I know I'm late to the game everyone has played all day, but I took my first opportunity to read the number of stories out there detailing the background of the London bombers.
One bomber was an avid soccer fan and a business graduate.
Another bomber excelled in track sports, studied science in college, and worked in the fish-and-chips restaurant owned by his 58-year-old father (who had lived in Britain since he was two).
And the third bomber was a teacher of disabled children.
MI5 was piecing together the double life of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the oldest of the bombers, who worked at a school in Beeston, Leeds.
Khan, the father of a 14-month-old daughter, was a “learning mentor” for children of immigrant families who had just arrived in Britain. Staff described him as gently spoken, endlessly patient, and immensely popular with children who called him their buddy.
Three years after this photograph was taken at the Hillside primary school, Khan triggered a 10lb bomb at Edgware Road Underground station.
While I am not surprised at any of this, it still carries some shock. After all, I think most would agree that people everywhere are basically good and decent folk, regardless of nationality or ethnicity. They want to make an honest living, come home to a loving family, and sleep in a comfortable bed.
Likewise, each one of these murderers seemed as normal as can be. At first glance, these killers actually *were* as normal as can be. If the reports are true, these weren't maladjusted loners muttering about vengeance. Yet, killers they became.
As terrible as 9/11 was, America was spared, for good or ill, any serious inward reflection. The terrorists were foreign, "other", madmen who may have snuck around our country but came from training camps and terror cells far away. For all its controversy, racial profiling never caught on.
The shock to Britain, however, is probably nothing short of tremendous. The London bombings carry the emotional wallop of 9/11, Oklahoma City, and Columbine combined. The killers were hidden from within, but relied on ideology utterly alien to British society. Or so the British thought, before this month, before their complacency was swept away.
The reaction of many elites in Britain will continue to be condemnation of any instinct towards racial profiling, towards immigration restrictions, towards actions directed at Britain's insular Islamic communities.
Brits and Americans alike are constantly told not to suspect that the decent, honest and hardworking Muslims living next door are terrorists. Well, what happens when the decent, honest and hardworking Muslim living next door actually *is* a terrorist?
We're constantly told that not to resort to profiling because there is no stereotypical terrorist-- they are young or old, rich or poor, educated or illiterate, so we must look at everyone equally. Yet, time and again the terrorists all share one indisputable trait-- they are all followers of Islam.
I am confident that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, just as I'm convinced that the vast majority of gun-owning white males are not Timothy McVeigh's, or that the vast majority of trenchcoat-wearing teenagers are not bent on shooting up schools.
Just to continue the McVeigh example, Americans everywhere understand that it wasn't just the man but the ideology that led to his corruption and ultimately his killing.
So what do we do when a murderous ideology just so happens to hide underneath the robes of one of the world's great religions? And overwhelmingly attracts adherents from specific nationalities and ethnic groups? We ignore the traits they have in common because it offers a convenient excuse to indulge our collective guilt about past racial sins irrelevant to our situation.
After all, paying extra attention to the brown man fidgeting on the Tube is the historical descendant of colonialism and slavery, and those things are bad. Far, far worse than being blown apart, you see.
It's as if the British hunted for Nazi spies by deliberately ignoring Germans on their soil. The same Germans who led rallies and marches every weekend. The same Germans who sent money back to the Third Reich. Yet, despite the fact that the vast majority of Nazis were Germans, no one could pay special attention to Germans because that would be unfair to the Germans who weren't Nazis.
Guess what-- you know what was really unfair to Germans who weren't Nazis? The Second World War.
Here's a bargain we can make with our Muslim communities: we won't profile you as long as you're willing to profile yourselves.
If you're loyal citizens, wonderful. Prove it, by helping us root out the evil men in your midst. If you don't, then the rest of us will have to that work for you.
Will it be hard on innocent people's feelings? Undoubtedly.
But so was the firebombing of Dresden.
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This posting was made on my personal computer.
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