Yes, London Can Take It

...There were no serious demands for capitulation...

...Scant chance of the latter...

...Further vox populi encounters disclosed an identical, almost camera-ready, ability to emulate the stoic forebears...

...In 2001 there was an enemy to hit back at, and some business to conclude with the Taliban...

...That's what the patriotic proles are supposed to have yelled from the bomb-sites when Churchill toured the battered East End...

...Like the fascists that they are, the murderers boast that they love death more than we love life...

...But last Thursday the blood wasn't dry on the wall of the British Medical Association in Bloomsbury, with the lower stairway covered in body parts, before the call for surrender was being raised...

...But the nature of the enemy is somewhat similar...

...This can only mean that Galloway knows what was in the minds of the bombers, and knows that it was these subjects (and not, say, the Wahhabi hatred of unveiled women, or their fury at the liberation of East Timor) that had actually motivated the attacks...

...Read, if you like, Stephen Spender's account of being a fireman, or any selection of George Orwell's wartime "London Letters" to Partisan Review...

...First out of the trap was George Galloway, the renegade Member of Parliament who has been Saddam Hussein's chief propagandist in Britain...

...Another dismal statement, issued by the Muslim Council of Britain in concert with something called "Churches Together in Britain and Ireland," got as far as proclaiming that "no good purpose can be achieved by such an indiscriminate and cruel use of terror...

...These included the presence of British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the photographs from Abu Ghraib, and the state of affairs at Guantanamo...

...again I assume that there is a subliminal script that so to speak "kicks in" when things get nasty...

...On the other hand, I must say that the leadership of "Imaan," a "social support group for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Muslims," managed to issue a condemnation that was not shaded or angled in any way, and consisted of a simple, unequivocal denunciation and a statement of solidarity with the victims...

...The mayor of London, Ken Living-stone—another Blair-hater and another flirter with any local Imam who can bring him a few quick votes—managed to say that the murders were directed at "the working class," not the "powerful...

...Many Muslims take the side of civilization and many European fascists and Communists are sympathetic to jihad...

...But from now on, we must increasingly confront the fact that the war within Islam is also a war within Europe...

...It is a huge and resilient city, and if there were ten thousand jihadist guerrillas operating full time within its precincts, they could scarcely make a dent before they were utterly defeated...

...If he doesn't know, he should at least have waited until the blood was dry before opening his ugly mouth...

...Much of this elusive script is based on Noel Coward's sentimental ditty "London Pride," which was dusted off and given a fair old revival in the press on the following morning...

...And at least it could be said that one note was almost never struck in those days...

...and 1945, Londoners ran away, panicked, sent their children off to the country with labels around their necks, trampled each other in the rush to make tube stations into airraid shelters (which the government at first refused to allow) and blamed Jews for jumping queues and hoarding goods...

...The tube stations selected for the mayhem show beyond doubt that the perpetrators must have expected to kill quite a number of Muslims, just as their co-thinkers have been doing in Kabul and Baghdad...

...Galloway is an open supporter of the other side in this war, and at least doesn't try very hard to conceal the fact...

...I was cynically thinking, yes, that's all very well, but I can imagine panic and nightmare in the "tube" underneath King's Cross station, when I received an email from a teacher at King's College who had been caught up in the most hideous of the underground train bombs...

...That's the stuff...

...Far more depressing are the insincere and inauthentic statements made by more "mainstream" types...

...Toward the end of the war, as guided missiles began to rain down from Germany, morale became very bad indeed...

...Since then, there has been unfinished business with Saddam Hussein and his notorious fedayeen...

...Within hours of the atrocities, he had diagnosed their cause, or causes...

...If he really knows that much about the killers, he should be asked to make a full disclosure of his sources to Scotland Yard...

...It's highly probable that the assassins of 7 July are British born, as were several Taliban fighters in the first round in Afghanistan...

...He recounted the almost pedantic willingness of citizens to make way and say "after you" as the doors finally opened and as emergency staff made an appearance on the platforms...

...They imagine that this yell of unreason is intimidating and impressive...

...BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS London IF ONE MUST HAVE CLICHÉ and stereotype (and evidently one must) then I would nominate the sturdy phlegmatic Londoner as the stock character who deserves to survive for at least another generation...

...These are not the bright, clear lines that many people fondly imagine to be heritable from a heroic past...

...For all that, both men did develop an admiration for the essential toughness and humor of the Londoner...

...That's true enough, but it doesn't avoid the implication that a jihadist bomb in, say, the Stock Exchange would have been less reprehensible...

...We shall undoubtedly go forward and put these grave matters to the proof but, meanwhile: Death to them and Long Live London...

...It was planned to be worse, and the next assault may be worse still...

...Nobody who has read any serious account of life under the Nazi blitz can believe a word of it...

...Once I had guiltily assured myself of the safety of my own daughter, I allowed myself to think that the long-awaited attack had not been as bad as many of us had expected...

...Between 1940 It is a huge and resilient city, and if there were ten thousand jihadists operating full time within its precincts, they could scarcely make a dent before they were utterly defeated...

...The rich moved complain-ingly into well-fortified hotels, and the police and firemen helped themselves to the contents of bombed or abandoned homes...

...Why do I think that there were some in both the Muslim and Christian leaderships who thought that, in their proud "inclusiveness," they didn't need to go quite that far...

...London can indeed take it...

...And the mirror image also exists...

...Woken in the dark on the early morning of 7 July, and given the news that I and all British people had been expecting for some time, I made haste to turn on the television and was confronted at once by a man in his 30s with a shirt-front coated in blood...

...It still hints that the purpose might be ill-served by the means...

...At last, the Churchill touch...

...But another reflection now deposes the preceding one...

...He was bleeding from his scalp, but was quite evenly telling his excited interviewer that "the gentleman next to me"—who was slightly off-screen— might be a superior witness since he had seen more of the actual flash and bang...

...His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author ofAmerica...

...Further, it fails as an ecumenical statement in that it was evidently not submitted to Britain's large Jewish community for ratification...

...As anyone who regularly uses Edgware Road station, or anyone who goes to soccer matches, can attest, Londoners don't normally behave this politely, so Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair...

...This is to say too much and too little...

...London can take it...