Ghost of a flea

7 July 2005 London bombings

The first 923 edits to the Wikipedia entry for 7 July 2005 London bombings are animated by The Last Minute. It is a fascinating look at distributed editing.

One moment stands out in particular. Someone added a general death threat against British Muslims into the entry which was quickly edited away. I hope that for all the efforts to understand how young men could be brainwashed into the murder of as many unarmed commuters as their warrior souls can muster, ending their own feeble existence in the process, that effort is also being directed into understanding the rage such attacks inevitably provoke. Reports of an increase in hate crimes following the July 7 massacre suggests the "cycle of violence" of which people speak is not limited to state power acting in the defense of our representative government to which so many take exception. Peace-loving souls offering pearls of sage advice to we in the benighted throng should spend rather more time considering the violence as an al-Qaeda sponsored recruiting campaign for the British National Party and rather less on criticism of the police and security services charged with the uneviable task of protecting everyone's right to offer ill-informed, self-serving complaint.

For every apologia for the massacre we need a corresponding, sane effort to redirect the urge for revenge from a generalized, purposeless hatred into a focussed, targeted and implacable will to stop the men responsible for the atrocity. This last bit of understanding is lost in the rush to empathize with the feelings, or worse yet the supposed political causes, of people with some tangentially related grievance to those claimed by the jihadists. I can only imagine the consequences when words, and more importantly the feelings behind them, cannot simply be edited off the screen. The word "crusade" has come to mean a philanthropic campaign that results from an inner spiritual struggle. It did not always mean something so benign. While we can only pray the world never sees what a nuclear-armed crusade looks like it is precisely this spectacle al-Qaeda is trying to provoke.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at August 4, 2005 08:21 AM

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