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Underground > Switchboard >

7/7 vs 9/11- LOCKED

  
  

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Francine I
23:35 / 13.07.05
I believe DI is sourcing hir information about the explosives and possible French knowledge of the culprits from this article.

You seem to believe that "the bombers used military-grade explosives of a type known to be purchased by al Qaeda in the Balkans", but the most that is known about this in the public domain is contained in a quote from the above article: "They also believe that the materials used were not home made but sophisticated military explosives, possibly smuggled into Britain from the Balkans." This sentence makes clear the relative lack of certainty regarding the origins of the explosive material. "Possible" does not comfortably lead to "certain". Furthermore, it sounds like your primary link in your mind between explosives originating in the Balkans and al Q'aeda is, apparently, the fact that a number of Muslims live in the Balkans. The only mention of al Q'aeda in the Balkans I can find is an unrelated discussion in a right-wing blog, and this somewhat dubious article. Note that the article references no sources. So from where do you draw the conclusion that al Q'aeda purchased these explosives in the Balkans and delivered them unto the criminals in question? From where do you derive your certainty that these were suicide attacks? Don't you find this (from the article above) just a bit too anecdotal: "A decapitated head was found at the bus scene which has been, in Israeli experience, the sign of a suicide bomber."

DI, your commentary in this thread and your stubborn urge to link this crime with Islamic terrorism before the investigative work has been done is disturbingly reminiscient of some U.S. commentators who essentially remarked "Good, now those damn commie Europeans will understand how vile these little brown critters are!"

I'm not saying the event was or was not associated with al Q'aeda. I'm just pointing out that you certainly don't know that yet, and that your aggressive posturing isn't lending you a convincing aura. Good luck, though.
 
 
sleazenation
23:38 / 13.07.05

On the subject of the plastic explosives that were reportedly used in July 7th’s terror attacks, I have heard them described as being of a type not readily available to the public in the UK. This suggests they came from outside of the UK and further suggests some elements of organization on the part of the bombers to get hold of them, possibly in the form confederates who did not play an active role in the planting of the bombs. I certainly feel safer with this hesitant mixture of facts and reasonable, but as yet unproven, supposition that I do with the cocksure and oversimplified claim that it is ‘completely obvious’ that the bombings of the 7th of July were all the work of ‘a UK cell of al Qaeda and that the attack was carried out in the name of that organisation's brand of militant islam’. Depending on what exactly one’s understanding of what the term ‘al Qaeda’ currently entails and to what extent one feels justified identifying the actions of criminal terrorists with the religion of Islam, it may well transpire that the bombings of the 7th of July were the work of ‘a UK cell of al Qaeda and that the attack was carried out in the name of that organisation's brand of militant islam’ however it is not yet so obvious as to be proven beyond reasonable doubt.
 
 
Kirk Ultra
00:12 / 14.07.05
Obviously al Qeada? No conspiracy theories in sight?

London Underground Bombing 'Exercises' Took Place at Same Time as Real Attack

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2005/090705bombingexercises.htm

A consultancy agency with government and police connections was running an exercise for an unnamed company that revolved around the London Underground being bombed at the exact same times and locations as happened in real life on the morning of July 7th.

On a BBC Radio 5 interview that aired on the evening of the 7th, the host interviewed Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, which bills itself as a 'crisis management' advice company, better known to you and I as a PR firm.

Peter Power was a former Scotland Yard official, working at one time with the Anti Terrorist Branch.

Power told the host that at the exact same time that the London bombings were taking place, his company was running a 1,000 person strong exercise which drilled the London Underground being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life.

The transcript is as follows.

POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.

------------------------

You can't say people are in denial just because they don't automatically jump on the "don't jump to conclusions, it must have been bin Laden!" bandwagon.

If anything, i'd say the biggest similarities between this and september 11th is that they both huge frame-ups, inside jobs, and there are huge amounts of information about them that the media is trying very hard to ignore.
 
 
Slim
01:16 / 14.07.05
I highly doubt these kids were part of AQ. Pawns of AQ maybe, but no more than that. That's pure conjecture on my part, of course. If it had been a professional AQ attack then I think it would have A)caused more casulties and B)been followed with a long statement by an AQ official.

