Debate over Iraq rages in Britain

July 13—Two opposite reactions have emerged in Britain since the four coordinated bombings on the London transit system on July 7 that reportedly killed over 50 people.

London, July 9: anti-war vigil supports Muslims against bashing.

As transit and emergency workers continue the grisly work of recovering the bodies of people blown apart on three subway trains and one double-decker bus, the government has announced that it believes four suicide bombers from the West Yorkshire city of Leeds were responsible. It has identified the four as young men of Pakistani heritage born in Britain.

West Yorkshire is a declining industrial area in the north of England with areas of deep poverty where the British National Party, a far-right anti-immigrant group, has been trying to blame the long-time failings of British capitalism on immigrants.

The police announcement was preceded by massive sweeps in Arab and Muslim communities, especially in the north. Some 1.6 million Muslims now live in Britain. They come largely from the countries in Asia and the Middle East that once were British colonies and still are a lucrative source of profits for British corporations and banks.

The Guardian of London on July 13 reported that at least 300 incidents of violence identified as “hate crimes” have taken place since the bombings—in other words, racist bashings of people perceived to be Muslims or, in some cases, merely non-white, including “the killing of a man in Nottingham after anti-Muslim abuse was shouted at him.”

This vicious racism has been egged on by the tabloids and by the pronouncements of the Tony Blair government, which is using the “bad guys versus good guys” logic and rhetoric of the George W. Bush White House to characterize this terrible tragedy that has fallen on the heads of British workers.

Queen Elizabeth added her two cents, saying that the bombings would not change “our way of life.” It wasn’t clear if she was referring to the life of the royal family, which recently spent half a million dollars sending heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles on a trip to Australia, Sri Lanka and Fiji.

In contrast to all this, however, is the analysis coming from the anti-war and anti-globalization movements. They have been able to turn out hundreds of thousands of protesters against the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan as recently as the G-8 summit meeting in Scotland, which was underway when the London bombs went off.

Several large rallies and vigils have taken place in London over the last week. Prominent speakers have called on the movement to stay strong in the face of a storm of political reaction.

The Stop the War Coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain have jointly called for a gathering on July 17 “in solidarity with the families of the dead and injured and in opposition to the racism and Islamophobia which have resulted since Thursday’s attacks.”

On July 9, two days after the bombings, a vigil was called in Peace Garden in the Euston section of London. A large multinational crowd attended. According to the Stop the War Coalition, “The overwhelming message was one of solidarity and sympathy with families who had lost loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan and the London terrorist attack, of standing shoulder to shoulder with the Muslim community and of calling for an end to the war of terror and a commitment to peace.”

One of the speakers was George Galloway, a member of Parliament who quit the Labor Party in disgust over Prime Minister Tony Blair’s support for the U.S. invasions and occupations and was recently reelected as an independent running on the Respect Party ticket.

Galloway has come under enormous pressure from the British establishment media because of his opposition to the war.

He told the crowd: “When the U.S. armed forces, their backs guarded by our armed forces, reduced Falluja to rubble, not a whisper found its way into the House of Commons.

“A swamp of hatred towards this country has been watered by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, by the daily destruction of Palestinian homes and by the occupation of Afghanistan. ...

“The only way out of this morass is to reverse the policies that have taken us into it. As the Spanish people showed us last year, the way out is to withdraw from Iraq and to break from Bush’s war on terror. It is to address the grievances across the region, not to add to them by support for Israel’s Ariel Sharon, and for the corrupt kings and presidents of Arabia.”

Another prominent voice on the left in this period has been Tariq Ali, a Pakistani-born writer, journalist and film-maker, who told a Marxism 2005 gathering on July 8:

“We have to be very clear. If the killing of innocent civilians in London is barbaric, and it is, how do you define the killing of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians?

“In the dominant culture of the West there is a deep-seated belief that the lives of Western civilians are somehow worth more than those living in other parts of the world—especially those parts being bombed and occupied by the West. ...

“If the media in Britain gave a quarter of the coverage that they devoted to the London bombings to what is being done to ordinary civilians in Iraq, you would have a gigantic, uncontrollable anti-war movement. ...

“Today there is publicly available information about U.S. soldiers shooting Iraqi prisoners dead. When they are asked why they did it they say, ‘We were being kind to them, they were wounded and we were putting them out of their misery.’

“They have humiliated prisoners in Abu Ghraib, which is well known, but they also have torture centers in Jordan, Pakistan and Egypt where they send people to be tortured by specialists.

“We know that they have made it their policy to urinate and shit on prisoners to humiliate them.

“This is how colonials behave. They don’t know any other way, because there isn’t any other way if you are occupying someone’s country. It’s the logic of colonial occupation. There is continuity in what empires do.

“I remember the French occupation of Algeria. The French used to call the Algerians filthy terrorists because they bombed cafés in Algiers.

“The Algerian National Liberation Front used to reply, ‘We do what we have to do to drive you out of our country. If you don’t want us to bomb cafés where you and your friends sit, then please lend us a few fighter bombers and we can bomb your barracks.’

“Throughout the Vietnam War the U.S. denounced the Vietnamese when they planted bombs in the capital, Saigon. But the resistance had to do this to make the country ungovernable.

“It is not a pretty thing. But the character of the occupation determines the nature of the resistance—this is true in every single instance.

“We in the anti-war movement shouldn’t lose our nerve when things happen such as the bombing in London. ... Unless there is a political solution, the terror will go on. ...

“The ideas we have put forward—the link between the bombing and the war on Iraq—is more or less common sense on the streets throughout Britain. People who might not even like us are saying, ‘If we hadn’t gone to Iraq, they might not have bombed us.’

“That’s why the establishment have united around the idea that this has nothing to do with Iraq. We have to be clear—it does have something to do with Iraq and, unless we pull out, it may happen again.”