Two Minutes of Silence for London
At noon on Friday, we should commemorate the deaths of the 52 persons in the 7/7 London underground bombings with two minutes of silence, as is being done (in a different time zone) in the UK itself.
We should remember that this atrocity killed Muslims as well as Christians and was not the work of Muslims or Islam, but of al-Qaeda. It seems increasingly clear that the cell that undertook it was recruited by Ayman al-Zawahiri through a Pakistani client organization, perhaps Jaish-i Tayyiba. Another farewell video by one of the four perpetrators has surfaced, introduced by al-Zawahiri (he also introduced the tape of Muhammad Siddiq Khan last summer). I noted at the time, last year, that the Arabic-language announcement of the operation, posted to the internet, seemed to me to have been written by an Egyptian Islamist, and I now think it was Zawahiri himself.
In his tape, Shehzad Tanweer said to the British: , “What you have witnessed now is only the beginning of a strain of attacks that will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and until you stop your financial and military support to America and Israel.”
The young Briton, brainwashed by agents of Zawahiri, obviously did not understand his own country. The UK has never paid the slightest attention to such threats, and if he had wanted to reinforce the British public in the policies he mentioned, he could have found no better instrument to that purpose than to menace them with bombings.
Tanweer also did not live long enough to understand his own religion, which unreservedly condemns terrorizing people (hirabah) as a means to accomplishing one’s objectives.
What I regret most of all is that our efforts in combatting al-Qaeda have been so inadequate as to leave Zawahiri free to corrupt minds and subvert souls, and to continue to sow terror.
The best commemoration of 7/7 will be his capture, and that of Bin Laden.
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