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Indymedia UK Statement on London bombs
08.07.2005 14:46
"Indymedia UK stands in solidarity with all the victims of today's horrific attacks in London. We share the disgust felt by all about these acts and their perpetrators, our thoughts are with the victims and their families. We are also acutely aware that these events will be exploited by the most reactionary elements of the British media and political establishment for their own selfish purposes.
We are particularly concerned about a possible backlash against Britain's Muslim community as we saw following 9/11 in the USA. We urge all activists involved in progressive politics to do everything they can to stop this from happening. Now is the time to be building bridges between all communities as we have seen with the anti-war movement. Don't feel helpless, do something.
We will continue to give a voice to all who have an opinion on these events and have little or no voice in the mainstream media. Our usual editorial guidelines apply.
IMC'ista, 07.07.2005 16:15
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| | | | some supplements were deleted from this article, see policy | | vertaling indymedia UK verklaring | fegnest - 08.07.2005 23:04
"Indymedia UK verklaart zich solidair met alle slachtoffers van de verschrikkelijke aanslagen van vandaag. Wij delen de walging die iedereen voelt bij deze daden en hun uitvoerders. Onze gedachten gaan uit naar de slachtoffers en hun families. Wij beseffen echter ten volle dat deze gebeurtenissen uitgebuit zullen worden door de meest reactionaire elementen in de Britse media en de gevestigde politieke orde om hun eigen doelen te bereiken.
In het bijzonder maken wij ons zorgen over een mogelijke reactie tegen de Britse moslim gemeenschap, zoals na 9/11 in de VS. Wij dringen er bij alle activisten, die bij progressieve politiek betrokken zijn, alles te doen om dit te voorkomen. Juist nu is het belangrijk bruggen te bouwen tussen alle gemeenschappen, zoals het geval was bij de anti-oorlog beweging. Voel je niet machteloos, doe iets.
Wij blijven ons inzetten om iedereen, die iets over deze gebeurtenissen te zeggen heeft en weinig of geen aandacht in de reguliere media krijgt, een stem te geven. Onze gebruikelijke redactionele richtlijnen zijn van toepassing."
| | Article of Robert Fisk about the attacks | british - 09.07.2005 10:18
The reality of this barbaric bombing
If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us think insurgency won’t come to us?
By Robert Fisk - 08 July 2005
 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article297623.ece
http://www.selvesandothers.org/article10155.html
"If you bomb our cities," Osama bin Laden said in one of his recent video tapes, "we will bomb yours." There you go, as they say. It was crystal clear Britain would be a target ever since Tony Blair decided to join George Bush’s "war on terror" and his invasion of Iraq. We had, as they say, been warned. The G8 summit was obviously chosen, well in advance, as Attack Day.
And it’s no use Mr Blair telling us yesterday that "they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear". "They" are not trying to destroy "what we hold dear". They are trying to get public opinion to force Blair to withdraw from Iraq, from his alliance with the United States, and from his adherence to Bush’s policies in the Middle East. The Spanish paid the price for their support for Bush - and Spain’s subsequent retreat from Iraq proved that the Madrid bombings achieved their objectives - while the Australians were made to suffer in Bali.
It is easy for Tony Blair to call yesterdays bombings "barbaric" - of course they were - but what were the civilian deaths of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart by cluster bombs, the countless innocent Iraqis gunned down at American military checkpoints? When they die, it is "collateral damage"; when "we" die, it is "barbaric terrorism".
If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us believe insurgency won’t come to us? One thing is certain: if Tony Blair really believes that by "fighting terrorism" in Iraq we could more efficiently protect Britain - fight them there rather than let them come here, as Bush constantly says - this argument is no longer valid.
To time these bombs with the G8 summit, when the world was concentrating on Britain, was not a stroke of genius. You don’t need a PhD to choose another Bush-Blair handshake to close down a capital city with explosives and massacre more than 30 of its citizens. The G8 summit was announced so far in advance as to give the bombers all the time they needed to prepare.
A co-ordinated system of attacks of the kind we saw yesterday would have taken months to plan - to choose safe houses, prepare explosives, identify targets, ensure security, choose the bombers, the hour, the minute, to plan the communications (mobile phones are giveaways). Co-ordination and sophisticated planning - and the usual utter ruthlessness with regard to the lives of the innocent - are characteristic of al-Qa’ida. And let us not use - as our television colleagues did yesterday - "hallmarks", a word identified with quality silver rather than base metal.
