Perspectives - A Column from The Tribune of Monday 25th July, 2005
by Andrew Allen
 

A few days after the terrorist atrocity that rocked London on the 7th of July, a matronly Nigerian woman, dressed in her traditional garb, called a hasty press conference.

Pleading for information of the whereabouts of her son, Anthony, a large picture of whom was displayed behind her, Mrs. Miriam Fatayi-Williams went on to question the motives, and deplore the senselessness of an act of terror that she well knew had probably taken his life.

Comparing the acts of the terrorists with the noble, non-violent, and ultimately successful, campaigns of Mandela and Gandhi she questioned how the attackers could further their cause by killing and maiming innocent people of all nations, religions and backgrounds.  As a Nigerian Catholic, married to a Muslim, she was well placed to ask these questions.

Hers was, on account of its eloquence, its pathos, and its signification of the random and unselective nature of the attacks, perhaps the most poignant expression of the senselessness and cruelty of the attacks that most Londoners will remember.

But no sooner had Mrs. Fatayi-Williams spoken than the politicians were competing to outdo one another in repeating her words.  For Tony Blair, as well as Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, it offered a golden opportunity to distance the events of the 7th of July from wider events in the world.

By showing the human suffering and senselessness of the acts so vividly, and in the experience of a random member of the world community so tragically effected by them, the two men sought to deny that British policy abroad is in any way responsible for the appallingly dangerous state of the world today.

As Mr. Livingstone well knows, and Mr. Blair should know (but probably doesn't) this self-righteous denial of the context of the event is based upon a most simple-minded fallacy.  That fallacy holds that the moment some nutcase decides to use an evil, terroristic tactic, this event breaks the chain of causation between western policy and the anger, much of it justified, that it provokes around the world.

It is, of course, only when that violence comes home, rather than just featuring on news broadcasts from “over there”, that the supporters of the fallacy feel the need to expend political energy driving it home.  Thus, in Britain immediately following the terror attacks, the government was out in force repeating the old line about those who hate western values, rather than taking the opportunity to face the arguments of those - inside the west as well as out - who simply hate western policy and what it does to others.

Strangely, then, it was with apparent disbelief that the British government learnt over last weekend what 75 per cent of British people (and possibly 100 per cent of British garden wildlife) already knew that Blair’s aggression in Iraq is responsible for creating and enhancing the conditions in which terror of the sort visited on London can thrive.  This was the conclusion of a report by the widely respected Chatham House, an organisation that cannot lightly be dismissed by anyone, much less a government that so regularly defers to it.

In describing his “astonishment at the conclusion of the report, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary appeared to suggest that no right-minded fanatical madman could actually be motivated by anything in the real world when it came to deciding where, when and upon whom to carry out his madness.  Nothing done in Baghdad, Basra or Gaza could actually undermine the safety of innocent Londoners.  What nonsense!

Whatever the spark, it is clear that politics is, by definition, the fuel for political violence.  In seeking to deny this motivation, and replace it with a supposedly potent perversion of Islam, Mr. Blair displays a shocking ignorance of western history, as well as of Islam (here in London he is being dubbed “Sheikh Tony Blair” in some papers for his laughable attempts to interpret Islamic jurisprudence).

Guy Fawkes, John Wilkes Booth and the Cato Street plotters, whatever their personal psychologies, are all figures whose historical explanation lay in political events of their day.

That the cause of none of these men would be judged to have been right by modern standards is a matter that stands independently of the repugnant tactics they used to further it.

Similarly, the justified sense of anger around the world at the policies of the west in places like Iraq must stand independently of what a few demented individuals chose (unilaterally) to do in supposed expression of that outrage.

For every crazed and imbalanced young man seeking martyrdom, there are many balanced, intelligent voices calling Mr. Blair to account for having dragged his country into one of the most disgraceful and unjustified wars of aggression in memory.  More than a million of them marched in London in protest of the war.

With typical self-righteousness and a flash of what the Economist magazine rightly dubs “the most irritating grin in British politics” the Prime Minister chose to ignore them.

Now that he has succeeded in making the world, including the streets of London, so much more dangerous a place, the same self-righteousness is back in use, this time in absolution of any policy (some of) whose opponents are terrorists.

Mrs. Fatayi-Williams’ voice was so compelling not just for the resonance of the emotion that it conveyed.  A mother from a distant land frantically grieving a son lost in an act of apparent senselessness far from home; the context alone evokes pathos in all balanced people.

But more than the context was the woman herself.  The intelligence, composure and eloquence with which she delivered a message of such universal truth made its truth all the more poignant.  For that, it is right that it should have attracted the repetition that it has among serious people.

But it would be very wrong to permit the eloquence, poise and high feeling elicited by these horrible attacks to be highjacked by those politicians keen to justify murderous, supremacist and hypocritical policies in other people's countries.

The tactic of terrorising people is inhuman and wrong, whether it is the slaughter of innocents in a bus in London or uninformed western politicians deciding, at a safe distance, to snuff out thousands of Arab, Muslim lives in an illegal and ill-founded war.

True, never should the use of terrorism as a tactic make the public look any more kindly at the cause of the perpetrators.  But equally, never should it make a thinking public look any more kindly at the policies of a government whose actions have made the world a so much angrier and more violent place.