The Bloody Seventh
After the rain, a cool, clear day dawned across Britain. The brilliant sun produced a brilliant blue in the skies above. A few white clouds scudded through the azure. It was a beautiful morning. A bright morning. A morning I’d seen before, in New York City forty-five months past.
This morning was the Bloody Seventh.
As I write, I sit in a terminal at Edinburgh Airport. I am London-bound in one hour. A crowd is gathered, rapt, about a flatscreen that has been repurposed from displaying departures information to Sky News. The scenes from London we’ve seen before: the wailing sirens, the wreckage in the streets, the wounded staggering about, the dust-covered civilians. Only before it was New York, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Madrid.
Now, in London’s agony, only the details are changed.
So many here are on cell phones. Everyone knows someone in London. I borrow a cell and try to call home. I try again and again. Again and again British Telecom informs me that all international lines are dead. People look as you’d expect them to look: stunned, glazed, appalled. Across from me, a young woman slumps against her boyfriend’s shoulder and stares into the distance, her eyes full of weary tears.
Sky News speculates that this is somehow the work of anti-globalization activists. But everyone knows this is a classic al Qaeda operation: civilian targets, mass casualties, simultaneous attacks. Confirmation will come in time. The immediate matter is to sort the living from the dead, care for the former, and bury the latter.
Once buried, it will be time to avenge them.
Perhaps the villains’ expectation is that the Briton will quail as the Spaniards, reacting to massacre with headlong flight from foreign fields. I think not. About me, I see older Scots with a steely flint in their eyes.
The reckoning will come. There is a soul of honor beneath the ribs of death.
Editor’s Note: Josh was on Hugh Hewitt’s show last night. Radio Blogger has a transcript of their conversation.
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April 23rd, 2006 at 23:10
[…] Still: dulls, not erases, and sometimes, not always. Man is not, with apologies to the libertarians, a purely economic animal. The truth is that as we let in increasing numbers from communities that do not share the same cultural premises as the American mainstream, the chance for conflict increases proportionately. We need only look to Europe to see the grim results of an alien cultural bloc transplanted into the heart of a society at odds with the values and mores of the immigrants’ homelands. Islam and the tribal ethic together, placed into the post-Christian context of a socialist Europe, have given us insurrections in France and Belgium, the ritual slaughter of public figures in the Netherlands, rush-hour massacres in London and Madrid, 9/11 killers from Germany, and dire threats to Danes everywhere. The list goes on. Now, Europe is not an exact parallel to the American experience: Muslim immigrants there, especially in Germany, have long been something of a helot class, unable to aspire to mere citizenship. If America has escaped the worst of the European experience, it is partly a factor of numbers, and partly a factor of the drive to Americanization. […]
April 24th, 2006 at 11:49
[…] Still: dulls, not erases, and sometimes, not always. Man is not, with apologies to the libertarians, a purely economic animal. The truth is that as we let in increasing numbers from communities that do not share the same cultural premises as the American mainstream, the chance for conflict increases proportionately. We need only look to Europe to see the grim results of an alien cultural bloc transplanted into the heart of a society at odds with the values and mores of the immigrants’ homelands. Islam and the tribal ethic together, placed into the post-Christian context of a socialist Europe, have given us insurrections in France and Belgium, the ritual slaughter of public figures in the Netherlands, rush-hour massacres in London and Madrid, 9/11 killers from Germany, and dire threats to Danes everywhere. The list goes on. Now, Europe is not an exact parallel to the American experience: Muslim immigrants there, especially in Germany, have long been something of a helot class, unable to aspire to mere citizenship. If America has escaped the worst of the European experience, it is partly a factor of numbers, and partly a factor of the drive to Americanization. […]
July 3rd, 2006 at 18:01
[…] IslamExpo is meant to burnish the image of Islam in the United Kingdom. In a PR effort, one expects a cheerful, nonthreatening face on the proceedings. Thus it’s curious that one of the headliners of the IslamExpo PR offensive is Dr Azzam Tamimi of the Institute of Islamic Thought in the UK. Tamimi has, in the past, endorsed suicide bombings, supported Hamas, called for the extermination of Israelis, and acted as an apologist for jihad. Tamimi or no, one might think that a PR effort is needed, particularly after Muslims slaughtered scores of Britons in London just last year — if one thinks it is fundamentally a PR problem. This is undoubtedly what a great many do think: the alternative is an unpleasant questioning of the fundamental premises of secular society, in particular that which states that faith is private and irrelevant to the public square. The deadening strength of this idea is especially apparent in this, the fifth year after 9/11, and the twenty-seventh after the Islamist takeover of Iran. We have had a generation to learn our lesson, and some years since we were denied any excuse to ignore it: that this does not appear to matter is more symptomatic of our weakness than our enemy’s strength. But then, that’s all they need to win. Azzam Tamimi won’t bring down the West by appearing at this propaganda event. That so many will fail to see anything amiss in his appearance that will. Technorati Tags: […]
July 6th, 2006 at 19:32
[…] Exactly one year ago, it was the Bloody Seventh. I was there. Having witnessed two of the mere handful of the mass-terror attacks perpetrated by Muslims in the West in the 21st century — the slaughter of 11 September 2001 being the other — I feel some familiarity with the effects the grim spectacle has on crowds. Surely there is some cultural mechanism at work here, though what specifically it tells us, I cannot say. There is, for the most part, a silent gaping wonder at the unfolding horror. There are the quietly weeping women. There is the occasional bawling man, who always appears to be in his 20s. There is the one person, again usually a young male, repeating something out loud: “Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh God, oh no.” […]
July 6th, 2006 at 19:33
[…] Exactly one year ago, it was the Bloody Seventh. I was there. Having witnessed two of the mere handful of the mass-terror attacks perpetrated by Muslims in the West in the 21st century — the slaughter of 11 September 2001 being the other — I feel some familiarity with the effects the grim spectacle has on crowds. Surely there is some cultural mechanism at work here, though what specifically it tells us, I cannot say. There is, for the most part, a silent gaping wonder at the unfolding horror. There are the quietly weeping women. There is the occasional bawling man, who always appears to be in his 20s. There is the one person, again usually a young male, repeating something out loud: “Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh God, oh no.” […]
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