"If there's any single thing that I hold against George Bush more than any other, it's the way that, with almost animal instinct, he decided within days of 9/11 to use it as nothing more than a routine opportunity to destroy his domestic enemies, rather than as a unique and fleeting chance to unite the country and destroy our foreign enemies. That tawdry instinct came from Karl Rove and people like him, and it's that instinct that is destroying the modern Republican party. Someday the few remaining grownup conservatives will figure that out." --Kevin DrumWashingtonMonthly.com
I have to admit, I love the British. Their droll sense of purpose, odd sense of humor and stiff upper lip (they really do have that) in the face of tragedy is commendable. To be sure, England has its problems -- and sometimes, Tony Blair is one of them (apparent permissiveness toward Islamic extremism has been another). But the British government's response to the London bombings has been nothing short of spectacular.
The Blair administration and Scotland Yard, particularly the other Blair, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian, have been careful, measured, and methodical, worked in sync with the intelligence units of other countries, including the American FBI, and made incredible progress toward solving the London bombings case -- as they have correctly characterized as criminal terrorism, not a "war." In particular, the non-brothers Blair have absolutely shown up the Bush admnistration by confronting the British Muslim community, not with large-scale, scattershot arrests of any available Muslim men, new interrogation rules that disquiet the military itself, or with platitudes about Islam, but with tough laws that target terror-related activities directly (rather than library reading) and perhaps most importantly, with a direct appeal for specific action:
"It is not the police, it is not the intelligence services who will defeat terrorism, it is communities who will defeat terrorism," Metropolitan Police Commission Ian Blair told a gathering at the Minhaj-ul-Quran Mosque. "We must seize this moment, this weekend, next week, we have to seize a moment in which the Muslim communities of Britain, helped by everybody of good will, changes from a current position of shock and disbelief into active engagement in counterterroism."
Blair told Muslims that "I need you."
"We've got nearly a million Muslims in London ... I've only got 300 Muslim police officers in London. I'm afraid that's not good enough. "I need your mothers and your fathers, your brothers and your sisters, your sons and your daughters."
Blair urged the Muslim community to change its attitude toward radical clerics such as Abu Hamza al-Masri, who is in prison awaiting trial for allegedly encouraging the murder of Jews and other non-Muslims, and Syrian-born Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, spiritual leader of the radical Muslim movement Al-Muhajiroun. "You're going to have move away from the very understandable position that lunatics like Bakri and Hamza are just lunatics and they're not important," Blair said.
"The trouble is, they only need to be important for half a dozen people. You have to find ways of identifying those preachers of hate and who they're talking to. We have to find ways in which we identify the young men and sometimes women who are vulnerable to extremism. That is a great challenge."
Blair said there was "nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist Muslim," or a fundamentalist of another faith. "The key issue is the slide into extremism," he said.
Well said, as opposed to "you're either with us, or against us..." The contrast with the Bush/Rove response to 9/11 is striking. Sadly, the U.S. administration seemed to see the terror attacks as an opportunity to burnish Mr. Bush's political legacy, silence his critics and hobble the opposition party. Had they not overplayed their hand and followed the neocons into Iraq, they might even have hit the trifecta. (When you look at their respective responses to outrageous terrorist attacks, I think it's fair to say that Mr. Bush was too hot, Bush pal Jose Maria Aznar of Spain was too cold, and Mr. Blair has gotten it close to "just right...")
When history looks back at this period, I think that it will record Mr. Bush's absolute squandering of the post-9/11 period as one of its low points, and the British response to 7/7/2005 as the moment things actually began to turn around.
<%
dim done
done = request.form("done")
if done = "" then
done = "No"
%>
Tell a friend
<%
Else
if request.form("done") = "Yes" then
'sets variables
dim email, sendmail
email = request.form("email")
Set sendmail = Server.CreateObject("CDONTS.NewMail")
'put the webmaster address here
sendmail.From = "webmaster@aspbasics.com"
'The mail is sent to the address entered in the previous page.
sendmail.To = email
'Enter the subject of your mail here
sendmail.Subject = "Check out this website"
'send a specific page or send a site url
dim url
'url = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
url = "http://www.aspbasics.net"
'This is the content of the message.
sendmail.Body = "Site recommendation from a friend!" & _
vbCrlf & vbCrlf & "A friend has sent you this email and thought you would should check out this site." & _
vbCrlf & url & vbCrlf
'this sets mail priority.... 0=low 1=normal 2=high
sendmail.Importance = 1
sendmail.Send 'Send the email!
response.redirect Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
'Response.write ("Sent to ") & email
End if
End if
%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
