Gwynne Dyer, Contributor
IT'S OFFICIAL: the four suicide bombs that killed over 50 Londoners last week had nothing to do with anything.
The family and friends of the young men who committed the atrocity, all British-born Muslims of Pakistani descent, insisted that their actions had nothing to do with Islam. Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, the only major British party to condemn the invasion of Iraq in last May's election, cautiously said that "I am not here implying some causal link between Britain's involvement in Iraq and the attacks in London."
Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokesman said it would be "naive" to link the London bombs and the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. "This kind of terrorism was active long before the Iraq war," he pointed out. "9/11 was in September 2001, not 2003."
So there you have it. The 9/11 attacks, in which 19 men born in the Middle East killed several thousand innocent Americans, were just a random act by people who "hate freedom," and the target could just as easily have been Canada or Sweden. The bombs in London on July 7, in which four young British men brought up in West Yorkshire murdered dozens of their fellow-countrymen, could just as easily have happened 10 years ago. And, of course, none of it had anything to do with Islam.
We are drowning in lies. The United States government, whose troops, intelligence services and local proxies have spent the past 50 years subverting or crushing Middle Eastern governments (including democratic ones) that threatened its control of the region's oil, denies that the recent wave of terrorist attacks has anything to do with US policy in the region.
But here's a clue: Arabs make up less than a quarter of the world's Muslims, but all 19 hijackers of 9/11, like almost every other Islamist radical that attacked any American target before the invasion of Iraq, were Arabs.
BRITAIN NOW A TARGET
The British government similarly denies that there is any connection between Tony Blair's decision to join President Bush's Iraq adventure and the bombs in London. Blair has to defend this position regardless of the evidence, because otherwise it would be solely his fault that Britain is now a target for Islamist terrorism. But here's another clue. Every major terrorist attack by Islamists since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 has targeted the citizens of countries that sent troops to Iraq: Americans, not Canadians; British, not French; Spanish, not Germans; Australians, not New Zealanders.
And these later attacks have not all been carried out by Arabs. Other Muslims are now getting involved too: Indonesians in the bomb attack on Australian tourists in Bali; Turks in the attacks on the British consulate and Jewish institutions in Istanbul; and now British Muslims of non-Arab origin in attacks on their own fellow-citizens. Is there some "causal link" here, as Charles Kennedy so delicately put it? You bet your boots there is.
Muslims everywhere were horrified by 9/11, and quite rightly denied that it was in any way an expression of Islamic values. Many Arabs, however, did share the grievances that had radicalised the terrorists, and even felt a fleeting, guilty satisfaction at seeing Americans suffer as so many Arabs have suffered. Whereas most non-Arab Muslims, at that point, saw no excuse whatever for the attacks, and felt nothing but sympathy for the U.S.
Then came the invasion of Iraq, which was obviously not about fighting terrorism (since there weren't any terrorists there, or any links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda). All over the world, Muslims, and especially young Muslims, began to conclude that there was some substance to the Islamist radicals' argument that the West was indiscriminately attacking Muslims everywhere; that it was actually attacking Islam itself.
Only the tiniest minority of their young men and women are ever likely to respond to that sense of betrayal with actual terrorist attacks, but the connection between Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq and the bombs in London is strong. Not one of the Western countries that drew the line at an unprovoked invasion of Iraq - not even the ones like France, Germany and Canada that sent troops to help the United States fight terrorism in Afghanistan and that have large Muslim minorities at home - has seen such an attack, nor probably will it. Actions do have consequences.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
