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The
London Attacks
The Way From Fallujah to London
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By
Muslim Affairs staff
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July
11, 2005
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"Hang your head in shame, Mr. Blair," Rev Mike Ketley. |
Again,
Muslims are under the spotlight. With the London bombings, which
took around 50 lives and injured more than 700, the 1.6 million
Muslims living in the United Kingdom are facing new challenges. As
reported by the Guardian,
on Thursday, July 7, the Muslim Council of Britain received around
30,000 e-mails with hate messages. Expressing their disapproval of
the attacks, Muslims held press conferences and prayers for the
victims to show their solidarity.
The
carefully coordinated attacks were unexpected, Paul Rogers of Open
Democracy argues, due to the fact that it came after a relative
halt in such operations outside occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. The
only recent serious assaults occurred in 2004: the Madrid bombings
in March, the attack on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in
September, and the bombings in Taba Hilton in October.
For
many, the London attacks represent an episode in a series of
incidents that show that the consequences of the so-called “war on
terror” have reached the West. The subsequent assaults on Western
interests in different parts of the world prove that the people of
the Middle East are not the only ones who are going to pay the bill
of the ongoing war.
According
to some observers, the bombings are merely a reaction to the current
“war on terror” led by the United States. “The explosive force
that killed and wounded hundreds of Londoners on 7 July is part of a
chain of events that stretches to Fallujah and Baghdad,” wrote
Paul Rogers in Open
Democracy. Similar views are all over the British press; many
people point the finger at the British government.
If
the perpetrators are Muslim, the continuous American and British
assaults on Muslim land, beginning long before the war on Iraq or
Afghanistan, may not justify the bombings, yet they would certainly
explain them. Thousands are dead and tens of thousands maimed in
Muslim lands; the perpetrators would find this kind of backlash to
be the only wake-up call to the people of the West. For many, the
real murderer is the British Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair. As
reported by the
Guardian, the Rev Mike Ketley wrote, “Hang your head in
shame, Mr. Blair. Better still, resign—and whoever takes over
immediately withdraw all our forces from Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The
hundreds of people who shared a two-minute silence in the gardens of
the Friends Meeting House in Euston expressed the same attitude.
Chris Nineham, of Stop the War Coalition, told the
BBC reporter, “It really is a case that peace is the only
answer and as soon as troops come out of Iraq the better.”
After
overthrowing the governing regimes in both Afghanistan and Iraq;
deploying more than 200,000 troops there; and killing, injuring, and
detaining tens of thousands of innocent people, the United States
and United Kingdom should ask themselves: Does the “war on
terror” make the world any safer?
According
to the British prime minister, the response to the attacks should
not be tightening security measures; rather, the solution, he told BBC
radio, is about dealing with the roots of terrorism, it is about
dealing with the “dreadful perversion of the true faith of
Islam.” Muslims now wait attentively to find out how the British
prime minister defines the true faith of Islam, or what the signs of
perversion in his eyes will be.
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