The aftermath of "07-07": a rush towards judgement

In the immediate aftermath of a disaster such as the one that struck at London’s rush hour yesterday morning, there is little point, little moral reason, to examine the whys and wherefores, to delve into the geopolitical manoeuvrings that may or may not have been the causes. It can be too easy to rush into judgement, and engaging with it at such an early stage can be a painful lesson, one that often backfires. The example of Ward Churchill’s infamous post-9/11 essay, “On the justice of roosting chickens”, is instructive: although some of his arguments were valid, at the time the proximity – and psychological resonance – of the attacks was too great for the piece to be approached fairly and honestly.

So it was disheartening – although not particularly surprising – to hear the comments by George Galloway yesterday. In the hours after the attack, while the bodies were still warm and traumatised survivors were brought up from the dark sarcophagus of the stricken Tube train, the Bethnal Green & Bow MP delivered his verdict, a classic piece of opportunistic political grandstanding in which he claimed:

“We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such warnings."

Tariq Ali, in a piece in Friday morning’s Guardian entitled “The price of occupation”, argued a similar line, noting that Britain’s actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its unstinting support for the White House-led ‘war on terror’, quoting the London mayor Ken Livingstone who once said that our Middle East policies “jeopardise security and peace everywhere”. I confess to sharing the sympathies of both men, although Galloway’s comments – made so swiftly, and with the Glaswegian clearly seeing terror and tragedy as points to be won on a political scoring card – were unnecessarily crude. It just seems to me that in the aftermath such reasoning is callous and callow, and does no service to those of us who wish to offer up a more reasoned, objective opinion. Many of us, too, who argued against the crackdown on civil liberties in Britain may well be re-examining our earlier positions in lieu of the country’s worst ever terror attack. These things take time to absorb.

All I’d like to say for now is to commend both the spirit of the city, and the response of the emergency services. For such a brutal attack, Londoners showed a remarkable resilience, and as I walked around the Aldgate area shortly after the bombs had exploded there was a sense of calm and fortitude that was a testament to the city’s character. As for the emergency services and transport workers, who knows how many countless lives their rapid actions saved? Millions of pounds have been spent planning for this kind of attack, and it showed in the way that ambulances, firemen and police were dispatched with incredible speed. The London Underground workers who evacuated the entire network in record time should also be commended. It appears they were informed that an explosive device had gone off, and yet still went down into each station and marshalled people out of there as quickly as possible. We in this city love to complain about the transport network, but yesterday’s response showed how lucky we really are to have such a robust system in place when disaster strikes.

So far there has been no sense of a backlash towards the city’s large Muslim population. This is something to be proud of, and we can only hope that the calm serenity that has so far prevailed will continue. Muslims will have been killed and injured in the blasts, and to persecute them – as, no doubt, the right-wing media will continue to do – will only exacerbate the situation and target those who are victims of these crimes as much as anybody.