Angry Loners

Interesting piece in the Observer today about the 7th July terror attacks in London. The bombers apparently waged their war on London on a shoestring budget, using the internet. They had no direct links to Al Qaeda. The implication is that the four bombers were the equivalent of Michael Ryan - angry loners, bent on the maximum destruction of random strangers.

But I think that there needs to be an further understanding of what happened. Ryan was a one-off - there have been others who have done similar things but generally speaking Ryan was a lethal loner. However, as the 21st July, 2005 so dramatically proved, Khan et al were not one offs. Whilst Ryan's suicide prevented any meaningful examination on what caused him to go on his rampage, it appears that he failed to connect with society at all. He was a loner, his motivation revenge on a society that he rejected and rejected him. However Khan et al could socialise with others, and were motivated by a mixture of politics and religion. To write them off as loners is counter productive.

Therefore I see three critical points. First of all, we need to understand how Islam - an inherently peaceful religion on some levels - was perverted to become a reason for mass murder. And we need to accept that this will be happening in other mosques in the country. There is nothing wrong with Islam. But there is something very wrong with this perverted version of Islam that inspires people to commit mass murder. We need to accept that, we need to say the perverted version of Islam is wrong, and we need to go out and convince fundamentalists of that. People are entitled to any belief they want to hold. But if that believe involves going out and killing people, we need to fight it. We need to convince people who hold fundamentalist views that they are wrong. They are allowed to hold those views in a liberal democracy, but we have a duty to prove them wrong.

Secondly, we need to accept that a War on Terror is not like a conventional war. It is not even like the campaign against the IRA. The IRA were an army - there was a clear reporting structure. Al Qaeda is not like that. Bin Laden long ago surrended operational control of his organisation, and the point of Al Qaeda ("the base", literally translated) is to act as an inspiration, not a coherent army. You will not stop Khan etc by arresting/killing Bin Laden. You will stop Khan et al by trying to convince they are wrong, or failing that using the police/intelligence services to stop of disrupt their activities. This should be a war fought covertly, not by bringing civil war to nations in the Middle East.

Finally we need an independent enquiry into what happened in London on 7th July, 2005. The government does not want this to happen. But we need to fight for it, because we need to know why this happened, what could have been done to prevent it, what can be done to prevent it in the future and what we need to do in the (sadly) likely event that it happens again.