As one of the people nearly caught up in the Edgware Road blast (myself and the missus were one stop away when we had to get out of the train – boarding a train three minutes earlier and it would have been us) the date 7/7 has added significance in the family calendar.
The boy could have lost two out of his three parents, the girl could have been a widow, I could have been a widower. It doesn’t bear thinking about but we did start to catch separate trains into work for the next week or so.
It’s still something I ponder every day, though…
But something to also ponder every day is the fact that a bunch of young men can have their minds filled with so much hatred that they see acts like this as legitimate warfare.
The 50-odd lives that were lost was a barbaric death toll, but it’s no more barbaric than the Iraqi civilian death toll (anywhere between 20,000 and 200,000 depending on what you read) caused by our latest war in Iraq.
It’s also no more barbaric than the estimated 500,000 Iraqis who have died through malnutrition brought about by the food blockade against Iraq that the British government enforced since the first Gulf War.
And it’s also no more barbaric than the massive increase in cancer and birth abnormalities caused to Iraqi children brought about by the use of depleted uranium shells in Southern Iraq after the first Gulf War that have still not been cleaned up.
I don’t defend the action of suicide bombers in any way but they’re not the only terrorists in this equation. The British government are terror mongers too and all their actions are doing is ensuring events like 7/7 will be the norm rather than the exception.
And yet certain right-wing rags genuinely can’t see that breeding yet more mistrust and hatred is not helping to solve the problem.
There are times I am ashamed of my profession…
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