LET’S BEGIN with the smell of acetate from the corner of the Tube train carriage. Just a whiff was enough to get me to look up and to create a half-second’s worth of anxiety. But the owner of the black rucksack turned out to be a blowsy, tanned woman who was painting her nails. I felt irritated with her. Hadn’t I left my own black rucksack at home precisely to avoid causing this anxiety in others? Didn’t she know that acetone was being used in the bombs, and that acetone and acetate are probably linked in some way? Cow.
All kinds of words are being applied to London at the moment. Some American paper described the capital this week as “besieged”. Then there’s fear, dread and panic, of course. Well, I haven’t seen or experienced any of those emotions. What is less commonly described are the more general feelings of being inconvenienced and of irritation.
Irritated, in my case, with the nonsense people say and write. London is not besieged. Leningrad was besieged for three years and a million died. Paris was besieged in 1871 and they ate rats. Irritated with those overpaid poseurs of the Italian Serie A team Inter Milan for initially cancelling matches in London and Norwich. It is more dangerous to cross the road in Naples than it is to spend a century in Norwich. Irritated with a Julia Smith, who told the BBC that she was emigrating to Australia and “will not come back to this country”. Good. Why wait, Julia, go now. Irritated with the man from Swansea who told reporters: “The truth is I will think twice before visiting London again. It’s not worth getting blown up to have a day out.” Think twice? It’d help if you thought once.
There’s the mother urging her daughter to leave the Smoke and go to live in the county with the worst road traffic accident fatality rate in Britain. “I’m right to be scared,” argue several letter writers in the wake of the bombings and the would-be bombings. No, you see, you’re not. If you look at the facts, calculate the risk properly, you’ll understand that your chances of being exploded are very, very slight. No one who smokes, for instance, could possibly mount a good argument for leaving London rather than packing in the fags. High blood pressure? Much worse prognosis than being blown up, but will you cut out the salt?
Then there’s the exaggerated concern of British Muslims (or maybe not, since their concerns are gauged through the selective use of vox pops and the comments of professionally concerned leaders) about being killed or abused. As someone put it at the weekend, Muslims apparently now have to balance the fear of being blown up with the fear of being killed by the police.
Do they? In reality, no. Muslim victims of bombs (not counting bombers) equals five. Muslim victims of police equals nil. I admit they might be scared. Is that fear, however, justified? Frankly, no. A spokesperson for the Muslim Safety Forum (which I’d never heard of) spoke of Muslims being “threefold victims”, of bombs, of unwarranted suspicion and of the police. Being wrongly feared doesn’t really confer victim status. The only people with genuine group victim credentials are London’s travellers, of all creeds, classes, ages and colours.
In fact, deeply reprehensible though attacks on Muslims are, the truth is that I had half expected much worse. With the lack of faith that people such as me sometimes have in the wider population, I had imagined that the first serious atrocity committed here by native British Muslims would give the racist far-right an immediate and violent lift. I still recall watching, as a 13-year-old, when the dockers — the aristocracy of labour — marched for Enoch. So far nothing such as this has happened. And, horrid though it may be to be wrongly suspected (like the man who finds himself walking behind a lone woman after dark), it isn’t victimhood. Nor is it Islamophobic for people to worry about young Asian men with rucksacks on the Tube. I don’t suppose that Muslims travelling on the buses worry too much about elderly white women with knitwear handbags.
I’m irritated, too, with the boneheadedness of some of our discussion about the Muslim community, as though it was homogenous, as though it was somehow responsible itself for the bombings, as though, by an act of will, it could stop this madness from happening. And why do sensible journalists fail to distinguish between men like the interesting and intelligent Tariq Ramadan on the one hand, and clerical fascists such as Omar Bakri Mohammad and Abu Qatada on the other? Irritated with category errors, such as the often-repeated question, “What drives them to it”. “Drives” them? Starvation might drive you to steal bread, but nothing drives someone who has just been enjoying watersports in North Wales to blow up a Tube train. The question is why they “choose” to do it.
Irritated with people who, knowing nothing, know everything. They “know” that the poor Brazilian man should have stopped when challenged, because that’s what they would have done. So it’s his own fault. Or they “know” that the police acted improperly, and it was an “execution”. I’d do this. I’d do that. We don’t know what we’d do until it happens. I understand why the family of Senhor de Menezes are so angry, but it doesn’t make his cousin right when he castigates the police for not using their brains and accuses them of acting like amateurs. Isn’t it just as likely to be true that what both parties did, Senhor de Menezes and the police, was — in their own terms — reasonable? That the complicated truth can lie in more than one place at any time?
And here we come to the most under-discussed anxiety concerning the shooting, which is that it reveals the vulnerability, the fallibility, of those whose job it is to protect us. They didn’t know as much as we, who watch Crime Scene Investigation every week, wanted and expected them to know. We’d had the “treasure trove” of the unexploded bombs and abandoned bags, so surely the next bit of the story was the tracking down and arrest of the bad guys. I felt my low spirits lift when, half way through writing this, I heard that the police had named two of last week’s failed bombers. And then sank again when I realised that we still don’t know who the other two are, despite the whole world having seen their grainy pictures.
In the absence of the reassuring knowledge that the men are caught or dead, and that we know how and why they failed, it is always tempting to fill in the gaps with speculation, rumour, often unreliable eye-witness accounts, prejudice and prior judgment.
But look, in a situation such as this there are only a few things that most of us can usefully do. The first is not to exaggerate the risk. The second is put two metaphorical fingers up to the bombers by refusing to overreact. The third is not to imagine that we know what we do not know. The fourth is to extend small courtesies to our fellow citizens. (As I said, I’ve stopped carrying my black rucksack on the Tube because it might spook some people. And now I won’t paint my nails, either.)
Above all we need to be as intelligent as we can possibly be and to recognise just how complex and ambiguous the world can be. We need now to keep our wits about us.
david.aaronovitch@thetimes.co.uk
