we are all free people

Shout this from the rooftops! I couldn't agree more and I salute the author of this post.

The problem with posts like these are that Al Quaeda made terrorist attacks before Iraq and would carry on even if we did pull out and leave Iraq to civil war. Oh and talk of gouging out eyes and burning pepole with cigarettes by troops is simple lying propaganda. Many people understandably are uneasy about the Iraq occupation, but telling lies to highlight your cause is no different from Blair. Most Iraqis want democracy but you let me guess you want an Islamo-fascist theocracy led by your buddy Al Sadr? Not content with having lost every battle he has started against the UK forces, you now attempt a propaganda offensive using Indymedia? Be honest.

My 10 yr old son was watching the news on TV this very morning and said;"Daddy I don't mean this to sound mean and I feel sad for the people in London; but lots and lots of ordinary people are killed every day in Iraq----
so why do we never hear THEIR names or anything about THEIR families?
Out of the mouths of babes------- Maybe our children can build a better world.

"Al Quaeda made terrorist attacks before Iraq and would carry on even if we did pull out and leave Iraq to civil war."

This is essentially the argument of all the neo-liberal blinkered pundits. "They just hate our way of life" as if the terrorists are a force of nature like a hurricane. Not to be reasoned with, impossible to placate without the whole of the Christendom converting en-mass to Islam.

Like everything else in this complicated world, the real picture is not so black and white (or cross and crescent shaped might be a more appropriate metaphor). While it is true that there are radical, fundamentalist elements of the global Islamic population, they are only a tiny percentage of the whole. There are probably just as many fundamentalist Christians in the Mid-West who would stop at nothing until all of Islam converted to Christianity... The only difference between them and their Islamic counterparts, is that the Christians get given high tech weaponry and flown into Islamic countries with the blessings of their government!

The thing that permits people to believe the terrorists exist in a vacuum, is a blind spot in the history of the West's relationship with the Islamic world. It consists of a catalogue of abuses stretching right the way from the Crusades up until the modern day. Off the top of my head, here are some of the most recent ones:

- Brutal occupation of Iraq by Britain between the World Wars, including use of chemical weapons against unarmed civilians famously sanctioned by everybody's favourite war-criminal - Winston Churchill.
- Consistent support of Israel in its various wars and aggressions against its neighbouring Islamic states from 1948. These so-called "Arab-Israeli Wars" have included hostilities by Israel against Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Jordan. Israel would not have been able to prosecute these wars without massive military aid from the US and other Western nations.
- Support of a multitude of oppressive regimes in Arab states, as and when it suited Western nation's interests to do so. This includes the Taliban (during and after the resistance to the Soviet invasion), Saddam Hussain during the Iran-Iraq war and the Saudi Royal family. It is a common misconception that those three mentioned above are Islamic regimes. They may profess to be (apart from Saddam Hussain who was always secular), but most Islamic scholars would claim that they follow perverted versions of Islam and who's brutal control over their subject populations has been useful to the West.

The list goes on...

What I am trying to illustrate, is that the radical elements of the Islamic faith have been massively strengthened, if not entirely created, by the decades of horrifying abuse dealt out on their countries by Western governments.

It is probably true to say that withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan would not completely dispel the spectre of Islamic terrorism because those two recent atrocities are just one of many in a long and sickening history. But is this a good reason to continue fanning the flames?

The way things are going, the warfare will continue and the terrorism will increase. Technology is making it easier and easier for non-state actors to inflict horrifying damage. How long will it be before a small nuclear device is detonated in central London, Manhattan or Rome? I truly believe it will be just a matter of time, unless we begin the long and brave task of pulling the teeth from this dragon.

We must reverse our foreign policy to make amends for all this horror our governments have doled out in our names. We must accept that states no-longer have a monopoly on mass destruction and stop using massive military force to counter the actions of a few individuals. We must stop pursuing policies that radicalise people. Only this, combined with fair, thorough and honest police work can defeat terrorism in the world today.