I heard news reports saying that all 4 were young British men of Pakistani descent. At least one of them had recently been sent to Pakistan as punishment for acting up. If all that is true then I think it's a safe bet to assume the bombers were motivated by an extremist Muslim ideology or in response to the treatment of Arabs by Western nations.
 
 
sleazenation
08:32 / 14.07.05
In reply to Slim

Again, I think this cuts into the problem of ‘what actually is Al Quaeda’. I have certainly heard the plausible scenario that the four bombers might possibly have been manipulated by a third party that might have been exploiting them as terrorist foot-soldiers. The precise nature, extent, connections, associates and resources of this ‘third party’ are, as yet unknown and I still think it is dangerous for officials to speculate publicly.

I can see plausible parallels between what we know of the British suicide bombers and the child soldiers of northern Africa, doing the dirty work of more senior warlords.

As an aside, I would point out that it is important to remember that the terms Arab and Muslim are not synonymous and should not be used as such.
 
 
Char Aina
08:53 / 14.07.05
just quoting you.
yes,
and completely misunderstanding how and why i was deploying the words you quoted.
did you really think i was suggesting that this was a personal attack on ken livingstone?
 
 
Quantum
09:17 / 14.07.05
A consultancy agency with government and police connections was running an exercise for an unnamed company that revolved around the London Underground being bombed at the exact same times and locations as happened in real life on the morning of July 7th.

Whoa! That's pretty crazy. So the disaster management training session was pretty realistic...
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
09:25 / 14.07.05
But is indiscriminate violence by a minority of fanatics more a feature of some religions than others?

Why not tell us what you think, DecayingInsect, instead of just insinuating?

I don't know about religion, but the ideology that seems to have caused most indiscriminate violence in the last 100 years is the worship of the nation state.
 
 
Smoothly
09:43 / 14.07.05
Hmmm. Maybe it’s just me, but it strikes me as a little unfair for so many people to jump on DecayingInsect for not having enough evidence to justify his assertion that journalists might have been correct to surmise that there was a religious dimension to the bombings, when the same proof wasn’t demanded from those who’d concluded - within hours of the attack - that it had something to do with "the war on Iraq, the illegal occupation of Palestine, the propagation of Islamophobia by the UK and US governments… etc."

Or am I missing something?
 
 
Ganesh
09:56 / 14.07.05
I think it's the phrase "completely obvious" that's triggering the jumping-upon, Smoothly.
 
 
Char Aina
09:59 / 14.07.05
i would also say that anyone saying the above has already made DI's assumption, and so to question that assumption would seem the more efficient approach.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
10:05 / 14.07.05
I didn't "conclude... that it had something to do with", Smoothly. I said:

[T]here has sometimes been a tendency for American neo-consevrative commentators... and so on, to say "wait until the bombs start going off in your country/city, then you'll change your tune!"

No. I still feel exactly the same way about the war on Iraq, the illegal occupation of Palestine...
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
10:14 / 14.07.05
In other words, a prediction (now fulfilled) as to how the bombings in London would be spun, and my reaction to that, not a comment on the motivations of the bombers.

Also, let's be honest: it doesn't take a genius to read between the lines of DecayingInsect's posts on that thread and this one. It's the Islamists! They hate freedom! Is it a bad thing that many people on Barbelith don't have much time for that point of view? I think not.
 
 
Smoothly
10:32 / 14.07.05
Yeah, and while I’m not having a pop at you in particular, Flyboy (yours was just the first post in that thread to mention Iraq, Palestine, Islamophobia), there were lots people early on linking the 7/7 bombs to those things – “Tony Blair painting a big target right across the British Isles” etc, without anyone saying “But how do you know it’s got anything to do with any of that?”. That’s what I’m saying.
And reading between the lines is kinda the problem, isn’t it?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
10:48 / 14.07.05
“Tony Blair paining a big target right across the British Isles”

I believe that was me, and I still stand by it, irrespective of the motivations behind last Thursday's bombings. Whether the target's been hit yet or not, allying ourselves with some of the (to my mind) despicable and unpopular actions of the US is bound to piss people off.
 
 
bjacques
10:54 / 14.07.05
As said above already, al-Qaeda today are probably bin Laden, Zawahiri (sp?) and whoever else they're holed up with, and that's about it. Before 11/9, they were a functioning organization, one of those lean, mean, networked enterprises beloved of '90s management gurus. According to a NY Times article I read (pre 11/9) but can't produce right now, they had a revenue stream, a budget, different departments; they even had HR woes like footsoldiers in Palestine complaining they weren't paid as well as Egyptian ones. All this came out in CIA interrogations of captured or disaffected al-Qaeda agents.

