Posted on 07/03/2007 5:19:12 AM PDT by Loyal Buckeye
As terrorists go, last week's attacks featured The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. One of the would-be London bombers drove erratically down Haymarket St. -- presumably affected by the fumes from the gas cylinders and gasoline containers that were the heart of his makeshift car-bomb -- before crashing into a garbage bin, getting out and running away. Another parked his explosives-packed car illegally, so it was towed away. The third attack was at Glasgow airport on the following day, but nobody was hurt except one of the attackers, who set himself on fire.
More-competent terrorists might have killed dozens of people, but it's safe to say that this incident will be taken more seriously in the United States than it is in Britain or anywhere else in Europe. An occasional terrorist attack is one of the costs of doing business in the modern world. You just have to bring a sense of proportion to the problem, as people in Europe do in general.
Most major European countries already had been through some sort of terrorist crisis well before the current fashion for "Islamist" terrorism: the IRA in Britain, the OAS in France, ETA in Spain, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Red Brigades and their neofascist counterparts in Italy. Most European cities also were heavily bombed in a real war within living memory, which definitely puts terrorist attacks into a less-impressive category. So most Europeans do not obsess about terrorist attacks. They know that they are likelier to win the lottery than to be hurt by terrorists.
Russians also are pretty cool about the occasional terrorist attacks linked to the war in Chechnya, and Indians are positively heroic in their refusal (most of the time) to be panicked by terrorist attacks that have taken more lives in India than all the attacks in the West since terrorist techniques first became widespread in the 1960s. In almost all of these countries, despite the efforts of some governments to persuade the population that terrorism is an existential threat of enormous size, the vast majority of the people don't believe it.
Whereas in the United States, most people do believe it. A majority of Americans finally have figured out that the invasion of Iraq really had nothing to do with fighting terrorism, but they certainly have not understood that terrorism itself is only a minor threat. "We have a threat out there like we've never faced before," said actor, former senator and potential presidential candidate Fred Thompson last month. "I don't think the (American people) realize that this has been something that's been going on for a few hundred years, and our enemies have another 100-year plan," Thompson continued. "Whether it's Madrid, whether it's London, whether it's places that most people have never heard of, they're methodically going around trying to undermine our allies and attack people in conventional ways, while they try to develop nonconventional ways, and get their hands on a nuclear capability, and ultimately to see a mushroom cloud over an American city."
There has been only one major terrorist attack in the United States since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and that one, on 9/11, is almost six years in the past. So how have Americans been persuaded that their duty and their destiny in the 21st century is to lead the world in a titanic, globe-spanning "long war" against terrorism?
Inexperience is one reason: American cities never have been bombed in war, so Americans have no standard of comparison that would shrink terrorism to its true importance in the scale of threats that face any modern society. But the other is relentless official propaganda: the Bush administration has built its whole brand around the "war on terror" since 2001, so the threat must continue to be seen as huge and universal.
Ridiculous as it sounds to outsiders, Americans regularly are told that their survival as a free society depends on beating the "terrorists." They should treat those who say such things as fools or deliberate liars, but they don't. So the manipulators of public opinion in the White House and the more-compliant sectors of the U.S. media will give bigger play to the British bombings-that-weren't than Britain's own government and media have, and they will get away with it.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
Is this the same Europe that did such a great job dealing with German dictators on two different occasions during the 20th Century.
Gwynne Dyer. Master Idiot.
Gwynne Dyer has long been a charter member of the hate-America club. After 9/11 Dyer probably did a happy dance in his living quarters.
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Ellis Hennican, uber-lefty of Newsday and Fox, took this approach to those poor, misguided, darn near cute Fort Dix kids.
Gwynne is a he. He is a Canadian writer who has a past history of hating the U.S. His advice is worthless.
Gwynne is a he. He is a Canadian writer who has a past history of hating the U.S. His advice is worthless.
