7/7
One Year On
The New Video: Confirmation That
Foreign Policy Was A Root Cause
Briefing
89
7 July 2006
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REALISM AND DENIAL
The suicide bombings in London on 7 July 2005 killed 52 people
and injured hundreds more. Evidence emerged soon afterwards that
the four young Muslims who carried out the attacks were motivated
in large part by their anger over the impact of British foreign
policy on Muslims around the world. (See Milan Rai’s 7/7:
The London Bombings, Islam and the Iraq War.)
This has been confirmed by the video statement
of suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer, released by al-Qaeda on 6 July—discussed
below.
Despite this new evidence, the British Government
continues to deny that British foreign policy is in any way responsible
for the attacks, or for the heightened level of threat from al-Qaeda.
The British media continues to distort and censor its news reporting
and commentary in support of this line.
'FALSE GRIEVANCE'
On 4 July 2006, Tony Blair re-affirmed his position that to ‘defeat’
al-Qaeda-type terrorism, we must ‘defeat’ ‘a
completely false sense of grievance against the West’. The
Prime Minister told a Parliamentary committee that Muslims should
not say to al-Qaeda sympathisers: ‘Look: we understand why
you feel like this and we can sympathise with that but you are
wrong to do these things’—they should say: ‘You
are wrong to feel those things’. (Blair’s words, not
ours. Official draft transcript)
In other words, if you are against terrorism,
you should tell British Muslims: ‘You
are wrong to be furious about the invasion of Iraq’;
‘You are wrong to
be angry about the occupation of Afghanistan’; and ‘You
are wrong to rage against the West’s support for
the oppression of the Palestinians.’
On the one hand, Blair argues that the young
British Muslims who carried out these atrocities were not motivated
by their fury and despair over British foreign policy. On the
other hand, he says that British Muslims do feel fury and despair
about British foreign policy, and they shouldn’t.
TANWEER:
IT’S FOREIGN POLICY
Tony Blair’s denial that British foreign policy was a motive
for the bombings was flatly contradicted
by the video statement of suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer, released
on 6 July, which highlighted the plight of Muslims globally.
In the al-Qaeda video, Tanweer said:
‘To the non-Muslims of Britain, you
may have wondered what you have done to deserve this. You are
those who have voted in your government, who have in turn and
still continue to this day continue to oppress our mothers,
children, brothers and sisters from the east to the west in
Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Chechnya. Your government
has openly supported the genocide of over 150,000 innocent Muslims
in Fallujah.’ (Search for International
Terrorist Entities, SITE)
(The reference to voting tends to confirm
the suggestion made in 7/7: The London
Bombings, Islam and the Iraq War that the bomb plot started
in earnest after, and because of, the re-election of the Blair
Government.)
TANWEER:
IT’S IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN AND PALESTINE
Tanweer also said: ‘What have you witnessed now is only
the beginning of a string 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.’
(Guardian)
EXTRA
Not included in the pdf of this briefing. More
of Tanweer's statement:
'What you have witnessed now is only the
beginning of a series of attacks, which by the Grace of Allah,
will intensify and continue until you pull all of your troops
out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Until you stop all financial and
military support to the U.S. and Israel, and
until you release all Muslim prisoners from Belmarsh and your
other concentration camps. And know that if you fail
to comply with this, then know that this war will never stop
and that we are willing to give our lives one hundred times
over for the cause of Islam. You
will never experience peace until our children in Palestine,
our mothers and sisters in Kashmir, our brothers in Afghanistan
and Iraq feel peace.' (SITE)
Tony Blair said on 4 July, ‘There is
a reason why they [al-Qaeda terrorists] were plotting terrorist
activities in Spain even after the Spanish had withdrawn their
troops from Iraq.’ (Official
draft transcript) Yes, there is a reason. It’s because
Spain was involved— and continues to be involved—in
the occupation of Afghanistan, which is just as important to al-Qaeda
jihadists as Iraq or Palestine, as we see from Tanweer’s
video statement.
MEDIA SELF-CENSORSHIP
How have the British media responded to the Tanweer video statement?
Typically, the Financial Times
had a flat headline (page 2): ‘Video
of London bomber shown on Arab TV’; and a perceptive,
realistic news report (para. 5): ‘Its linkage of the bombings
to British foreign policy appears to be a calculated challenge
to the government of Tony Blair, who earlier this week urged British
Muslims not to excuse extremism by blaiming British military operations
abroad.’
