After the London Bombings: Global Terror, The West and Indiscriminate Violence (Essay‪)‬

In the midst of carnage and outrage in many parts of the world, and with daily body counts in Iraq often in excess of the loss of life in the London bombings, the endless soul-searching accounts into that particular terrorist attack often seemed an exercise in double standards. But there is another possibility. Perhaps this preoccupation arose out of an unease still to be articulated. In this article I will argue that the London bombing confirms a new order of threat comparable only with that of September 11, not just a threat to the 'Western way of life' but, more significantly, touching on doubts about its very viability. Nevertheless, analysis in the press concentrates on the immediate anguish generated by the death of innocent people and terror's deep disruption of everyday life. It leaves in the background the larger processes of history, international power relations and cultural transformation that can provide a perspective on the experience of a terrorist assault. Most people have only a rudimentary sense of the way that the external relations of their governments affect the way they live. It is one thing to depend on ready access to oil, to take a relevant example, but quite another to grasp that its taken-for-granted availability is frequently implicated in the subordination of other peoples. Often enough, as the history of conquest demonstrates, it entails the disruption of those peoples' taken-for-granted ways of living, including their religious beliefs.