Not that anyone will listen to little old me... Oh well, I have to try!

Paul

So you feel 'uneasy' about the situation in Iraq. I appreciate your overwhelming empathy. Still 'uneasy' feels more comfortable than despair, desperation, bereavement and physical pain.
Islamic fundamentalist terrorism hardly registered in Global conflict terms until 9/11 and
well here's the rub...
The Bush administration orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, without which the invasions of Iraq and Afganistan, the Bali, Madrid and London bombings would never have happened.
If you find this hard to believe, please take a few hours of your time to order and read " The 9/11 Commission Report - Omissions and Distortions" by David Ray Griffin.
Please.

Zero

and feel too little.

I must agree with the author of this article however the misconception seems to be being made that the British people have a lot of knowledge about what is happening in Iraq. The invasion of Iraq, amongst other things, is mainly for oil and the vast reconstruction contracts to be gained.

What Blair is now doing with the London bombing is to use it in exactly the same way Bush used 9/11. British people told to continue as normal, saluted for their bravery whilst Birmingham is totally evacuated and US troops are advised not to go near London. How farcical can they get trying to scare us??

We will soon be introduced to "preparatory anti-terrorism" laws which will merely be a further erosion of our civil liberties. We will also be told that these laws will not be misused even though previous laws passed for "anti-terrorism" have ALREADY been used against anti-globalisation and capitalist protestors by BLAIR!!

All of this whilst last week, an Amnesty report confrimed British companies were shipping over weapons from former Eastern Bloc countries to Rwanda and Conga. What is the government doing about this sort of "preparatory terrorism".

We will be sure to implement further foreign policy designed to act as a recruiting agent for more terrorists (i.e The Iraq War) in the name of stopping them.

The fact the Bin Laden went on record in 2002 to advise he would cease all attacks on countries that didn't meddle in middle eastern affairs appears to have been forgotten by our "free press" and of course, Paul, whose earlier comment makes you want to chew off your fist in sheer embarrassment.

The messages from the British people are "WE ARE NOT AFFRAID" but the fact is they will soon be very affraid because that is what they are supposed to feel.

The US wiped out communism using brute force, scaremongering, maybe they are planning the same with Islam?

Could we at least start with an assasinated US president?

the post is very noble and correct. we must stop imperialist, corporate global wars, which are waged against the ordinary people of the world in order to control them and their economies. we must stop placing corporate profits ahead of our survival as individuals and as a species.

the sad thing is that, merely because the main stream media parrots the term "al qaida" every five minutes, there is no pause to reflect on the actual evidence of the London terror attacks.

yes these are despicable acts of terror? but who really committed them?

HOW ON EARTH can "terror exercises" be taking place at exactly the same time and locations as the attacks?  http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m13556 this story was confirmed by Canadian Broadcasting Company and yet is nowhere to be seen in the US media.

HOW ON EARTH can such military grade high explosives be used with precision timing at the very moment those "terror exercises" are taking place?

HOW ON EARTH can anyone believe that these invisible "al qaida" operatives are going to gain by bombing London at the exact moment that a secret memo detailing the near immediate pull-out of UK forces is going to take place? AND at the exact moment when the G8 is to discuss global emissions controls and poverty in Africa? Are we to believe that the BP - Chevron - Exxon cabal who are driving the world (both economically and environmentally) into total disaster would just sit and allow the topics of stopping the personal-auto juggernaut and redistributing wealth to those now starving to take place? And yet it is supposedly these invisible "terrorists" whom we must devote the entire national treasure to fighting who are to blame!

oh how sad and ridiculous are the people unwilling to face the truth, to tear down these monsters from their watchtowers, and seek peace for all the people of Iraq, of Nigeria, of the UK, of Israel and Palestine.

please, let us take the truth of the terrible and unnecessary slaughter of innocent civilians in Iraq as the motivation to end the tyranny of brutal fascist capitalists and their tools like Cheney, Blair, Rumsfeld, Feith, Sharon, and absurdist "aw shucks" front man W. Bush.

