The particular problem of 7/7, as opposed to 9/11, is that there is no obvious next step. The Americans had to destroy the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; but what do we have to do in response to the Tube and bus bombers? The inept responses of the police at Stockwell and Forest Gate indicate clearly that striking back with lethal force is not, in our case, an option.
“The state’s response — in the form of violence against an unarmed man — only heightened the anxieties of Britons and Londoners,” comments Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed in The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth £8.99), on the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. Of course, it wasn’t the response of the state at all, but of something more familiar — an incompetent, unreformed police service. Ahmed is right, however, to speak of heightened anxieties. That killing and the recent Forest Gate farce both remind us that, in chasing terror in our midst, we are chasing shadows.
But shadows of what? The simplest answer is given by John Tulloch in One Day in July: Experiencing 7/7 (Little, Brown £12.99). He is a survivor of the Tube bomb at Edgware Road. His experiences that day form the core of his book. He considers all the casual little acts that led to him being on that train, in that carriage, sitting a few feet from the bomber. Even his movement of a bag in front of his legs turns out to be significant, as it probably saved his life. And he describes well the complex emotions that follow the surreal moment of detonation when “everything turned a horrible, urine-coloured yellow”. His subsequent recovery is agonising.
Bleeding and dazed, Tulloch was photographed coming out of the station and the picture went round the world. He thus became the emblematic survivor, a role that fascinated him as he is a media academic. Unfortunately, his investigation of this role spoils the book as he descends into some rather strange and subtly wrong-headed analyses of the coverage and his own place in it. At the heart of these analyses seems to lie the simple conviction that the bombings were primarily caused by the invasion of Iraq. None of the other books supports that contention.
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Our real crime, all the other authors agree, was our dimwitted and wildly ill-considered attempt over the past two decades to engage with and exploit radical Islam, an attempt that led directly to the widespread radicalisation of British Muslim youth by cynical preachers. Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory in The Suicide Factory (Harper Perennial £7.99) provide the straightest account of this process by focusing on the story of Abu Hamza and the Finsbury Park mosque. They perform a valuable service, as much of this information did not come out at the trial which finally saw Hamza locked up.
There are two levels to the story. The first is the abject gutlessness of the police. So fearful were they of offending religious and racial sensibilities that they dared neither to respond to the complaints of moderate Muslims that their mosque was being taken over by hoodlums, nor to arrest the radicals when they flagrantly broke the law by firing up their young followers with tales of jihad. The second level is the way the security services convinced themselves that their discreet contacts with Hamza and his fascist colleagues meant they were somehow controlling them. In fact, the radicals were running rings round MI5 and MI6, to the despair of our allies in France and America. But our suave spooks and their gullible political masters wouldn’t listen to their warnings and, as a result, London became the global hub of Islamic terror. “The result of Abu Hamza’s recruitment regime,” write O’Neill and McGrory, “ was that more young men from Britain embarked on suicide missions than from all the other countries of Europe combined.”
The books by Ahmed and Melanie Phillips, though utterly different in tone and intent, agree absolutely that British official nurturing of Islamic radicalism is at the heart of the matter. Ahmed’s book is a lucid and, in spite of the endorsement by John Pilger on the front cover, quite persuasive account of how our security mandarins talked themselves into believing we could make quiet, backroom deals with these terrorists. For Ahmed, it is a conspiracy theory, though, for me, his evidence could equally well point to a string of post-rationalised blunders. Essentially, the Anglo-American strategy in the Balkans from the early 1990s onwards was part of a great game designed to satisfy both corporate greed and strategic logic. Maybe. It is certainly true that the fact that our allies against the Serbs were Muslims did provide an opportunity for the radicals to exploit our Balkan strategy.
From there Al-Qaeda grew and grew within Europe. Uniquely, the British attempted to control the militants through discreet contact and it is this that lies behind Blair’s refusal to convene a public inquiry into the 7/7 bombings. The can is just too full of worms. “An entrenched and growing network of Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists of more than 100 in number — and consisting of possibly up to several thousand — has operated in the UK, with immunity from the law, despite being implicated in numerous instances of international terrorism.”
In Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within (Gibson Square £14.99) Melanie Phillips agrees, but is more concerned with culture and “the deadly fusion of an aggressive ideology and a society that has lost its way” than with conspiracies. It is, in her terms, our inability to define and defend our own values that renders us so powerless when confronting the enemy. Written like one of her Daily Mail columns — she is “appalled” and “shocked” on almost every page — this book may persuade you but you may not be sure quite why.
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Overall, Tulloch apart, these books make plain that the British official response to Islamic radicalism at every level has been inept and ill-judged. This may be a conspiracy, a cock-up or a symptom of our own decadence, but it is plainly a disaster. However, if we are truly speaking about causes, there is one huge factor that is left out of all these accounts — the condition of the Arab states that have incubated this evil ideology as a convenient way of distracting their under-employed young men from the gross spectacle of their own cynicism, brutality and corruption. But that is another book, another truth. For the moment, impure and complex, our truth is that we blew it.
www.bryanappleyard.com
The above books are available at the Books First prices of £8.54 (Ahmed), £11.69 (Tulloch), £13.49 (Phillips) and £7.59 (all inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585