A Wound in my Heart

The Observer’s war-on-terrorism special – “9/11: At last, the full story has been told” – highlights a quotation from April Gallop, a survivor of the Pentagon attack: “There’s a wound in my heart that can only be closed with truth and by someone accepting responsibility”. Good lord, has no one told the poor woman? It was Al-Qaeda who were responsible. They’ve admitted it. They’ve even boasted about it.

But of course that isn’t what she, or the Observer, mean. There’s only one culprit here, and that’s the administration in Washington and its disastrous failure to tackle terrorism.

Indeed yes, and this is just the latest in a long list of complaints. All those attempts by the administration to tackle terrorism, by overthrowing the Taleban in Afghanistan, or by detaining suspects in Guantanamo: they’re disastrously wrong, immoral even. People’s rights are being trampled on.

Curiously though, as Jason Burke reports, there are signs that the Muslim world is beginning to turn against the militants (known outside Guardian/Observer circles as terrorists):

Few people noticed the statement by two Saudi Arabian clerics denouncing attacks, on locals and Westerners alike, by Islamic militants. It came not from the usual tame clerics, but from Safar al-Hawali and Salman al-Auda, two rabble-rousing prayer leaders imprisoned several times for their hardline views.
The statement last week was part of a phenomenon which, though its outlines are barely discernible, give us a glimpse of light at the end of ‘the war on terror’ tunnel. For, though it is gaining in many areas, the radical Islamic militant movement labelled ‘al-Qaeda’ is beginning to lose public support in others.

Good news: but there’s one point that must be borne firmly in mind:

This is despite the actions of Bush and Blair, rather than because of them, but is heartening nonetheless.

So, to sum up:

1) the US administration was grossly negligent in its failure to tackle terrorism.

2) any attempts by the US/UK to tackle terrorism are utterly repugnant.

3) if there’s any reduction in terrorism it cannot possibly be anything to do with attempts by the US/UK to tackle terrorism, which by definition only make matters worse.