After 11/9, the security services rolled up most of the actual organization. The invasion of Afghanistan deprived them of a secure base, though the Taliban were on the point of chucking those city slickers out anyway. Many of al-Qaeda's big donors in places like Pakistan (Realpolitik) or Saudi Arabia (Danegeld), stopped or scaled back their support.

So al-Qaeda's value to jihadis is more symbolic than concrete. There are plenty of enterprising kids eager to do actions in their name.

Any redneck or skinhead can bomb an Olympics, a pub or a government building. The bombs last week were (most likely) military or industrial stock that walked out the back door, along with some regular batteries and safety switches from Dixon's. It's not hard to figure out, and what's available on the Internet now puts the Anarchist Cookbook well in the shade (and the stuff is more likely to work).

I suggest calling this incident the July Outrage(s), giving it a sort of Victorian ring--infernal machines and all that, but stop before getting to Fuzzy-Wuzzy. Anyway, leave 7/7 to the numerologists. 3/11 was bad enough.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:01 / 14.07.05
Not really, no, Smoothly. DecayingInsect first asked whether Sleazenation was "in denial", with regard to a comment to the effect that the investigation was treating the bombing as a crime rather then focusing on a religious or racial angle. He subsequently clarified that he believed that it was completely obvious that the bombings were carried out by fanatics with an islamist agenda. Providing some rather contentious evidence, he then added that it was obvious to him that:

that they were a UK cell of al Qaeda and that the attack was carried out in the name of that organisation's brand of militant islam

All fair enough. He has decided, based on the evidence, that the people involved were "fanatics", "islamists", a "UK cell of Al Qaeda" and therefore the bombings were in the cause of "militant Islam".

However, it strikes me that this is simultaneously unedifying - I imagine that the police were already aware of and investigating the possibility that the bombing was linked to what we tend to shorthand as "Islamist terror" before DecayingInsect shared his research - and also pretty unhelpful. Those of the criminals we have identified so far are of South Asian descent and probably identified as Muslims. There are a lot of people in Britain who are of South Asian descent and identify as muslims, and there are for that matter a lot of people not in Britain and not of South Asian descent who identify as members of Al Qaeda. As such, investigating the crime - with the usual tedious forensics, intelligence work and so on - might be more successful in narrowing down those responsible than bringing in everyone who is involved in some way either with Islam or Pakistan - that is, who shares a racial or religious "angle".

There is no doubt an interesting discussion to be had about the historical skeins that extend from the Jamaat-e-Islami to present-day Yorkshire, but I'm not sure this is going to happen here, or that it should. I am also a bit iffy about the way DecayingInsect has elided "Islamist", which describes a specific political position, with "Islam", which does not, be it ever so militant.
 
 
Smoothly
11:26 / 14.07.05
Stoatie, I agree with you about that. But making the point that Blair’s foreign policy in Iraq and elsewhere makes us a target for terrorist attack, on the day of a terrorist attack, in a thread about that terrorist attack give an unavoidable impression that you’re linking those things together.

Haus, I’m not defending DI in this thread or any other. I’m just saying that there are better fronts on which to attack his position than the fact that he argued that it’s possibly reasonable to surmise that 7/7 could be connected religious fundamentalists, which is where this started. Saying ‘How do you know? Maybe it was someone who hated Ken Livingstone?’ would have sounded disingenuous and needlessly facetious after Stoatie’s post in that thread, and it sounded a bit like that to me here. And I wonder if this didn’t ramp up a conflict which was steadily derailing this thread.
‘Are you still in denial about that sleaze?’ was a dumb thing to say, but then I’m not convinced he knows the difference between denying and being in denial. His post read to me like he’s misunderstood sleaze’s comments anyway – but others winding him up with...
Oh this is a bit useless isn’t it. He’s been way too much of a twat for me to even want to appear close defending him. You’re right. As you were.
 
