June 29, 2007
Another bomb scare in London
Another bomb scare in London My first recollection of bombs going off in London goes back to the early/mid 1970s. After graduating from Cambridge in the spring of 1971, I often visited friends in the West End - Marylebone Mews, I believe. While staying there one day, I heard some loud bangs - sounds I now recognise as explosions. The IRA had detonated one of its explosive devices at the Selfridges Department store in nearby Oxford Street. In the years following, a performance I attended at Sadler’s Wells Theatre was evacuated because of a bomb scare (false alarm), I had to leave a barber shop with half a hair cut, and people (including yours truly) got their knickers twisted in the Tube on a number of occasions because some nitwit had left a shopping bag behind. In 1997, I moved into the Canary Wharf area, first just to the north and later to the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs. Each working day, the Docklands Light Railway passed South Quay, where the IRA had set of a deadly explosion in 1996. Since then, of course, we have had the murderous post-9/11 attacks on London by Al-Quaeda-inspired British Muslim fanatics, the subsequent failed attacks on the underground system and today the two (so far) failed car bombs in the West End. You don’t get used to these outrages. With each attempt to terrorise us by maiming and killing the innocent, seemingly at random, I get more angry and determined not to let the bastards that want to destroy my city and my way of life and who endanger the life and well-being of my loved ones, have their way. I don’t care whether the perpetrators feel deeply aggrieved by what Bush/Blair/the US/the UK/the West/Christendom/the Crusaders and the Great or Little Satans may or may not have done to them and to the causes, beliefs and things they hold sacred. Sincerity and deeply held beliefs can explain actions, but do not justify them. No doubt Hitler was a sincere Nazi, Attila a sincere Hun and Idi Amin a sincere psychopath. Tout comprendre n’est past tout pardonner. There is no justification for the actions of these murderers and suicide cultists. The human excrement that perpetrate these crimes against God and humanity must be hunted down and locked up or killed. I admit that my occasional day dream, which involves tying the murderers/suicide cultists to their own explosive devices, and blowing them up one small piece at a time, is unworthy and does not express the teachings of the faith I would like to believe in. But I do not apologise for the righteous anger that prompts such musings, and I become even more determined that these emissaries of evil shall never prevail.
