Explosions in London leave at least 40 dead, 700 wounded

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A group calling itself "The Secret Organization of al-Qaida in Europe" posted a claim of responsibility, saying the blasts were in retaliation for Britain's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The statement also threatened attacks in Italy and Denmark, both of which have troops in Iraq. It was published on a Web site popular with Islamic militants, and the text was republished on Elaph, a secular Arabic-language news Web site, and Berlin's Der Spiegel magazine.

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As I've said many times before, waging unjustified imperialistic wars on Islamic populations will only make terrorism worse--this al-Qaeda statement, and the Madrid attacks last year, seem to reinforce that thought. Furthermore, if Blair's belief that these bombings were intended to coincide with the G-8 meeting in Scotland is true, this must also be a statement against the brutal economic imperialism relentlessly pursued by industrialized Western nations against the rest of the world. As if the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center didn't already make that obvious.

This is horrible, and, as with New York in 2001, I'm a bit worried because I have friends in London I haven't heard from yet. I also have to admit my own ethnocentricity: this bothers me more than Madrid because today's victims speak English, my own language. It's as though these guys are slowly working their way back toward US soil; I'm pretty certain that's an eventuality, given the retarded foreign policy of the Bush administration. This is serious business.

I'm particularly angry because I know how to stop this shit from happening again. It's simple, really: pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan right now, get serious about a just settlement in Israel for the Palestinians, and alter economic policy such that we help the world instead of exploiting it. I say simple but it's also impossible. None of this can happen, especially ending economic exploitation, because so many elite interests absolutely depend on the current system of lunacy remaining exactly the way it is now, and those interests control the government, and the government controls the military. We're stuck, and it's not the silk-suited corporatists who are paying the price; ordinary citizens are being killed.

This will happen again, and short of a drastic reversal in policy, there's nothing anybody can do to stop it.



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