 
Ganesh
11:39 / 14.07.05
possibly reasonable to surmise

Not the same phrase as "completely obvious" (to the extent that those who do not agree are "in denial").
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
11:43 / 14.07.05
making the point that Blair’s foreign policy in Iraq and elsewhere makes us a target for terrorist attack, on the day of a terrorist attack, in a thread about that terrorist attack give an unavoidable impression that you’re linking those things together

Oh, I probably was. And, yes, probably shouldn't have been.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:54 / 14.07.05
I’m just saying that there are better fronts on which to attack his position than the fact that he argued that it’s possibly reasonable to surmise that 7/7 could be connected religious fundamentalists, which is where this started.

He didn't argue that. He asked Sleaze if it was possible etc., as the opening of a couplet of rhetorical questions, the second of which was whether Sleaze was in denial. What he argued was that it was completely obvious:

that the bombings were carried out by fanatics with an islamist agenda

and

that they were a UK cell of al Qaeda and that the attack was carried out in the name of that organisation's brand of militant islam

I think there are things that are at this point if not completely obvious then pretty well-supported: the identities of three of the bombers, for example. There are assumptions it may be safe to make, for example that the attacks were based on a clash of ideologies rather than the settling of a personal animosity. Once you get into phrases like "UK cell of al Qaeda", things get more complex.

On t'other hand, yeah? Toksik, I don't want to look like I'm down on you, but could you possibly think before you post something about whether it contains something that will derail the discussion completely by providing your interlocutor with an easy target to lampoon? And if you do find that you have done that, could you just walk away?
 
 
DecayingInsect
11:55 / 14.07.05
Kirk Ultra: have you considered posting on Indymedia UK? They have people that are into your theories.

Before bombers were known to be British:

“Tony Blair paining a big target right across the British Isles”

After:
"...he has no way of knowing if that is true.
the bombers may have been individually motivated by anything at all, including but not restricted to religious fervour"

You can't have it both ways.


For the record:

I am very much in favour of Islam as a personal religion

I believe that militant Islam as a politcal movement has been a disaster In all countries in which it has arisen and should be opposed in the UK.

I oppose the harrassment of muslims in western countries: they are having a hard enough time anyway.

However the frantic attempts by posters here to 'out' me as racist, islamophobe, etc rather than look into the real issues are typical of an attitude that I believe gives their real antagonists more traction in the long run.

I'm signing off on this one. Thanks for the debate.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:24 / 14.07.05
I believe that militant Islam as a politcal movement has been a disaster In all countries in which it has arisen

I think you're failing to distinguish between the religious and the political, here, and more broadly between "Islam", "Islamist" and "al Qaeda". Also, as a belief that's fine and dandy, but it's going to require a bit of support. Was Zia al-Huq's Islamism the problem? What bits of Saudi Arabbia's problems relate to its relationship with extremist Wahabite thought? Are we saying that Pan-Arab socialism was a better model? It's all a bit more complex than a one-sentence summary accounts for.

There's some interesting stuff around the idea of Islam as a "personal" faith as well - looking at the relationship of the individual and the Ummah, say - but that may be outwith the scope of this discussion.
 
 
Bill Posters
13:53 / 14.07.05
If it helps, DI, you could gain a very general idea of where most people are coming from by asking yourself what the precise relation between Christianity and the IRA is...

Uh, to the Conspiracy Posse, I posted that link here (towards the bottom of that page*) and Fridgemagnet cast serious doubts on its value and validity, as you'll see by following his link. It's a coincidence, yes, but I'm not sure it's evidence of any shadowy conspiracies...

* P.S. Can someone either remind me via a PM how to post a link to a specific post on this site, or put that into in the FAQ? Ta.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:13 / 14.07.05
Click on the "date/time" signal just below the poster's name on the left-hand side, Bill.
 
 
DecayingInsect
14:42 / 14.07.05
Can't let that one go

Bill Posters: "If it helps, DI, you could gain a very general idea of where most people are coming from by asking yourself what the precise relation between Christianity and the IRA is..."

I seem to recall that the IRA's violent campaign was conducted in the name of irish republicanism, not christianity

To continue off topic, why is it that my admittedly robust remarks here are held to be 'problematic' and bring forth endless homilies on shades of gray, the complexities of certain issues, use of language etc etc, whereas other posters' contentious remarks on, for example, christianity, america and israel are receive less scrutiny?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
15:15 / 14.07.05
Are they receive less scrutiny? That could, possibly, be because we have launched every "Zig"...

