Two very different views from London after the bombings
[7-13-05]

One American in London comments on the lack of flag-waving and calling for God’s vengeance on the "bad guys." The other exemplifies just that attitude in an article entitled "Terror – A Tale of Two Gods."

No need for flag-waving and vengeance

Steven S. Volk, who teaches Latin American history at Oberlin College in Oberlin, OH, wrote a long note to friends and family in the States, on the day after the bombings. 

On 7-13 we posted part of his note.  Now we are posting the full note, along with an additional comment on the one-week memorial service held today (Thursday, July 14) in Trafalgar Square. 

You may want to skip to his comparisons between the British reactions to "7/7" and the US reactions to 9/11.  Or if you've read them, jump to his thoughts on today's memorial service.

This is posted here with his permission, and with our thanks.

Dear Friends, relatives, and all who have been concerned about our well being:

Forgive this joint letter and (even more so) my attempts to provide some information about the London bombings from the perspective of someone who's in London at the moment. I fear that my thoughts are still fairly disjointed ramblings, but figured I might as well impose them on you.

The death toll of the 5 London bombings of July 7 (which a few people here are trying to coin "7/7") has now surpassed 50, but it will likely climb as there are still bodies thought to be trapped at Kings Cross. You all probably know the chain of events: bombings on 4 Underground trains and on a double-decker bus right at the height of rush hour yesterday morning. Fifty + is a horrendous sum, but it's probably a miracle that it hasn't climbed higher. I actually spent most of the morning in central London (foolishly but valiantly trying to get to the British Library) and ended up at Tavistock Sq. where the bombed out bus could be seen across the square.

Dinah and I spent most of yesterday in our flat, watching the same news repeated over and over on the television, feeling that same sickening sense of dÉjA vu when any disaster occurs, the same images (not particularly graphic in this case) shown time and again; the same interviews with the same people rebroadcast so many times that by the end of the day you feel you have become friends with them. We went out to dinner nearby that night, and then walked to the top of Primrose Hill, which looks down on London, from Westminster in the west to Canary Warf in the east. There were a lot of people up there; I think they wanted to be reassured that London was still there. It was.

Today we worked around the flat in the morning and then ventured out on the Tube to go to the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. The train was relatively empty, both coming and going, even though we came back around rush hour. People (us included) were more nervous than usual, looking at everyone who walked in, particularly if they were carrying packages. But we're at home again, after a very nice afternoon.

So what's the mood? The more that I see, the more I am bowled over by the differences between what is happening here and what happened in the US after Sept. 11 (at least in the early hours of reaction). It is clear that this was a major terrorist attack, and it has had a profound impact. West End theatre closed on a regular night for the first time since World War II; the Royal Mail couldn't get through; major concerts planned for last night and tonight have been cancelled. There is still only partial service on the Underground trains, although a good bit of the service, amazingly, has been restored, as has bus and above ground rail service. Londoners are probably a bit more accustomed to this (having lived through a spate of IRA bombings in the 1990s, not to mention the Blitz in WWII) than others might be, but still were shaken. The word that's always used here is "stoic," and I think they probably are. Having spent about two hours wandering around central London yesterday morning, as the events were unfolding, I can only recall seeing one young woman in tears as she spoke on her cell phone.

What's the difference between here and the US? About 36 hours after the attacks, I haven't seen a single Union Jack flying outside private houses, a single person walking around with a flag lapel pin, not a WORD from any British leader (from the unsavory Blair to every lowly police or security figure) that> sought to define this as an attack on Britain or England. This was, in the very apt words of Ken Livingston, London's mayor and known to his friends as "Red Ken," an attack on "working people, poor and rich, black and white, Christian and Muslim, Jewish and Hindu." The response has been to see this as an attack on OUR humanity, not on "our" country. No leader has called on God's protection or demanded that God's vengeance rain down on the "bad guys." God (in this country where there is no separation between Church and State) has been left out of this struggle, as has machismo, xenophobia, and self-serving political posturing. London was attacked, many have argued, because it is an open city, an international city, a place where people come "to fulfill their dreams and achieve their potential," to quote Livingston again. It would be absolutely the wrong response to reverse that, as doing so would only give a victory to the kind of fanatics who would place a bomb on a train traveling between Aldgate and Liverpool (two Tube stops that serve one of the biggest Muslim populations outside of Bangladesh) at 8:51 on a workday morning, on a bus that just picked up an extra load of passengers at Kings Cross as the Underground shut its doors there.

News readers (our "anchor" people) often try to egg on their interviewees to get under their skin and get some real (rather than scripted) response. When John Humphries on Radio 4 suggested this morning to the head of the Metropolitan Police that they should start to round up groups of Muslim men for questioning and that Britain should institute a national ID system (neither of which he actually believes in), the commissioner wouldn't have any of it, saying that it would be absolutely the wrong response, that these were crimes committed by individuals, and that they need to be found and held accountable.

Who knows where this will go or how it will develop; as I said, it is still in the early hours. Who knows what is happening to this mundo infeliz that we live in. But I do know that the response of the British people and London's worldly citizens has been light years ahead of the repressive, undemocratic, counterproductive steps taken by the Bush Administration and his supporters after 9/11. Britain could easily raise its drawbridges and separate itself from the world - it won't do that. Instead, and coming a day after it was awarded the 2012 Olympics, London seems to want to carry on with the same arguments that probably swayed the IOC: London is a city of the world, for the world's people, and nothing's going to change that. Vive la difference!

My best to you all,

Steve

Christian God vs Muslim God

But Uwe Siemon-Netto, a former Religion Editor for UPI, sees the event as "Terror – a Tale of Two Deities." A compares the American reaction, with people crowding into churches and synagogues, with the British response. They headed for the pubs, he says with dismay. In the church he went to there were only four other people – all Americans.

The crucifix in that church reminds us, he says, of "the incompatibility between the deities we worship - we Christians, and they, the militant Islamists, who follow the command of hate preachers calling the slaughter of ‘infidels’ in America, Britain and other parts of Europe a ‘holy duty.’"

He then cites Thomas Friedman to say that "Ours is a culture of life given to us by way of the Cross. Theirs is a death cult, a cancer, within the body politic of the Muslim world."

You’ll find his article on a conservative Anglican website with wondrous title, Virtue OnLine.