The torture pictures from Abu Ghraib, the hell hole of Guantanamo Bay, the daily humiliations endured by the Palestinians - have contributed to the bitterness against us... Al Qaida took shape out of the last attack on Iraq in 1991 and the murderous sanctions that followed... If we bomb them, they will bomb us. It is time to drain the swamp until it dries up, then the monsters that lurk in its depths will have nothing to feed on." - Rather than address the substance of Galloway's comments, his attackers want to divert attention away from his arguments and focus instead on allegations about his character or personality. [Chomsky has noted that rightwing bigots cannot answer the argument, so they smear the writer.]  According to PropagandaCritic, a useful website of propaganda techniques, "The name-calling technique links a person, or idea, to a negative symbol. The propagandist who uses this technique hopes that the audience will reject the person or the idea on the basis of the negative symbol, instead of looking at the available evidence."] First, Galloway did predict that the "attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain". And several others did but they were ignored by war supporters. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (a U.S. ally) predicted, as the war commenced in March 2003,  "there will be 100 Bin Ladens afterward." Colleen Rowley, the FBI whistleblower, in an open letter to FBI director Robert Mueller, warned in March 2003 that invading Iraq would, "in all likelihood, bring an exponential increase in the terrorist threat to the U.S., both at home and abroad."  - Second, were Thursday's terrorist attacks a consequence of the war, as Galloway suggests? This is a somewhat more complicated question. Of course, the primary individuals responsible for the attacks were the terrorists themselves. But would they have committed their crime if we were not at war? Supporters of the war want us to believe, as President Bush has claimed, that terrorists are attacking simply because "they hate our freedoms". Michael Scheuer, the former CIA Bin Laden analyst, also rejected Bush's interpretation in interviews following the Thursday attacks. Scheuer believes that al-Qaeda is an insurgent ideology focused on destroying the United States and its allies, because its members believe that the US is trying to destroy them. Al-Qaeda members see the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, backed by the US; US support for military regimes like those of Pakistan and Egypt; and US military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as evidence of a US onslaught on Islam and Muslims aimed at reducing them to neo-colonial slavery. That is, specific Western policies are the focus of al-Qaeda response, not a generalized "hatred" of "values."