|
After July 7 we are all Londoners now
By Ronan McGreevy
 In
the wake of the terrorist bombings in London on July 7 Ronan McGreevy admires
the London spirit and condemns the scourge of religious hatred.
In 1940 a young director called Humphrey Jennings made a short film about
the London Blitz. London Can Take It was only 10 minutes long, but its iconic
images of burning buildings, heroic fire crews and stoical citizens gave
succour to a suffering people and helped to form the national myth that
became the Blitz.
Except it wasn’t just a myth. Adolf Hitler’s intention in targeting London
was not military nor strategic, but solely to break the resolve of the British
people. He failed.
As the American narrator of London Can Take It put it: “Bombs can only
kill people, they cannot destroy the indomitable spirit of a nation.”
London is a vast, impersonal, intimidating, unsentimental city. It is
not for the faint-hearted. People who go there to live and work often have
to excel themselves just to survive.
There is hardly an Irish emigrant that didn’t feel overwhelmed on first
arriving. Some never get over it.
Yet the very drawbacks to living in London are the qualities which came
shining through after last Thursday week’s abominable attacks.
Despite the horrors, there was no panic, no vengeance missions, no looting
— just a very British calmness that still resonates despite the multicultural
nature of the city.
It was extraordinary to witness the millions of people stranded after
the bombing. They could have been targets for further attacks, they had
no way home, yet there was a serenity and a self-control about them which
was heroic in its understatement.
There are generations of Irish people who live in London, whose children
are Londoners, but who would never call themselves Londoners.
Indeed, it’s possible to live in London all your adult life and still
be perplexed by the question: “What is a Londoner?”
Well, the answer came on that already iconic date 7/7. Londoners are
Ania Brandt, Monika Suchocka and Karolina Gluck from Poland, Rachelle Yuen
from Mauritius, Mike Matsushita from Japan, Gamze Gunoral from Turkey, Slimane
Ihab from France, Mihaela Otto from Romania, and the young London-Irishman
Ciaran Cassidy.
They include an Israeli Jew Anat Rosenberg and Shahera Islam, a 20-year-old
British Muslim killed in the name of the religion that bears her name.
London may be the capital of Britain, but, as the casualty list from
the attacks demonstrate, it is a city that belongs to the world.
One day after his city lost the Olympics, the Mayor of Paris Bertrand
Delanoe said: “We are all Londoners now.”
By that he meant not just the people who are born and bred in London
nor the millions of emigrants like ourselves who live there, but anybody
who is on the side of democracy, tolerance, freedom and respect for human
life.
Those are the values that separate us from the people who carried out
these murders and there can be no compromise with them.
What the terrorists want is for us to be weak to morally equate George
Bush and Tony Blair with the suicide bombers. They are not. Another canard
is that the London bombings happened because of the invasion of Iraq.
How then do you explain September 11 which happened before the invasion
of Iraq? How do you explain the attacks in Morocco, Turkey and Indonesia
— all countries that opposed the Iraq war?
If the suicide bombers are motivated by hatred of the British and US
occupation of Iraq, why then are they killing thousands of Iraqi civilians
in that suffering country?
The equivalent of two London bomb attacks died last weekend. Twenty-six
children were killed last week in Baghdad by a suicide bomber.
There’s a school of thought that says Britain and the US should withdraw
from Iraq, that Ireland should stop letting US airplanes land, that if we
understood radical Islam a little more and condemned a little less, these
nasty people would go away and leave us in peace.
Such appeasement, and that’s what it would be, is based on a fundamental
misunderstanding.
These people are not looking for concessions, they despise everything
we hold dear starting with the most fundamental right of all — the right
to life. They despise the principles of free speech, democracy and equality
for women.
Their targets are not just the West but Muslim countries that do not
adhere to their fundamentalist view of the world like the new Iraq.
We cannot give in to these murderous ideologues, nor can we be seen to
give in to them.
After the Madrid bombings the Spanish people, in their grief and fear,
voted for a government which withdrew its troops from Iraq.
That cannot happen again and it will not happen. Regardless of how you
felt about the Iraq war, it is too late now to turn back.
Since September 11, we have been drawn into a world war. It’s not a world
war on the scale of the ones that preceded it — the Blitz has given Londoners
a perspective on 7/7 — but it is a global conflict.
For better or worse both the US and Britain must stay until the Iraqi
Government is able to defeat the murderous barbarians who are an affront
to the whole civilised world.
We are all conjoined in this battle and the frontline is the Number 30
bus as much as it is the suburbs of Fallujah.
There isn’t much we can do except carry on as normal — that’s the only
riposte we can give to the scourge of religious hatred. As Winston Churchill
said in another context: “It’s business as usual”.
We have no other choice. We are all Londoners now, whether we like it
or not.
|
