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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>It seems that the London bombers did not come from
Iraq seeking vengeance, but grew up in the next street from where I was raised.
We lived at Alexandra Crescent in Leeds when I was born, the bombers, now all
named by the press, lived in Alexandra Grove and Alexandra Park, parallel and
adjacent to me. It was a mixed Pakistani-English area then.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>In the eighties when Shehzad Tanweer (22) was
growing up my mother was still teaching Junior school in nearby Huddersfield.
Her students were mostly Pakistani, then. Often they would turn up to school
with swollen fingers where the Imam had hit them with a stick at the "mocks
[mosque] school". They had to chant the Koran by rote with their hands flat
on the desk in front of them so that he could rap them with a stick when they
got it wrong. </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>The Imam, all visitors from
Pakistan, would be rotated so they did not go native.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>When I was a child, Pakistanis were hated by
many white Loiners, and were isolated as a community. As the indigenous
working class's economic position fell, they hung on more tenaciously to the
racial divide, dreading the Pakistanis as the personification of decline. The
first generation of Pakistanis were culturally conservative, but politically,
Labour Party voters, and generally avoided confrontation with the white
community. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>But in the late eighties and nineties some of those
divisions were breaking down. First the recessions of the 1980s demolished the
organisational solidarity of the white working class. I can remember Leeds
looking like Sarajevo in the early nineties, with corner houses burnt out, and
gun crime on the rise.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Then, just as unexpectedly, the economy swung
upwards, and Leeds was singled out as a success story, the city centre
renovated. All across Britain, attitudes to Asians (collective term for
Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis here, not Koreans, of whom there are few)
were shifting. Living in Manchester and Birmingham, I could see there were many
more mixed-race couples, more or less alien in the Leeds of my early years. In
some circles, Asian was cool, crossover music like Kula Shaker made the charts,
novels by Monica Ali, Vikram Seth and Arundathi Roy were popular.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>There were also conflicts as the second generation
of Asians grew up resentful of their parents perceived servility. The conflict
is rehearsed in Hanif Kureishi's story, My Son the Fanatic. I saw many second
generation immigrants confuse their parents by embracing a political Islam that
was oddly Western, much more ideological and less traditionally religious than
their own faith. Islamic militants burned Salman Rushdie's 'blasphemous' novel,
the Satanic Verses in the street. In Leeds, younger Islamic militants harassed
prostitutes. Not all the Asians were religiously motivated, by a long chalk.
There was a lot of secular advance, into the expanding higher education sector,
and also more Asian gang activity, which was particularly high-lighted by the
press.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Local authorities in Bradford and Leeds accomodated
the rising aspirations of British-born Asians by extending the provision
for publicly-funded faith schools to include Islamic as well as Jewish and
Catholic Schools. Those white people that lacked the economic means to move out
were particularly resentful at the way that a more assertive Asian population
won influence over the provision of services like public housing and other
community funds. A few years ago white and Asian youths fought pitched battles
in Leeds over allegations and counter-allegations of assault.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>