GRIM REALITIES
by John O'Sullivan
New York Post
July 17, 2005

July 17, 2005 -- LONDON - WHEN something too terrible to contem plate actually hap pens, it is a normal human reaction to contemplate something else entirely. That is what seems to be happening in Britain since the bombs exploded on the London Underground and, even more tortuously, since the bombers were found to be not only suicide bombers but home-grown and fully assimilated suicide bombers.

This aversion to reality, this glancing away from the truth toward some slightly less horrible possibility, is not immediately obvious from media reports of British reactions. They have concentrated on such events as Tony Blair's stout defiance of the terrorists, the united Parliament supporting him and the stoical bravery of ordinary Londoners.

These things are important, of course, but they are a predictable part of the script following any major terrorist action. I must have heard prime ministers denounce terrorism, then Irish terrorism, in identical terms more than a dozen times when I was a parliamentary reporter in the 1970s. Londoners were equally stoical in those days too.

You have to listen carefully for those odd little indications, both things said and things left significantly unsaid, that reveal a fear of facing reality. Before we knew for certain that the terrorists were suicide bombers, for instance, Tony Blair listed the countries that had suffered similar terrorist bombings.

His list, though long, did not include Israel.

THAT omission cannot have been accidental. It may per haps have reflected the unpopularity of Israel in Europe's media and political elites. More likely, it revealed a desperate wish that the bombings should be the conventional kind the Brits have coped with before and not the eerie suicide variety that would threaten Britain with an Israeli-style future. The wish, however, was a deceiver.

Another litmus test was the meeting of European ministers responsible for homeland defense called by the British home secretary last week. It is a core belief of European progressives, including in this case the Blair government, that coordination of security, law-enforcement and immigration under the EU will help defeat terrorism. Every previous terrorist outrage has been used to further this coordination. But a single European immigration system would put British immigration security in the hands of Greeks, Italians and Spaniards. Would that really be likely to improve it?

The meeting hardly suggested so. It decided to store all electronic communications for one year so that security forces might inspect them. No sooner had the meeting concluded, however, than the experts pointed out quietly that such a vast amount of data would overwhelm the intelligence agencies.

Besides, the Anglo-American system of worldwide electronic eavesdropping (Echelon) already picks up contemporaneous terrorist "chatter" in a very sophisticated way — and the French, the EU and the European Left are trying to drag Britain out of that system.

In short, the top-level security meeting was an example both of "gesture politics" — the only kind of politics at which the Europeans excel — and of "displacement activity," which is doing something pointless because you shrink from doing something necessary.

THIS kind of bustling irrele vancy is undertaken be cause the authorities are baffled by two emerging realities. The first reality is that the suicide bombers were homegrown. They were not poor, not oppressed, and not segregated from the rest of Britain. They were not even isolated by their own wishes. They were born to families integrated into British neighborhoods; they went to British schools and colleges — one was even a teacher; they played cricket; they were outwardly integrated.

Why then did they become suicide bombers? Why did others like them go to fight British soldiers in Afghanistan?

One important answer seems to be that they were fully assimilated into a nullity. The British identity presented to these young people under multiculturalism was at best thin and at worst vicious.

That was certainly not necessary. Not too long ago, people all over the world admired and emulated the moral ideal of the British gentleman. But a mixture of political passions — left-wing post-colonial guilt, elite enthusiasm for the EU, the post-1945 unfashionableness of patriotism — caused this identity to be trashed and despised. And nothing offered in its place.

No natural patriotism filled their soul to block the entry of murderous ideologies. And nature abhors a vacuum.

BLAIR and his colleagues are beginning to grasp this. They talked last week about reviving and proselytizing "British values" in much the same self-conscious way that Americans used to promote assimilation before the multicultural revolution. It does not come naturally to them, however. They are uncomfortably aware that until yesterday they were promoting the multiculturalism that kills. And those older instincts may well compromise and distort the British patriotism they are now attempting to promulgate.

Still, they are tackling a fundamental problem. By now, however, it is only half the problem. The second emerging reality — one that ministers are desperately wriggling to avoid — is that Islam had at least something to do with what inspired the suicide bombers.

Their motives are honorable. They want to protect innocent Muslims from reprisal attacks, to avoid conflict with a billion Muslims worldwide and keep empty young souls out of the arms of al Qaeda recruiting sergeants. It is also understandable that peaceful law-abiding Muslims — especially those like the unfortunate father whose own beautiful daughter perished in the bombings — should want to insist that, almost by definition, Muslims could not have carried out these atrocities.

BOTH attitudes are, alas, un realistic. What filled those empty young souls was a variant of Islam — a death cult within Islam, a blend of fundamentalist Islam with the totalitarian ideologies of 20-century Europe, but a variant of Islam all the same.

In the honest words of Abdel Rahman al-Rashed of the Al-Arabiya news channel: "It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims."

And it is another fact, equally painful, that a large minority of young Muslims in Britain are attracted to this death cult within Islam just as — columnist Kevin Myers reminds us in the Irish Times — a large minority of young Irish nationalists kept the fascist death cult of the Provisional IRA in business for 30 years.

British official estimates, seeking to minimize the danger, still suggest that 16,000 young Muslims might now be part of a terrorist network.

The four suicide bombers have shown that future mass murderers can move easily among us as well-dressed, polite, respectable young men just like the rest of us. Their only distinguishing feature, in fact, is that they are Muslims.

They will therefore have to be countered on two levels: British security forces will have to learn the intelligence techniques that have slowly and painfully defeated the suicide-bomber threat in Israel — and Muslim clerics and intellectuals will have to defeat the death cult in the mosque, the lecture room and on the Internet. However discreetly, both will need to take the "Islamic factor" and other realities into account.

FOR a long time to come, however, Britain (and other European countries) face a frightening prospect. Worse bombings with higher casualties will probably occur. And those who cannot endure this reality will take refuge in illusions and displacement activities — of which the easiest to hand is anti-Americanism. Even while the bodies were being disinterred from the London underground, some voices were heard blaming the United States, the Iraq war and George W. Bush for what had happened.

Neither Blair's government nor the Tory opposition will yield to this temptation — and if more terrorist atrocities occur, as they will, their stand is likely to become more popular across the continent.

But others — the BBC, the multiculturalist Left, some European countries; all the usual suspects — will find slippery reasons for blaming the U.S. for these additional crimes. The BBC has already told its correspondents not to refer to the London bombers as "terrorists" lest they alienate their World Service listeners.

It should therefore be firmly stated that the terrorists bombed the World Trade Center, the East African embassies, USS Cole and the World Trade Center a second time, along with countless other atrocities elsewhere, long before Iraq was invaded. To blame the United States therefore is to argue that resisting terrorism is the cause of it.

John O'Sullivan, former adviser to Lady Thatcher and former Post editorial-page editor, is editor-at-large of National Review and a member of Benador Associates.

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