Brian Reade: How Britain should face its own 9/11!

[Desigol]

BRIAN READE: HOW SHOULD WE FACE OUR OWN 9/11?

8 July 2005

AND so they finally came for us. In the place, the time, the manner and the context we always knew they would: London, in the rush hour, without warning, as we hosted a major political event.

They hit the targets we knew they would. The only ones they are capable of hitting. Defenceless human beings going about their inoffensive lives.

The only shock was that it took these al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists so long to flood our capital city with death and devastation. To deliver us our very own 9/11.

Well, now they've given us their best shot, it's time to show them and the wider world how we react to feeling so violated and vulnerable. How we deal with the raging desire for a swift and bloody revenge.

We may not have been able to prevent our 9/11 happening, but it is entirely in our hands how we respond to it. And we can start by learning from America. These people, 85 per cent of whom don't own passports, became insular and paranoid, looking on all things foreign with even more suspicion.

They urged a willing government to act in precisely the way they did after the last time they were attacked, at Pearl Harbor. By unleashing "a terrible rage". For Hiroshima and Nagasaki read Kabul and Baghdad. Cities flattened with little or no regard for life.

And where did it get them? As the body bags keep flying back and Osama bin Laden remains at large, how many of those Americans are glad they lashed out at the wrong targets? We are more open-minded and sophisticated than America. Let's remember the times we've been here before, thanks to the Luftwaffe and the IRA. And let's keep our British cool.

Don't start seeing buses and trains as handcarts to hell, or anthrax where there's baby powder. Don't stop travelling, especially not to London. Send your kids there on school trips, make that away-day to the shops and the theatres. Its people deserve our support.

How impressed were you by the philosophical shrug that many of the survivors gave to film crews as they emerged from their underground nightmare yesterday? The lack of panic, the absense of hysteria, was typical of a people who have always known how to take such random, barbaric acts in their stride.

In contrast, I remember an American screaming at a Fox News reporter during 9/11: "This is what happens when you let evil people off the hook. We let them off the hook no more. Oh my God, please help us."

And it is that famous British sang-froid that will see us through this. It's how we've won wars, how we've always appeared to be the ones who kept their heads while those around lost theirs.

Let's stay rational. Let's embrace perspective. Don't let this become an excuse for right-wing elements to wreak revenge on Muslims in your community. Don't go there. Hold on to your intelligence and self-respect.

T HINK back 24 hours to why London won the Olympics. Because it promoted itself as the most diverse, tolerant, multicultural and open city on earth.

It's why, despite those bombs, young people from every corner of the world will still come here to study. Why, despite those bombs, workers will still pour in tomorrow, the next day and the next, hoping for a better life away from economic misery and tyranny.

Don't let our government take that freedom away from us, by pushing through knee-jerk, Draconian measures such as compulsory fingerprinting and identity cards. Can Charles Clarke explain how they would have stopped one single death yesterday?

Don't let them continue to kid us, as their Washington allies do, that we are at the forefront of some mythical war on terror which legitimises invasions of other countries. To be in a war you need to face an army. The fanatics who killed in London are not an army but a rag-bag collection of common murderers.

That was the view we took of the IRA. And that is how we should have treated bin Laden's henchmen, by wiping them off the face of the earth. Instead we invaded Iraq on illegal grounds and brought terror to that country. Now, finally, it's come to ours.

And the way to fight it is not to panic but to remember who you are.

[beachesl]

Sanity.