Most of the media framed the statement either
in relation to the al-Qaeda connection (Independent
headline, ‘Bomber’s
video shows hand of al-Qaida’, page 5); or the cynical
timing of its release (Guardian
headline, ‘One
year on, a London bomber issues a threat from the dead’,
page 1); or the possible impact on people personally affected
by the atrocity (Telegraph headline,
‘Suicide
bomber’s video won’t frighten us, say July 7 families’,
page 1).
The Times
was the only newspaper to headline the key element of the video
statement: ‘I blame war
in Iraq and Afghanistan, 7/7 bomber says in video’ (page
4). However, unlike the FT, The
Times did not make any connection to the propaganda of
the British Government, and the way in which Tanweer’s statement
undermined Blair’s denial.
REPORTED
AND SUPPRESSED
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman point out that media provision
of some information about an issue ‘proves
absolutely nothing about the adequacy or accuracy of media coverage’:
‘The media do in fact suppress a
great deal of information, but even more important is the way
they present a particular
fact—its placement, tone,
and frequency of repetition—and the
framework of analysis in which it is placed.’
‘That a careful reader, looking for
a fact can sometimes find it, with diligence and a skeptical
eye, tells us nothing about whether that fact received the
attention and context it deserved, whether it was intelligible
to most readers, or whether it was effectively
distorted or suppressed.’
(For more on the Propaganda Model of the
mass media, see this JNV
summary.)
It is possible for something to be reported,
but effectively distorted or suppressed.
In the case of the reporting of Tanweer’s
explicit statement of his own motivations, we have a classic case
of this phenomenon. Newspapers often record his words—the
attacks continue ‘until you pull your forces out from Afghanistan
and Iraq’—but they do so in a way that suppresses
their meaning.
For example, see the Guardian's
front-page story, whose headline ‘One
year on, a London bomber issues a threat from the dead’,
subhead ('Al-Qaida release video on eve of 7/7 of Shehzad Tanweer,
one of the homegrown terrorists') and first 7 paragraphs have
nothing to do with the foreign policy element, makes no further
reference to foreign policy in the 5 paragraphs following the
Tanweer quotes in paragraphs 8 and 9.
Typically, the final paragraph is allowed
to contain a hint of realism, quoting Mohammed Abdul Baari, Secretary-General
of the Muslim Council of Britain: ‘We hope this video serves
to end the denial in parts of
government about the impact of some of its foreign policies on
the radicalisation of a section of Muslim youth, but also
the denial in some pockets of the Muslim community that these
four Muslim men were responsible for these murderous acts.’
GUARDIAN:
POLICE CONFIRM FOREIGN POLICY LINK
What is so striking about the Guardian’s
front-page distortion is that it sits alongside another confirmatory
front-page story:
‘After the London bombings, British
counter-terrorism officials intensified their efforts to understand
why some Muslims turned to violence. The document, which has
been seen by the Guardian,
is the product of that work, and was completed within the past
three months before being distributed to senior officers across
London. The document says in a headline introducing one section:
“Foreign policy and Iraq;
Iraq HAS [its emphasis] had
a huge impact.” ’
The report includes the removal of legitimate
grievances as part of the anti-terrorist programme: ‘What
will change them [the jihadists]—gradually—is argument,
the removal of justifying causes
(Palestine, Iraq), the erosion of perverted beliefs and
day-to-day frustrations.’
This is exactly the argument of 7/7:
The London Bombings, Islam and the Iraq War, it is exactly
the argument JNV has been making for many years now, it is the
argument that Tony Blair has been resisting, and it is the argument
that the mainstream media has largely excluded from the debate.
There are concessions to reality. See the
end of Philip Johnston’s comments in the Telegraph
or the muted sentences buried in the middle of the Independent
editorial today (page 24 or paid-for
access) for typically weak examples. They are minor elements
drowned out by the rest of the media chorus.
DOWN THE
MEMORY HOLE
Overall, the mass media continue to effectively suppress vital
facts, such as the leaked Home Office/Foreign Office report ‘Young
Muslims and Extremism’, which said that British
foreign policy post-9/11 was a major cause of such ‘extremism’;
the Joint
Intelligence Committee warning to Tony Blair that invading
Iraq would ‘heighten’ the threat from al-Qaeda; the
Joint
Terrorism Analysis Centre report in June 2005 that
‘Events in Iraq are continuing
to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist related
activity in the UK’, and so on.
Also omitted are the most credible statement
of responsibility, the earlier video from Mohammad
Sidique Khan, and the evidence of the
bombers’ friends. (See 7/7
for more in-depth material and discussion.)
Without retrieving this information, we cannot
find our way forward.
We will certainly not find it by telling
young Muslims that they are wrong to feel what they feel about
the crimes that we commit, or are party to.
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