London mayor Ken Livingstone:
"I want to say one thing, specifically to the world today — this wasnot a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful, it was notaimed at presidents or prime ministers, it was aimed at ordinary,working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian ...young and old … that isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted fate,it is an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder."
"Theyseek to divide London, they seek Londoners to turn against each other... this city of London is the greatest in the world because everybodylives side by side in harmony. Londoners will not be divided by thiscowardly attack."
London is a particularly symbolic ground for al Qaeda to attack. No other society on earth has been as open to Islamic immigration as England. Indeed, it was so willing to tolerate all manner of extremists that it earned the name "Londonistan". This, from Gilles Kepel's Jihad, makes the point well:
On the issue of asylum, London and Paris took positions dimatreically opposed to each other. London, still traumatized by the Salman Rushdie affair, freely gave safe haven to militants from all over the world. Paris, on the other hand, whose political landscape had for some time been distrubed by controversy over the wearing of the veil in state schools, kept its frontiers firmly closed to militants. Thus, in the final years of the twentieth century, Great Britain became the axis around with the small world that had coalesced at Peshawar in the 1980'revolved. In return for this hospitality, them ilitants declared Britain a sanctuary: no act of terrorism was committed there, and the refugee activists made no attempt to stir up the young Indo-Pakistanis".
That truce, it's safe to say, is long over.