On one level, it may be that the viewpoints expressed by others are more sympathetic to the viewpoints of other people on the board. In a perfect world, we would be inclined to subject every statement to the same level of scrutiny, but this is not a perfect world. More generally, the fact that your presentation was bombastic and rude is probably not inclining anyone to give you the benefit of the doubt. Insult people and they will think less of you. It's just a thing.

Back ontopic:

I seem to recall that the IRA's violent campaign was conducted in the name of irish republicanism, not christianity

Approximately correct - the IRA was seeking, or claiming to seek, a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and the creation of a unified Irish Republic, which is not quite the same thing. However, it's been made pretty clear that the actions of the bombers, or for that matter of al Qaeda, are not really akin to the aims of Islam, so I'd say that you and Bill are both misinterpreting the comparison, just in somewhat different ways.

Which brings us back to this Islamism thing. Since the Americans found out about Islamism, the word gets used an awful lot, and often in rather peculiar contexts. So, you're describing this is an act of "Islamist terror", but in what sense does it advance Islamist ends? I don't imagine that Britain is likely to convert to sharia law, and nor could the peoople planning the attack. So, Islamist in what sense? Islamic in what sense? If the perpetrators are and were muslims, what exactly does that tell us about Islam? Not a huge amount, I'm thinking. At which point the Catholic/Protestant distinction might flip back into utility, although personally I think Christians/Muslims in Bosnia might be an equally handy example.

So, I'd say less "robust" and more "wooly and inexact" are maybe the adjectives causing the rather gelid reception of your words of wisdom.
 
 
DecayingInsect
15:37 / 14.07.05
"Haus: "Are they receive less scrutiny? That could, possibly, be because we have launched every "Zig"..."

I appreciate your occasional need to launch a cheapo but isn't it a bit "rude" to nit-pick a grammatical slip?

As for "bombast" (and contentious choice of language):

"Do you mean that the bombings were religious in the same way that a bishop is religious - that is, that the explosion itself sparked some sort of brief sentience, during which the bombs made a series of posits and reached a series of conclusions that led them to believe in the existence of a higher force with certained defined aspects? Or do you mean that the killings were religious in the sense that, say the giving of the Eucharist is religious - that they were part of a religious ceremony, like mass or a Christian wedding?"
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
15:51 / 14.07.05
Precisely. By debuting in the thread with the remarkably and pointlessly rude and ad hominem:

Or are you still in denial about this?

You effectively abrogated the right to be treated with civility, and thus invited that response. Which is why it's nice to be nice; it makes people inclined to be nice to you. Declining to represent half-truths and rumours as facts, and then insulting people for not "knowing" them is also likely to provoke a warmer reception, as, in a fairly emotive topic, is failing to make it clear that you are not interested in the death and suffering in London per se, but only in how it feeds your pet theories.

So, yeah. I'm afraid that even if your posts did become suddenly valuable and incisive, rather than a complaint about how you don't get no respec', you might at this point find that some people wouldn't be very interested in discussing them with you, because they might feel that you aren't interested in exchanging views, only expounding yours, and cannot be relied upon to do that in an adult way.

Anything else is probably covered by the FAQ.
 
 
Francine I
18:37 / 14.07.05
"To continue off topic, why is it that my admittedly robust remarks here are held to be 'problematic' and bring forth endless homilies on shades of gray, the complexities of certain issues, use of language etc etc, whereas other posters' contentious remarks on, for example, christianity, america and israel are receive less scrutiny?

Aside from the insight Haus has offered on these questions, I might also advance that you haven't been very forthright with your sources. So, basically, you're taking swings at a group that has less of a say in world affairs then say, the Israeli government, the U.S. government, or organized Christianity, and offering little to back up the pugilism. It seems to me that most of the Barbelith posting demographic is generally a bit more sympathetic to concepts that challenge the status quo, to be sure, but then the status quo is often terribly fucked up and very difficult to change (see: civil rights and slavery). So when folks glibly defend (or attack on behalf of) said status quo with nary a nod to the importance of backing up their claims, most of the folks around here aren't likely to respond in a very friendly manner. After all, you've got to have a stack of sources ten miles high to challenge U.S. hegemony, Israeli abuse of human rights, or the relative merit of Christianity. Meanwhile, people don't seem to feel the same rigour should be necessary when insinuating that 'there's something wrong with them there Muslims'. In my experience, that's not often received well in the few enclaves in this world where people support one another's attempts to analyze, criticize, or even improve the status quo.

