Interpreting the attack on London

Hasan Abu Nimah

Last week's dreadful bomb attacks in central London struck very close to home for me, almost as close as the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in New York.

On that infamous morning, my pregnant daughter, her husband and their young daughter had to flee from their home in Lower Manhattan in the panic following the aeroplane strikes on the Twin Towers. Half a world away in Amman, we waited in shock and fear until we heard they were safe, moved to a hotel since they were not allowed to go back to their apartment less than a mile from Ground Zero.

I had lived, until a year before the attacks, in New York for five years, and grew to love the city where both my grandchildren were born. I feel almost as a strong an attachment to London, where we also lived for five years in the early 1970s. My second daughter and her husband, who works in central London, recently moved to England, and last week, once again, we waited to hear that both were safe. But dozens of grieving families were not so lucky as they face unbearable pain and loss.

The London bombs bring to mind frightening thoughts: that the war on terror has not only failed but has been counterproductive, and that our world is getting far worse than our darkest expectations.

The first suspects were, as usual, Muslim extremists, whether connected to Al Qaeda or not. British Muslims and immigrants braced for a possible backlash - fears made more palpable by the vicious anti-immigrant and anti-"foreigner" tone that characterised the recent UK general election campaign. Within hours, reports of hate mail and crimes began to circulate. Although it is hoped that these were only isolated incidents that would be condemned by the vast majority of decent people in the UK, Muslims worldwide are once again deeply concerned about the additional damage to the image of Islam.

Muslims, all 1.5 billion of them, unlike any other group, are held collectively responsible for the actions of any of their number. Editorialists and politicians in the West constantly demand that Muslims loudly and publicly condemn acts of terror, and even though Muslim leaders routinely do, they are repeatedly accused of not doing so. I am not aware, by contrast, of any similar demands that Jews in New York condemn the routine acts of racism and violence conducted in the name of their religion by Israeli settlers and their government against Palestinians. Nor are all white people in America made to feel personally culpable - as we Muslims are - for the acts of extremist racist groups or routine police brutality and unfair treatment, by the American justice system, of the black Americans.

Even after the atrocities documented at Abu Ghraib, it would be ridiculous to view every American as a potential torturer, yet every Muslim is increasingly made to feel as if he or she were a potential terrorist.

Two currents of reaction to the London bombs can be detected. One is simply that terror is blind and aimed at the Western "values" "way of life" and "democracy". In other words, the terrorists attack Western countries precisely because they are perfect and beyond reproach, not because of any perceived injustice they have caused. And so, the only way to deal with terrorists is to exterminate them by unabated force.

Although this is the politically correct and official view of the Bush administration and the British government, it has become threadbare with repetition and has lost all credibility. Fifty-six per cent of Americans believe that the main motive for the London attacks was because of British support for the United States in the war in Iraq, according to a July 8 CNN/Gallup poll.

The second current of analysis is that the war on terror, declared since Sept. 11, 2001, and fought mainly in Afghanistan and Iraq was bound to hit back in Western capitals, especially those that joined the US in its wars on Muslim countries.

The developing pattern is very clear. Robert Fisk wrote in The Independent on July 8: "If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us believe insurgency won't come to us?"

If Tony Blair and George Bush want to take the fight to the "enemy", why would the enemy not want to bring it back to them?

He added: "The Spanish paid the price for their support for Bush - and Spain's subsequent retreat from Iraq proved that the Madrid bombings achieved their objectives - while the Australians were made to suffer in Bali."

Like Blair, Fisk called the attacks "barbaric", as indeed they were, but "what were the civilian deaths of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart by cluster bombs, the countless innocent Iraqis gunned down at American military check points?" he pointedly asked.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, anyone who tried to connect terrorist attacks against Western interests to events in the home countries of the attackers was vulnerable to the accusation of "justifying" terrorism. This was partly an understandable emotional response - the people killed on Sept. 11 can in no way be punishable for any injustice committed by the US government - but discouraging analysis also served a political purpose. Any credible argument that the US was paying the price of earlier actions and blunders would imply that something fundamental needed to change and that accountability was required.

Indeed, one must be emphatic that the killing of innocent people in London or anywhere else is in no way a justifiable reaction to the equally barbaric killing of innocent Iraqis or Afghans or Palestinians, and one must constantly reaffirm that one barbarity does not legitimise or excuse another. It is simply untenable and dishonest, however, to maintain that there is no connection at all and that the attacks in London or Madrid would have happened anyway, as some were quick to assert. Even Blair had to publicly abandon the official line when he told BBC Radio after the London attacks that "as well as dealing with the consequences" of terrorist violence, by "trying to protect ourselves as much as any civil society can - you have to try to pull it up by its roots". Those roots, he acknowledged, included the intensifying conflict in Palestine and the lack of democracy in states long supported by the West.

Blair did not go quite as far as Tariq Ali who argued, in The Guardian on July 8, that "the war against terror is immoral and counterproductive. It sanctions the use of state terror - bombing raids, torture, countless civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq - against Islamo-anarchists whose numbers are small but their reach is deadly." Ali concluded: "The solution then as now is political not military. The real solution lies in immediately ending the occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine."

Supporting this thesis is a brilliant article by Jon Sawyer (Knight-Ridder Newspapers, July 7). He refers to a study by University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape on suicide terrorism worldwide since 1980. Pape concludes in his new book "Dying to Win; The Strategic Logic of Suicide Bombing", "that modern day terrorism, including that of Osama Ben Laden's Al Qaeda, is far less related to Islamic fundamentalism than most observers believe - that it is driven by coherent political aims, especially the desire to expel what are perceived as armies of occupation."

Pape said: "The lesson of London is that Al Qaeda and like-minded groups are alive and well, systematically focused on the clearly defined goal of forcing US and allied troops out of predominantly Muslim countries."

Pape argues that the critical factor in fuelling suicide terrorism is not the ideology of people like Ben Laden and his most committed followers, but whether conditions on the ground produce armies of volunteers to carry out attacks and, he concludes, it is foreign occupation that produces these recruits.

We would be burying our heads in the sand if we continued to see terrorism as merely a blind thirst for crime and as a destructive view towards life for its own sake. This is not true. We may continue to condemn terrorism in the strongest possible terms, but that should be no reason for failing to ask, objectively and scientifically, as Pape did, why people resort to it.

The lesson of London is costly, as was the one in Madrid. The lives of Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians and Israelis are also too valuable to be so insanely wasted. It is time that the cycle of evil is stopped and the injustice feeding it is addressed.

This article was published in the Wednesday, July 13, 2005 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.