Someone Would Have Been Bombed

"IT’S BEEN a quite a week for what the historian Brendan Simms once described as “conservative pessimism”. If we left everyone else alone, say the conservative pessimists, then they’d leave us alone. It’s all this doing stuff in the world that leads to trouble. So, don’t give us the Olympics, it’s too expensive and we don’t want it. Don’t spend all that time on bloody Africa, because it’s too complicated and we’ll probably only make things worse. Get out of Iraq as soon as possible and the chances are that we won’t get bombed.

...I want us to agree one thing first. Someone would have been bombed. The jihadist campaign outside the Middle East first started when the omens for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement looked good, not bad. Then, just under seven years ago bin Laden’s people attacked the US embassies (no Bush back then) in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam and killed 225 people, the vast majority of them local Africans. That was before 9/11. ....

...a whole lot of German and French tourists were blown up outside the synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia. A few months later a Spanish restaurant and a Jewish community centre were blown up in Morocco. The chap who did it had been trained by bin Laden in Afghanistan. The radicals have blown up Shia mosques in Pakistan, before, after and during Iraq. They have blown up Iraqi Shias for being apostates. Closer to home, in spring 2003, two boys, one from Derby and one from Hounslow, travelled all the way to Gaza and then to Israel so they could blow the arms off a French waitress in an English bar in Tel Aviv.

What does all this tell us? First, that if they aren’t blowing us up, then they’ll be blowing up someone else. And you don’t get to choose who. Secondly, who or what they blow up is largely a matter of what’s available. Jews anywhere, Americans after that, Shia next and Brits probably a distant fourth. Africans for fun."