http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/Stories/0,1413,206~30374~2969235,00.h tml Article Published: Saturday, July 16, 2005 - 10:33:43 PM PST
Terrorism threatens us all BRITONS were still reeling last week, of course, from having come under terrorist attack. If different in scale, and in other ways, there isn't any question that 7/7 is their own 9/11. But at the end of the week the British began to have to deal with something that Americans haven't. It seems the four London bombers were not foreigners at all. While at least three were of Pakistani descent, they were all British citizens. One Londoner called what he was feeling "a fear of the home- grown' before he observed the two minutes of silence as Big Ben tolled noon. "It's like the hidden enemy, and I suspect there's more anxiety to deal with,' Alfie Proto told The New York Times. Indeed. It's one thing to lash out against the disaffected Saudi Sunnis who attacked us, to try to seal up the formerly porous borders, to make it harder for foreigners to study or stay here, to let trillions in contracts for "homeland security.' It's quite another to imagine that it is your fellow countrymen who intend to do you in en masse. Britain finds itself in a curious position vis-a-vis extremist Islam. As the great colonizer of the world, by the 19th century ruling Muslim countries spreading the globe from Egypt to Pakistan to Malaysia, it has for hundreds of years had great contact with people of that faith. And when colonialism came to an end, Britain famously set in its ways; essentially entirely white welcomed as immigrants massive amounts of the people it formerly colonized. They had children and grandchildren. Now, unlike here, tens of millions of British citizens are Muslims. You can't say the social experiment has been entirely successful. Skinheads happen. Parts of the football-hooligan and punk movements of the '70s and '80s rallied themselves against foreigners as violently as the Ku Klux Klan did here, using the same jobless-white economic rhetoric as an excuse. But the vast majority of this innately conservative society has proven remarkably welcoming to its large numbers of Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese and West Indian immigrants. While Britain's hands were by no means entirely clean in the slave trade few Western nations' were not having had much of a legacy of slavery on their own island completely alters aspects of class-based racism that still pervade here. The British professional and artistic classes have about them an eclectic race-blindness that, nice talk and glossy advertising aside, has not yet fully arrived in America. While there's no doubt been some fights and pub-muttering, the British people I've read about who have addressed the matter of the bombers of Pakistani descent have been universally kind. "He's a nice guy,' one mom whose kid was at a nursery school where one bomber taught said of him. "He would be smiling all the time with the children. I'm surprised about all this. He was a good man.' Another Briton told the Times the real quandary of their nation now: "If you are a British Muslim, you're as likely to be a victim of an attack as you are likely to be accused of doing it,' said Sarfraz Manzoor. Each terrorized country shall be terrorized in its own way. Larry Wilson is editor of the Pasadena Star-News. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Write him at [EMAIL PROTECTED] . -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
