The London Attacks

The Way From Fallujah to London

"Hang your head in shame, Mr. Blair," Rev Mike Ketley.

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.