Yesterday's memorial service for the victims of the July 7 bombs was conducted with sensitivity and pomp. The survivors and their relatives, or most of them, were clearly content to share their grief with strangers and their loss with the nation. The Church of England does these things well. Yet the event left me ill at ease. This was plainly a state occasion, not a private commemoration. It was a moment for monarch and prime minister, for prelates, mayors and policemen.A terrorist bomb is not a battle in a war; that is what the terrorist’s definition is. A bombing is a civil crime. The dead are not soldiers dying for their country. They are 52 random victims of what was, for them, a ghastly accident.The decision to remember July 7 as a state occasion was taken, I am told, by Downing Street. The argument was that the bombs were an attack on London as a whole. It was a de facto act of war. The intention of the bombers was political, and the nation’s response was thus collective. One relative was quoted yesterday as calling the service a debt of honour to those who died because of the government’s Iraq policy.Hence the presence of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Tony Blair and other politicians, of representatives of the emergency services and of London’s many faiths. The service was to show London’s resilience.Since terrorism craves publicity, its best prophylactic is cold neglect. Giuliani called the 9/11 terrorists murderers, to be treated as murderers, their crimes as crimes. The July 7 killers did not constitute a political threat, only an explosive one. The killers’ intention was to use their atrocity to further an argument within evangelical Islam. It was to do something that would win massive attention and thus invite government into a trap: to curb civil liberties, oppress minorities and so goad Muslims into the fundamentalist camp.Ministers entered that trap. Awarding criminals political status, as happened in Northern Ireland, not only raises their self-esteem within their community, it also pollutes the attitude of government. Having elevated the potency of an enemy, a ruler feels the need to elevate his own. Since July 7, a battery of new laws has been sought by Downing Street, against free speech, freedom of assembly and habeas corpus. In other words, we have not only granted terrorism a tactical victory, by turning what might have remained a private grief into a state occasion. We have also granted it leverage. In Blair’s words, we have let it “change the rules of the game”. In this game, the winner is terrorism and the loser is the freedom it seeks to undermine.Exerpted from an article by Simon Jenkins in ‘The Guardian’, November 2
