As across the Atlantic New York burned London reeled from the implications of this new threat to free liberal democracy. Tony Blair said as much to a stunned press after an emergency cabinet meeting was hastily called after the two towers, symbols of the corporate and finacial might of the west, lay as piles of rubble in Manhattans streets.

Workers were evacuated from key centres across london, the canary wharf towers ( likely financial targets), the stock exchange, Westminister and MI6 on the banks of the Thames.

All domestic air traffic was suspended above London, for the first time since my arrival here the sky was empty of jets. Offices emptied into nearby pubs to catch the footage being televised on CNN. Web servers overloaded as the entire city tried to get news of the events unfolding in America. Americans working in our office were in tears as they witnessed live the attack on the heart of there country.

The television newsmedia and late edition papers were super-saturated with images streaming in from the new world as Londoners commuted back to their homes. But this was different to the usual media glut that the "free west" is desensitised to. This was not starving or mutilated people in Africa. This was not a hollywood-esque media coverage of Bosnia or Desert Storm. This was coverage with a smattering of fear, disbelief, contemplation.

This was a simple revelation of the duplicity of moral awareness.The belief that death in New York is more important than death in Beirut or Palestine. We as a ethnic group have become accustomed to all manner of calamity befalling cultures other than our own and our arrogance has made us dumb and blind. The planes that crashed into the trade centres did more than destroy a corporate icon they burst a bubble of delusion held dearly by both the American and anglo-ethnic community. The delusion of invulnerability and the delusion of out of site out of mind international relations.

The truth is that these attacks are the ripple on the surface a ocean of pain and suffering endured by many of the worlds disadvantaged
people and in comparison to that suffering this event registers but a blip on the radar.

It will be a measure of the international communities maturity to see through the sensationalism that will follow these attacks and identify the true motivation behind them. Dispair. And in the Arab states you see the rare and lethal combination of pinpoints of power ( Bin Laden) scattered amongst millions of dispairing people.

Lets hope that these events enable us to move forward rather than backward into paranoia and suspicion because in the end our real enemy is our own society.