London bombings: Investigation, response, remembrance

There's more emerging on the men who bombed London a week ago, and their supposed accomplices. See, for instance, this David Stringer article at The Scotsman. The Scotsman has about a dozen bombing-related stories in today's edition, including Millions fall silent to remember dead, which has a link to condolence@london.gov.uk which has been set up for e-mails from the public.

CNN has the article Britain's homegrown terrorists, by Matthew Chance, which paints this attack as something new:

(CNN) -- Terrorists don't usually attack their own. It happens, of course: In Iraq, for instance, insurgent bombers all too often kill Iraqi civilians.

Thank you for noticing.

But, till recently, it's been terrorists from one community killing people in another: Palestinian suicide bombers crossing into Israel; Chechen rebels in Russia; the 9/11 hijackers attacking the United States. But London's bombing suspects are British, born and bred, with jobs and families and lives. Their victims were not, on the surface, enemies; not an occupying army -- but their own countrymen.

Earth to CNN - young men often terrorize their own neighborhoods. It happens all the time. Young men commit suicide on a fairly regular basis. You don't think that, perhaps, the idea of taking people with you when you commit suicide might not appeal to spoiled brats or to boys in one of their all-too-common 'I'm a misunderstood social misfit' phases? Hey, kid, you don't want to face the difficulities of being a grown-up? Have we got a deal for you! Be a hero! Be a martyr, no less. (Why are the experts trying to make this so difficult?) Besides, not to pile on or anything, if these guys grasped the concept of having countrymen I rather think we wouldn't have this problem.

Oh, excuse me, there's something else we must take into consideration here. Mr. Chance adds this down the article:

Problems with Britain's nearly 2 million Muslims have been simmering for years and are growing. In 2001, riots swept immigrant areas of Britain's north. An official report cited alienation, unemployment, and lack of opportunity as causes.

All of these are factors that moderate Muslim organizations say are still making their youth vunerable to extremism.

"We have social exclusion, we have a sense of not-belonging, a sense of alienation. We have alien ideas, frustration, and humiliation," said Dr. Daud Abdullah of the Muslim Council of Britain.

"When you add the international dimension to this, all of these factors feed into the mindset of our youth, and it's demonstrating itself in this outrageous behavior," Abdullah added.

But it is the United States' -- and Great Britains' -- invasion of Iraq that has outraged many British Muslims. The Afghan war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are also high on their list of grievances.

The US and the UK (and 30-some other countries) didn't invade Iraq in the standard sense. We rousted and routed a dictator and his murderous underlings and are stepping aside as quickly as the Iraqis themselves get things in hand. For the first time in more than a generation, it is now possible for Iraqis in the UK to go home to Iraq. Yeah, that's just horrible. I'd be mad, too. Their relatives who didn't make it out might actually have a chance to not be shoved into mass graves now. Unthinkable. Those horrid Americans and Brits, giving Iraq a chance at rejoining the civilized world...

Analysts say radical Islamic groups may now be capitalizing on the anger and frustration of some British Muslims by channeling those feelings into a simple solution: terrorism. Hence Richard Reid, hence the Israel suicide bombers, hence the London attacks.

Here we're actually in agreement, more or less.

I'll only add that if the media wasn't so keen on playing the bellows to this fire, maybe it would help a little bit? Just a guess.

P.S. It occurs to me that with the current de-emphasis on history, there are probably folks out there who don't know about bellows. They are devices for getting more air to fire, such as in blacksmith shops. By getting more air (specifically, more oxygen) to the fire, the fire can be made to burn hotter - something vital to men trying to bend metal that can't be molded at lower temperatures. For a short overview, see, for instance, the Blacksmith page at the Colonial Williamsburg website. For a picture of one type of bellows, see here. Lately, I can't shake the idea that some 'reporters' see their job as keeping the heat on somebody or another, and making overall situations hotter from time to time. Hence, my analogy of bellows.