We’re
All Brazilians Now
By Sir Cam
Cambridge, England
Things are moving at an extraordinary
speed. Depressingly downward, that is. London
has lost its innocence. “The City of Fear”,
declare the headlines. Maybe not, but things aren’t
the same. They can’t be. Not after the horror
of July 7, the attempted bombings of July 21,
and then the shooting of an innocent man.
Sir Ian Blair, the chief of the Metropolitan Police,
keeps telling us about the super speed with which
the investigations are being conducted. Fantastic
stuff, indeed. However, our friendly British Bobby
has become super fast with his gun also perhaps
as a consequence of our special relationship with
that trigger-happy sheriff across the Atlantic.
Poor Jean Charles de Menezes, the young Brazilian,
was the tragic victim of this new shoot-to-kill
policy. Is this the beginning of summary public
executions in Britain? We – the ethnic minorities
– were victims of the London bombs, we are
victims of the resulting hate and racism, and
now we can be shot dead because we are the wrong
color or happen to be wearing a dodgy jacket.
We don’t want to go down the road of Israeli-style
violations on the streets of Britain.
Collateral damage of the holy “war on terror”,
that’s what we’ve got. “If you
bomb our cities,” said a former mujahid
of the West who is thought to be hiding up in
the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan,
“we will bomb yours”. Sends a chill
down your spine, doesn’t it? Prime Minister
Blair was absolutely right when he said on Tuesday
that “there was no excuse or justification”’
for the actions of the terrorists.
But, as my courageous friend Dr Nick Megoran (www.megoran.org)
of Cambridge University said in The Times on July
11, “The attacks were inexcusable but not
inexplicable. Osama bin Laden’s past statements
indicate that Britain became a target for him
only because of UK backing for America’s
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Tony Blair’s
misguided support of George W Bush’s illegal
and immoral wars brought this tragedy upon us,
and we will never enjoy security until that policy
is reversed.”
Another Cambridge University man, Dr Piers Brendon,
whom I consulted on the topic of Churchill in
India a little while ago, also couldn’t
resist commenting on this hot topic. An edited
version of the following was published in The
Guardian on July 25: “Why is Tony Blair,
who misled us into an illegal war which is now
having the violent consequences here that many
predicted, hailed as a statesman for urging calm
from the safety of his Downing Street Green Zone?”
May I suggest Dr Brendon do a similar piece on
that Texan Bushman.
The smiling and gentle Rev’d Andrew Brown,
of the Unitarian Church in Cambridge, whom I met
recently at a community meeting to discuss the
fallout of the London bombings, foresaw at the
outbreak of the Iraq war that “we are also
facing the uncertainties that the revenge for
this invasion is likely to be, not from Saddam’s
soldiers and weaponry but from fanatical individual
terrorist groups who perceive the current action
to be another example of American and British
colonialism”. But Mr Blair was not in a
mood to listen to anyone except Dubya.
Finally, I come to the amazing, multi-talented
Dr Douglas Carnall, who bicycled all the way from
London to Cambridge to enquire about the hidden
history about the man who named Pakistan. A keen
blogger (http://navarino.org.uk:8080/blog), he
has recently composed a musical piece on the London
bombs:
“They voted for the war. They voted for
shock and awe. They thought it was far from home.
But we’ve got something here… We’ve
got... a faint troubling”.
Don’t “give one inch” to the
terrorists, Mr Blair, but please do listen to
us for we’re all Brazilians now.
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