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7/7 bombings one year on

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grant

16:23 / 07.07.06

I think "mainstream" might be a more useful word, if you want to counter some of the unspoken thoughts around "moderate."

It tends to get tagged onto "Christianity" here in the U.S. when discussing the freaky, fringey religious right in a critical way.

Kiltartan Cross

16:32 / 07.07.06

there isn't really a Muslim position on women's rights. So, while the views of an Asma Barlas may not be wildly popular in Saudi Arabia, they are nonetheless part of Muslim thought.

Surah 4 of the Qur'an is fairly clear cut (at least in the translation I have) about the relative positions of men and women. On the other hand, as far as I understand them, the more mystical branches of Islam, Sufism, say, agree on the spiritual equivalence of men and women. It depends, I think, on the willingness of the individual to treat the Qur'an as allegory rather than code. Christianity manages well enough without following the legal codes of the Old Testament; it would be most encouraging to see a similar state across Islam.

Dead Megatron

21:36 / 07.07.06

I wonder if there will be two minutes of silence for Jean Charles de Menezes (y'know, the innocent guy who was murdered by the Police)...

Tryphena Absent

22:30 / 07.07.06

Death is a big thing for me, quite a formative experience because my adolescence was coloured by people dropping like flies so unsurprisingly the things that I hated today were the papers with the "victims" faces splashed all over the place. I think that was pretty nasty. It upset me a little to be able to identify one of those faces and think about people who had known that person and I think if it had been a friend or relative I would have been brimming with rage at the Daily Mail splashing their face around so callously with some comment aimed at "them" (Al-Qaida).

sleazenation

23:34 / 07.07.06

Meanwhile the Express was having one of its Diana days off where instead of focusing on news it instead once again exhumes the fashionable corpse of the late Princess of Wales... I wonder whether it is more offensive to highjack the death of one wealthy
woman or the deaths of many less wealthy people.

For my part, I observed the silence by dint of being in a library when it occurred. Last year I was standing on a platform at Holborn station a couple of hundred metre away from the smouldering wreackage, cursing the lateness of the train under my breath...

Strange Machine Vs The Virus with Shoes

00:09 / 08.07.06

Personally I disagree with a 2 minute silence for the victims of July 7th. I always observe the 1 minute on Remembrance Day and even if the 2 minutes silence is a one off it does not seem right to me. I personally think a “Remembrance Day” for the victims of 7/7 sets a dangerous precedence in that it equates the deaths of those who died to those who died in WW2 and may infer that by living our lives in this society is equivalent to fighting a war. On a more personal note, my family is from Northern Ireland and I have never heard of any national remembrance for the victims of the terrorist deaths related to that conflict. By all means, those directly connected to the bombings in July should have a memorial ceremony, but I do worry about how the state uses July 7th to further its own agenda with this act of 2 minutes silence. I see this as a means of emotional hijacking by the state.

haus of fraser

08:21 / 09.07.06

I'm not so sure that it was an emotional highjacking of the State. Was the 2 minute silence govenment organized or was it something promoted by the media/ support groups etc?

As a Londoner that uses the transport system and by chance missed being on a train that blew up i think a 2 minute silnce in London was appropriate. I'm pretty sure Manchester did a similar thing one year on from their IRA bombing.

I guess that its a local thing - having a national 2 min silence would be unnapropriate but for those of us in London I think it shows a degree of respect and gives a moment to reflect.

sleazenation

10:53 / 09.07.06

Depends whether or not this is going to be a one off event or something that is cultivated year in-year out... the danger with doing the latter is that it runs the risk of giving the government an excuse to further erode our civil rights and way of life in seach of a bogeyman that they can't defeat through conventional means anyway. The danger is that the commemoration becomes institutionalised and about fear (and the maintainence of fear in a population) rather than about the people that lost there lives on that specific day...

Tryphena Absent

13:49 / 09.07.06

the first time in months that i've found myself checking out unclaimed luggage

This actually kind of worries me. I mean perhaps the bag thing is ingrained in me to the point where logic flies out the window but the tube isn't more or less dangerous then it was 2 years ago or 10 years ago. Best to work on the assumption that someone wants to blow the tube up at all times and never stop looking for unattended bags. At least if you ask the morons start to, you know, stand by their luggage, which could actually be nicked at any time.

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