A long, strange week in London

What a long, strange week it's been in London. No sooner had I written last week's piece about Britain's health and safety fascists than London's underground train network was bombed at several locations. Can the two things be linked perhaps?

Maybe all this obsession with speed cameras and bans on houses with corners (because you could hurt yourself on them) can be seen as a symptom of post 9/11 paranoia. After the Milan bombs, Brits just knew that it was going to happen over here before too long. This dreaded sense of premonition, albeit perhaps an unconscious one, could be what's behind this desire to film, seal off, quantify, regulate and thus render safe all of life's minutiae.

Last Thursday, Britain's worst fears were realized when, as we now know, suicide bombers, born and raised in the UK, blew up several underground stations across the capital. The first suicide bombing in Western Europe was perpetrated by some guys from Leeds. The bombers had been all identified -- bar the one vaporized in the King's Cross explosion -- by the following Tuesday. The police have done a great job since the attacks, though it appears that it wasn't any great, hyper scientific, DNA analysis breakthrough that led to the identification of the bombers. Eerily, one of the bomber's parents had phoned the police, sick with worry, to report their boy missing, just as the victims' families were doing.

"They seemed like good blokes," said one Yorkshire man who knew two of the bombers in a TV interview. "They had a couple of small businesses around here, they were friendly, I just couldn't imagine them doing anything like that," he continued.

But imagine is surely just what the bombers were doing when they planned their little party. Al Qaeda is perhaps little more than an idea these days, disseminated at light speed across the Internet and assimilated by disaffected youth around the world. Al Qaeda is just a symbol, a name tag for an idea: fundamentalism, which flourishes in the brains of people the world over if fed regularly on a diet of overheated, web-based diatribe. So how does one destroy that terrorist infrastructure? Bomb Microsoft perhaps?

This is what scares people, not just in the West, but I guess in countries such as Indonesia, bombed several times also, as well. This fear is certainly doubly intensified now in London and it's only going to get worse: more bomb alerts and more urban paranoia set alongside more explosions of meaningless violence. The violence is not meaningless to the bombers of course, who all have twenty virgins waiting for them in heaven apparently, although killing yourself and over 80 other people is quite an extreme length to go to just to get laid.

On the other hand Jakartans and Londoners have both shown great stoicism and a refusal to be cowed through the dark days of their bomb outrages.

After the Jakarta Stock Exchange and Marriott Hotel bombs, people calmly went about their business as if nothing had happened. One doesn't just give in and stay at home. So far reprisals against Muslims have thankfully been few and far between and famous leaders from the past such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King have been invoked as great examples of passive resistance to violence. However, I can't help thinking that Messieurs Bush and Blair are in as much need of a dose of these great men's genuine moral authority as Bin Laden, Amrozi or Hasib Hussain, London's Leeds-born bus bomber. The war(s) have led us to this point and people all over the world brace themselves for the clash of civilizations. Where have all the real leader's gone?

Next week this column will be back with -- thankfully -- more trivial matters from the Big Durian. Look after yourselves.

Simon Pitchforth