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Sunday 12 October 2008

The London bombings: one year on

A year of thinking lazily

The men who wrought such devastation last July were not foreign fighters prosecuting a struggle of national liberation against a colonial overlord. They had been born, nurtured and supported by Britain and its institutions. They were not desperately poor and voiceless outsiders, Franz Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’ driven to violence because no other option lay open to them to secure justice. They had enjoyed the freedoms and opportunities of the West, holding down respected jobs and living lives of relative comfort. And they were not psychopaths, or empty nihilists who found in violence an end in itself. As they themselves made clear, they saw their violence serving a cause and a purpose higher than themselves. As Khan himself proclaimed, in a videotape broadcast after his death, ‘We are at war and I am a soldier.’

Mohammad Sidique Khan’s broadcast explicitly linked his actions with the campaign prosecuted by al-Qa’eda’s leaders, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarkawi. His enlistment as a soldier was driven, he explained, by his religion: ‘Islam — obedience to the one true God, Allah, and following the footsteps of the final prophet and messenger Muhammad.’ The terrorists responsible for the Madrid train bombing were, according to Bosnian police, trained in al-Qa’eda camps in that country. They were also, according to British intelligence sources, working in co-operation with a Syrian al-Qa’eda fighter who, after leading operations in Europe, is now believed to be in Iraq.

Even where no explicit link between terrorist cells and known al-Qa’eda operatives is established, the operational style, political rhetoric and ideological justification deployed by different Islamist fighters underline their shared approach. From the Hamas killers in Gaza to Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and Islamist fighters across Southeast Asia, from Indonesia to the Philippines, there is a ruthlessness in the selection of civilian targets, reinforced by a willingness to embrace suicide bombing, a belief that Western influence needs to be cleansed from Muslim lands, and a desire to see a narrow and highly politicised form of Islam imposed across the Muslim world.

More articles from: Michael Gove | this section

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