The London Bombings

The first tragic victims of a terrorist attack are the people. The second tragic victim is the truth. Before we have even begun to come to terms with the dead and the torn apart, the burned and the blackened, the stumbling, screaming and moaning victims of the explosive blasts, the assault on the truth by those who have something to lose or something to gain has already begun.

It starts with the politicians. Tony Blair, the prime minister of Britain, said the people behind the London bombings seek “to change our country or our way of life”. It’s not British policies that are the cause, he’s saying, it’s British values – it’s not Britain’s occupation of Iraq, it’s the way the British go “about our business as normal”. For Bush and Blair, this attack fits neatly into a political framework that strains under the weight of implausibility: Islamist extremists hate freedom.

That’s when the military steps in to back up the politicians. Taking a page straight from W’s phrase book, General Rick Hillier, Chief of the Defense Staff, (the Canadian military’s top job), said, “Members of al-Qaida hate us and detest our freedoms. All the characteristics that make Canada great, also make us a target.” (Speaking of which, I wonder if terrorists hate our geography too.)

It’s interesting how al-Qaeda, an organization whose roots lie in the fight against the occupation of Afghanistan by the totalitarian Soviet state – among the least free of all nations in modern history – went from hating communist dictatorships to hating free democracies. This remarkable ideological shift is something General Hillier has apparently not examined closely, or perhaps he’s just reluctant to admit that the parallel between the USSR and the USA/Britain is not their level of freedom but their occupation of Muslim countries. Soundbites (“They hate everything we stand for … and the fact that we let men and women choose their own lives”) work better on tv, anyway.

Speaking of soundbites, after the politicians and the military officials, it’s up to the media to back it all up with a raucous chorus that ranges from the attack’s silver lining as described by Fox News anchors Brian Kilmeade and Paul Varney:

KILMEADE: And that was the first time since 9-11 when they should know, and they do know now, that terrorism should be Number 1. But it’s important for them all to be together. I think that works to our advantage, in the Western world’s advantage, for people to experience something like this together, just 500 miles from where the attacks have happened.

VARNEY: It puts the Number 1 issue right back on the front burner right at the point where all these world leaders are meeting. It takes global warming off the front burner. It takes African aid off the front burner. It sticks terrorism and the fight on the war on terror, right up front all over again.

to the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno, who had this to say among other things:

The agenda of these mass murderers has little to do with religion and ideology, even less to do with justifiable grievances. Their demands are blurry, their ambitions fantastical.

Do not seek moral cover under what are purported to be the fundamental and underlying reasons for their hostility. That is theoretical relativism run amok. Poverty and social alienation of Muslims in Europe, autocratic and corrupt regimes in Arab nations, historical grievances — these are not the factors that lure zealots to what is a far more crude and ambiguous campaign. Dreadfully impoverished peasants in South America, the starving masses in exploited sub-Saharan Africa, enslaved societies in Asian regimes — none of these people are exporting their choler to the West, shredding us in subway cars and steering airplanes into office towers.

In response to her article I wrote a letter to the editor of the Star:

Rosie DiManno’s emotional analysis of Islamist extremists as “nihilists” in a “death-culture thrall” is as rooted in fantasy as the mythical terrorists she describes. Addressing America in 2002 Bin Laden explained his reasons for 9/11: “Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.” Indeed, contrary to DiManno’s claim, there were American and British forces in Iraq before 9/11, bombing Iraqis to enforce the no-fly zones.

DiManno glibly dismisses the bloody occupation of Iraq, continued Western support of regimes that oppress Muslims and “historical grievances” as motives for terror, but these facts are what drive recruitment into terrorist organizations. In the battle against terrorism, some choose to fight against its causes. DiManno chooses to ghostbust the “amorphous” Islamist boogeyman with fanciful fiction. Pick your side.

It’s a medical miracle that the truth still somehow survives. I think it’s thanks to people like you who are at least willing to consider an alternate version of events, a different retelling of history. You give truth a little breathing room, a cranial space to stretch out a little bit, relax and quietly tell the story. It needs you, but more than that, you need it. We all do…

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Today in Iraq, suicide bombers killed some 50 people. That news held the headlines for about as long as most news of people dying in Iraq whether at the hands of insurgents, British troops or US airplanes: not long. I wonder if people’s impression of the war on Iraq would be different if video coming back from that country was of the victims of aerial assaults stumbling out of the blasts, their faces charred and lacerated, instead of distant explosions that inspire “whoas!” instead of “oh no’s”. I wonder if perhaps Iraqis spoke fluent English, embedded American reporters could have found it in themselves to feature more of their tales of loss and survival instead of American tales of courage and heroism from inside an M1 Abrams tank.