And now let us reflect on the fact that yesterday, the opening of the G8, so critical a day, so bloody a day, represented a total failure of our security services - the same intelligence "experts" who claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there were none, but who utterly failed to uncover a months-long plot to kill Londoners.
Trains, planes, buses, cars, metros. Transportation appears to be the science of al-Qa’ida’s dark arts. No one can search three million London commuters every day. No one can stop every tourist. Some thought the Eurostar might have been an al-Qa’ida target - be sure they have studied it - but why go for prestige when your common or garden bus and Tube train are there for the taking.
And then come the Muslims of Britain, who have long been awaiting this nightmare. Now every one of our Muslims becomes the "usual suspect", the man or woman with brown eyes, the man with the beard, the woman in the scarf, the boy with the worry beads, the girl who says she’s been racially abused.
I remember, crossing the Atlantic on 11 September 2001 - my plane turned round off Ireland when the US closed its airspace - how the aircraft purser and I toured the cabins to see if we could identify any suspicious passengers. I found about a dozen, of course, totally innocent men who had brown eyes or long beards or who looked at me with "hostility". And sure enough, in just a few seconds, Osama bin Laden turned nice, liberal, friendly Robert into an anti-Arab racist.
And this is part of the point of yesterday’s bombings: to divide British Muslims from British non-Muslims (let us not mention the name Christians), to encourage the very kind of racism that Tony Blair claims to resent.
But here’s the problem. To go on pretending that Britain’s enemies want to destroy "what we hold dear" encourages racism; what we are confronting here is a specific, direct, centralised attack on London as a result of a "war on terror" which Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara has locked us into. Just before the US presidential elections, Bin Laden asked: "Why do we not attack Sweden?"
Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair.
| | robert fisk mainstream journalist | onix - 09.07.2005 20:39
Zoals jullie kunnen zien op de links bij dit verhaal is deze man een publicist in de standaard media.
Daarom twee opmerkingen,
ten eerste.. dit verhaal gaat er de hele tijd en helemaal vanuit dat er echt terroristen bestaan die echt de mogelijkheid zouden hebben zonder sondersteuning van binnenuit explosieven in fort europa af te steken.
Dat vind ik al een zeer eenzijdige benadering.
Ten tweede, het woord madrid komt in dit verhaal niet voor..
van madrid is ondertussen vrij goed bekend dat de spaans geheime dienst betrokken was, dus dat verkoopt het terrorisme verhaal niet meer.
Ik denk dan ook dat je dit artikel als propaganda , van de neoliberalisten, kunt beschouwen, angstzaaierij, en eenzijdigheid zijn immers de kenmerken van geslaagde false flag operaties.
| | Re: Onix | Jan - 10.07.2005 14:43
Wat heeft de geheime dienst dan met de aanslagen in Madrid te maken. Ik heb daar nooit wat van gehoord. Leg aub dat eens uit.
| | Robert Fisk | __ - 10.07.2005 19:39
Robert Fisk is niet zo maar een journo die werkt voor de gewone pers. Hij is een van de beste (en beste van 'ons' perspectief) schrijvers over het Midden-Oosten. Niet zomaar naast je neer leggen dus.
| | A Letter to the British People | Iman al-Saadun - 12.07.2005 20:14
I’m sending this letter to the British people and in particular to the residents of London. For a period of hours, you have lived through moments of desperate anxiety and horror. In those hours you lost a member of your family or a friend, and we wish to tell you in total honesty that we too grieve when human lives pass away. I cannot tell you how much we hurt when we see desperation and pain on the face of another person. For we have lived through this situation – and continue to live through it every day – since your country and the United States formed an alliance and laid plans to attack Iraq.
The Prime Minister of your country, Tony Blair, said that those who carried out the explosions did so in the name of Islam. The Secretary of State of the United States, Condaleezza Rice, described the bombings as an act of barbarism. The United Nations Security Council met and unanimously condemned the event.
I would like to ask you, the free British people, to allow me to inquire: in whose name was our country blockaded for 12 years? In whose name were our cities bombed using internationally prohibited weapons? In whose name did the British army kill Iraqis and torture them? Was that in your name? Or in the name of religion? Or humanity? Or freedom? Or democracy?