I'm not going to argue with people who believe crackpot theories that 9-11 and now this new atrocity is the work of the government. That's because what this say is irreconcilable and indeed plain silly. I will re-iterate my initial point that the post contains blatant falsehoods, when have UK troops gouged out eyes and tortured people with cigarete lighters? The person who makes this claim is lying and probably does so to support a Islamic fundamentalist terrorist like Al Sadr. neither are the US and others in Iraq to force Christianity on people. They are there to force democracy and make a tidy oil profit. Not much better perhaps. One point must be made however, suicide bombers do not kill themselves for Checynya, Palestine, Iraq or Leeds(the home of the suspected tube bombers). They do so because of a belief, unique to Islam that it guarantees them a place in paradise. Sure a minority view,but it is rooted in an extreme interpretation of that religon. Such a view makes conflicts like Palestine and Checynya extremley difficult to reconcile. They also thrive on a misplaced view of Islamic victimhood, claiming that since the crusades the West has been against them. And yet most Muslims die at the hands of fellow muslims and always have done. Who killed the most muslims out of these three, Bush, Sharon or Hussein? The winner manaed it with a margin of about a million so far but little condemnation in the Arab world. Such a discussion misses the point anyway, this terrism is caused by Islamic extremism, that wants to dominate the Western world and only ever views other Muslims as either victims of Western aggression or apostates. It also refuses to aknowledge the ongoing jihadist aggression of some muslims.

"One point must be made however, suicide bombers do not kill themselves for Checynya, Palestine, Iraq or Leeds(the home of the suspected tube bombers). They do so because of a belief, unique to Islam that it guarantees them a place in paradise."

What a load of patent hogwash ....... where in the quran does it say - "the quickest way to heaven is through a suicide bomb?"

For as long as people keep ignoring grave injustices, the problem will continue, and according to Robert Pape, get worse.

Suicide bombings, according to him began in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and have not been limited to Islamic people - the mainly Hindu Tamil Tigers used the tactic prolifically.

The uniting factor is struggle against oppression and injustice.

 http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/06/30/schuster.column/

"And yet most Muslims die at the hands of fellow muslims and always have done. Who killed the most muslims out of these three, Bush, Sharon or Hussein? The winner managed it with a margin of about a million so far but little condemnation in the Arab world"

Paul, I assume by this statement you are implying Hussein is the winner in the crude contest but this is surely missing the point. I assume by Bush you didn't meant George Bush Snr who supplied Sadaam with the weapons when he, for example, gased the Kurds.

You also mention Sharon. Do I really need to point this out to you as well? I hope not.

And when you say US/others went into iraq to "force democracy" be careful how you use the word "democracy".

The Japanese kamikaze pilots are another example of non-muslim suicide bombers. Although it was, as in current day cases, managed due to a maniuplation and brainwashing of religion.

You seem to acknowledge some of the facts in that the US/others went to Iraq to make a tidy oil profit, not mentioning the reconstruction contracts (heard of Halliburton?), but do not regard this as evil as the suicide bombings.

People acting in a twisted misguided interpretation of religion usually brainwashed into them by others or calculated cowardly murder in the name of democracy to gain money.

Did the iraq war increase the chances of the terrorist attack on London and over 300 suicide bombings since May. Both the CIA and UK intelligence thought so, and they got it right. Chances are they may actually be happy about it. Was their any link between Sadaam/Iraq and Al-qaeda before the war? No.

Why do they keep implementing policies which appear to act as recruiting agents for terrorism??

Don't you think any muslims are aware of what actually is happening in Iraq? Do you think a very very small minority will over time grow disenchanted with what is happening?

We need to condemn our leaders in the same way we condemn suicide bombers. It will never happen.