So if you want to come around here and drop hints about some already very disenfranchised and justifiably pissed off people, at least include some linky-linky action, yeah?
 
 
Slim
23:05 / 14.07.05
In reply to Slim

Again, I think this cuts into the problem of ‘what actually is Al Quaeda’.

It was always hard to label. An umbrella organization or simply a collection of terrorist groups financed by bin Laden's cash and Muslim donors. I agree that it's difficult to define AQ presently since its former leaders are on the run (well, maybe) and its previous way of doing business has been either destroyed or temporarily halted, depending on your opinion. I do think it's worth noting that some of the smaller insurgent outfits in Iraq are still attempting to join up with AQ, so it exists and still has quite a bit of pull with the extremists.


I have certainly heard the plausible scenario that the four bombers might possibly have been manipulated by a third party that might have been exploiting them as terrorist foot-soldiers.

A couple of the bombers were 18 and 20, correct? It seems to me that they got caught up in a movement and went overboard, as teenagers often do.


The precise nature, extent, connections, associates and resources of this ‘third party’ are, as yet unknown and I still think it is dangerous for officials to speculate publicly.

I think the British government and its agencies have been handling it quite well. And this is coming from a right-wing apologist for neo-conservative warmongers.


As an aside, I would point out that it is important to remember that the terms Arab and Muslim are not synonymous and should not be used as such.

It's important to separate the two when it comes to labeling people but I'm afraid the terms have become horribly intertwined when it comes to political issues.


As an aside that will be sure to piss off the lot of you, is anyone else getting irked at some of the comments coming from the Muslim community? While most have been great, I've heard or read some of the, "What the bombers did was wrong, BUT...." comments that are followed by a justification. It reminds me of statements made by Catholics after the Church got caught with its pants down.
 
 
DecayingInsect
23:36 / 14.07.05
Citizen Frances: did you read my remarks about islam? How were they "glib"


Here is a link info on some seemingly not terribly "disenfranched" but ultimately very "pissed off" individuals


here
is another

and here
is another

And what is your position on 'progressives' apparantly united in struggle with obscurantist fanatics? Opinion piece here
 
 
Francine I
03:10 / 15.07.05
DI, this is just what I (and others) find so objectionable. When I said "...very disenfranchised and justifiably pissed off people...", I was referring to Muslims living in the Middle East and Central Asia (particularly Palestine), and I think that was very clear. But you respond and apply precisely the same terms to a small subset of terrorists, and thusly equivocate your terrorists with Muslims in general. Meanwhile, you haven't addressed the meat of a single argument nor answered a single question asked of you. What do you call that? One of the definitions of glib is "Showing little thought, preparation, or concern", as in "he addressed our concerns glibly". You can't see from where I'm taking that term?

As far as the opinion piece you linked which exhibits a total lack of academic rigour and a whole lot of rumour mongering, I haven't got an opinion since I have few facts to work with, and I don't see how it's relevant. Care to enlighten me?
 
 
DecayingInsect
09:05 / 15.07.05
Citizen Frances: can you explain how, in the light of my remarks about islam I equivocated "my" terrorists with muslims in general and how the legitimate or otherwise grievences of people in the Middle East and Central Asia (not all of whom are moslem) constitute *any* justification for their actions.

By the way, I think I have responded to several questions and stated my position with complete clarity as you will discover when you re-read the thread.


Meanwhile try this for more emerging facts and then tell me if I haven't been right all along.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:14 / 15.07.05
As an aside that will be sure to piss off the lot of you, is anyone else getting irked at some of the comments coming from the Muslim community? While most have been great, I've heard or read some of the, "What the bombers did was wrong, BUT...." comments that are followed by a justification.

Could you give examples, Slim, and also explain how you are distinguishing between "the Muslim community" and "individual Muslims"? I've certainly heard people drawing comparisons between the numbers of people killed in urban bombing in Iraq and the numbers killed in London, or for that matter the number of children who died of hunger, statistically, during the two minutes' silence, but these people have not been Muslims. Also, are you distinguishing "justification" and "equivalence"? That is, is anyone reputable describing the attacks as justified, or are they drawing comparisons between the bombing, which is wrong, and other things happening in the world, which are also wrong?

On the plus side, The leading scholars of Islam in the UK are drafting a fatwa, which will deny anyone complicit in the bombings from calling themselves Muslims. That's quite a big thing, I believe.
 
  

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