What do you call the killing of more than two million children? What do you call the pollution of the soil and the water with depleted uranium and other lethal substances?
What do you call what happened in the prisons in Iraq – in Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and the many other prison camps? What do you call the torture of men, women, and children? What do you call tying bombs to the bodies of prisoners and blowing them apart? What do you call the refinement of methods of torture for use on Iraqi prisoners – such as pulling off limbs, gouging out eyes, putting out cigarettes on their skin, and using cigarette lighters to set fire to the hair on their heads? Does the word “barbaric” adequately describe the behavior of your troops in Iraq?
May we ask why the Security Council did not condemn the massacre in al-Amiriyah and what happened in al-Fallujah, Tal‘afar, Sadr City, and an-Najaf? Why does the world watch as our people are killed and tortured and not condemn the crimes being committed against us? Are you human beings and we something less? Do you think that only you can feel pain and we can’t? In fact it is we who are most aware of how intense is the pain of the mother who has lost her child, or the father who has lost his family. We know very well how painful it is to lose those you love.
You don’t know our martyrs, but we know them. You don’t remember them, but we remember them. You don’t cry over them, but we cry over them.
Have you heard the name of the little girl Hannan Salih Matrud? Or of the boy Ahmad Jabir Karim? Or Sa‘id Shabram?
Yes, our dead have names too. They have faces and stories and memories. There was a time when they were among us, laughing and playing. They had dreams, just as you have. They had a tomorrow awaiting them. But today they sleep among us with no tomorrow on which to wake.
We don’t hate the British people or the peoples of the world. This war was imposed upon us, but we are now fighting it in defense of our selves. Because we want to live in our homeland – the free land of Iraq – and to live as we want to live, not as your government or the American government wish.
Let the families of those killed know that responsibility for the Thursday morning London bombings lies with Tony Blair and his policies. Stop your war against our people! Stop the daily killing that your troops commit! End your occupation of our homeland!
| | Re: letter to the british people | Belfast child - 12.07.2005 21:16
This letter insinuates that not only Tony Blair but the people of London are responsible for this atrocity. Of course what is happening in Iraq is shocking and repulsive, just as the attack in London was. The western media are conducting their usual circus and making sure we have these images of London rammed down our throats 24/7, while we see nothing of the suicide bombings which happened shortly after in Iraq, something which happens all too often. These attacks in London may have been a reaction to what is happening in Iraq, but the bombers carried out these actions of their free will, making them solely responsible for carrying out an act on innocent people, something which they themselves will most likely condone when similar things happen in Iraq.
Some of the biggest demonstrations against the war took place in the UK, and many people continue to this day to campaign against what is taking place there and in other countries 'in their name', and are trying to make others aware of what is happening, yes also the suffering of your little children.
Having myself grown up in Northern Ireland I have seen a lot of suffering at the hands of the British crown forces, and also at the hands of paramilitary groupings. My conclusion from my own experiences is that you can't fight fire with fire, it has rarely worked in the past and it more than likely won't work in the future. Violent reactions to violent reactions will never bring peace and solidarity to this messed up world. Cliché I know, but two wrongs rarely make a right.
| | Moslims is afleiding. | Che Fan - 13.07.2005 15:25
de term moslimterrorist leidt inderdaad af van de werkelijke oorzaak achter deze monsterlijke aanslag: de imperialistische oorlog in Irak met haar 10.0000den doden, verdwijningen in geheime gevangenissen, martelingen, verkrachtigingen etc.
De europesche media maakt zich schuldig aan racisme en euo-centrisme doordat ze duizenden onschuldige doden als gevolg van het fascistische geweld van de "Coalition of Evil" minder belangrijk vinden dan een "lullige" 50 westerse doden. geheel in de lijn met het feit dat het "lullige" aantal van iets meer dan 1000 doden meer persaandacht krijgt dan de 10.000'den die er in Afghanistan zijn vermoord, dood gemarteld of gewoon "verdwenen" in een van de vele geheime martelcentra van de amerikaanse fascisten.
De parralelen met de periode van WO-ii worden met de dag sterker: de moslims als de joden van vandaag.
| | 1000 doden | Che Fan - 13.07.2005 15:32
Met die duizend doden bedoel ik de slachtoffers van 9/11.
Overigens vallen er in Irak maandelijks zoveel doden.
Vind je het gek dat de oorlog een keer in het thuisland arriveerd?
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