Dyer is someone who I would call a brilliant idiot. These people are very adept with words and the media and academic world, but very deficient in common sense. I've actually read one of his books (The 54th Parallel or some title like that) and never made sense out of it. If he were present at the Russian revolution, he would have felt very much at home in Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat. And most likely applauded all the shootings of the "enemies of the people".
Ummmmmm, blaming Bush is “business as usual”...
Bingo. The “pipe bomb” on 9-11 dealt a serious blow to the economy. Thank God for Bush’s tax rate cuts which allowed the economy to grow again.
Brilliant.
“I wonder if the Press would be so flippant had it succeeded.”
Pretty sure if it had happened here, the press would have ripped Bush for it, despite our excellent vigilance since 9/11. I think they want to have their cake and eat it too concerning the GWOT.
What a damned fool!
Don’t bother reading past the first line.
There is no “Haymarket St” in Central London.
This from the Sacramento Bee...
“A Mercedes car is loaded onto a removals truck in Haymarket Street, near Piccadilly, in central London, which contained a suspected car bomb Friday June 29,”
Haymarket is closer to Piccadilly Circus than it is to Piccadilly, but then what can you expect from the drive-by morons...
Dyer is not only plain stupid of the subject, out of time at this particular dance, but also badly informed and apparently intentionally so.
If he (Dyer) paid only cursory attention to the mobilization of the British law enforcement establishment, or the attention paid by the Spanish Authorities, of the interest of the Chechs, and on; he would not have tried of skin a fee for his shilling per word excremental piece. Hopefully he will be able to find employment in a field he will be much more competent in, such as refilling the salt shakers and vinegar bottles in a low end chip shop.
I hadn't really noticed him until a few months ago when I read a piece by him in my local paper claiming that Ahmadinejad had been mistranslated in his remarks threatening/encouraging/celebrating the destruction of Israel.
It was a stunning report given that Ahmad was being quoted EVERYwhere as having made these extremely bellicose remarks, virtually a casus belli, IMO.
Sometimes even our side runs off halfcocked on the basis of bad reporting so I thought it very important to check this out.
I sent a ltr to the editor asking them to do some reporting. They had published an op-ed style piece from a regular contributor (Dyer), identifying him as an authority. Either he was wrong or virtually everything else the paper had published on the topic was wrong. As this was potentially a matter of war and peace, I urged them to tell us what is the truth. Of course, they ignored me. They like to liven up their editorial pages with incendiary crap, but they don't feel obligated to clarify what is false and what is true as a simple matter of fact (although if I, as a conservative, submitted something to them with an important misstatement of fact or with a lie, they would be all over it).
I paid lots of attention thereafter to Ahmad's rhetoric: He repeatedly made the same kind of bellicose statements. Nobody, NOBODY but Dyer -- not the BBC, not Reuters, not AFP, not the Slimes, NOBODY -- every claimed in the MSM that Ahmad's remarks were less than the existential threat to Israel that they had been widely reported to be.
I nominate Dyer for the first Walter Duranty award for his extraordinary lying in support of the forces of evil at a time when war and peace hangs in the balance.
(I am neither Jewish, nor a neocon, nor a person inclined to put the security interests of Israel ahead of those of the USA, although, happily, they often coincide. I am interested in the truth and in finding and punishing -- killing, actually -- the real evil-doers.)
Passivity in the face of attack is not sophistication, it is suicide.
Islomania is the terminal cancer that threatens the survival of all post stone age progress,made by humanity while the USA,who offers the only cure in sight is disdained.
It is way past the time for the USA to devote everything we have toward our own interests and survival.
F*ck those pompous asses of Babylonia.
Dyer is like millions of other common-sense deficient libs who hate conservatives so much they will never admit it when they're wrong. They're so obtuse and outright stupid at times they'll side with people, like Ahmanutjob, who would gladly hang them for their views.
And the ironic thing is people like Dyer only breathe free because of people like Bush and Blair who protect him from the real baddies. Dyer is obviously too wrapped up in himself to see it.
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