[lbo-talk] They lived in the next street from me

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Wed Jul 13 09:23:22 PDT 2005



>From: "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
>
>>None of this background explains the bombings. Hasib Hussain (19), Shehzad
>>Tanweer (22), Mohammed Sidique Khan (30) and their last, as yet unnamed
>>accomplice lived the same lives as many people who went on to do quite
>>different things with their lives. Of course it is tempting to ascribe
>>political motives to the bombings, because that makes more sense of them.
>>But in the end, these suicide bombings are just the equivalent of what the
>>Americans called 'going Postal', after Post Workers went to work and
>>blasted all their colleagues - or a kind of Columbine Massacre on the
>>Underground.

Your strenuous efforts to deny the obvious are impressive, James, but "going postal" is not a satisfactory explanation of the London bombings. There is every reason to believe the prime motivation was political, and I think we can safely assume that Hussain et al. were not, say, IRA sympathizers, Basque separatists or members of the Fuerzas Armadas Liberacion Nacional Puertoriquena. Grievance over Iraq seems the most likely cause for their actions. Here we have George Bush and Tony Blair "democratizing" Iraq in what appears to be an exercise in ritual humiliation of Islamic people. Here, too, we have the electorates of both the US and UK saying, "Way to go, George and Tony!" and returning both war criminals to office. George Bush said that his reelection was a "moment of accountability" for the war on Iraq -- the London bombings look like another.

Carl



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