Letter from London
GEDMIN, JEFFREY
Letter from London Unfazed or underwhelmed? BY JEFFREY GEDMIN London I THOUGHT LEAVING ISRAEL for London would make me safer. I came via Zurich, and the mood in the airport before takeoff was...
...Extra police were patrolling everywhere when we landed...
...Tony Blair has gotten a desperately needed boost for his tireless calls to take the terrorist threat seriously...
...Depending on how the investigation proceeds, you cannot rule out that Britain's Michael Moore conservatives will follow suit...
...Shanksville, Pa...
...The pair missed their first flight but find themselves ready now for their trip to Canada and complaining that a new electronic video game they bought for the flight cannot be brought on board...
...We had been in the air maybe 30 minutes, bound for the west coast, when the pilot announced that the president had declared a state of national emergency...
...I would only learn later about United Airlines Flight 93, apparently just ahead of us, which had crashed in an open field near Jeffrey Gedmin is director of the Aspen Institute Berlin and columnist for the German daily Die Welt...
...As ghastly as the intentions of the current airline plotters seem to have been, Blair's critics have already started stirring up what Gove calls the "here-we-go-again" syndrome...
...The "poverty-causes-terror" school may be about to be further discredited...
...Missteps at home by the British authorities in the war on terror have not helped either...
...In the Swiss Air lounge, passengers gathered around television sets as reports came in that British authorities had thwarted a plot by terrorists to blow up multiple aircraft in midair...
...They found nothing, and the two brothers were later released...
...There was the tragic killing last summer of a Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, who police mistakenly had suspected of being a terrorist...
...In London, some neighborhoods are as much as 35 percent Muslim...
...And so far it looks like many of those arrested in the plot, like the terrorists who struck last summer, are citizens and apparently middle class...
...Authorities had expected to find chemical weapons in their possession...
...Milling about London, though, you get a sense of normalcy...
...Reid insisted the British people "probably faced the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the Second World War...
...The British still have that "stiff upper lip" thing, and while there was a threat of unimaginable destruction— security alerts remain at the unprecedented "critical" level—nothing has actually happened, not yet anyway...
...The Tories have their own share of Bush bashers, and the party as a whole has not exactly been a rock on these issues...
...John Reid, Britain's home secretary, had just given a speech that critics had berated as strident and excessive...
...Michael Gove, a former assistant editor of the Times and now a rising star in Tory politics, worries things may not change substantially for the better...
...The failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the considerable violence in Iraq since Saddam's deposing effectively decimated the prime minister's standing...
...The BushBlair side of this argument has not fared very well...
...They wore large black bulletproof vests, and each officer I saw held his finger on the trigger of a machine gun...
...Blair stood by the police, though, "101 percent," as he said, adding at the time: "You can only imagine, if they failed to take action and something terrible happened what the outcry would be then...
...Overzealous cops...
...I just saw on Sky Television an interview with a father and daughter at Heathrow...
...It's hard to see how the debate here will sort itself out...
...Two months ago, in an operation involving some 250 police officers, authorities arrested in their Forest Gate home Mohammed Abdul Kahar and his brother...
...I had to laugh...
...It's unclear exactly what Reid knew when he spoke, hours before the raids, but news of the dramatic plot has made Reid's speech look a bit more compelling...
...In front of the airport, cars letting off and picking up passengers drew constant attention, as police officers would approach each vehicle, peer inside, and signal for drivers to keep moving...
...I felt I had been here before...
...In Britain there has been a crucial debate, says Gove, between those who think Blair has exaggerated the threat—and believe that Islamic terror has mostly to do with misguided Western policies (Iraq) and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and those who believe that Islamism is ideological and global...
...Was this a gesture to reassure the public, or did the police know something we did not know...
...The Iraq war was never popular with the British...
...Scotland Yard issued an apology...
...I was booked to fly into London City airport, and, while Heathrow passengers were left stranded back in Zurich, my flight arrived with a mere 30-minute delay...
...I noticed on the monitors that the entire day's flights to Heathrow were suddenly posted as either canceled or delayed...
...Undeterred, materialistic, and hedonistic as ever—this must be exactly the sort of thing that drives the Islamists crazy...
...They just don't get it," Reid had said, a blast directed at the British media and legal establishment...
...Police shot Abdul Kahar in the shoulder...
...It all looked rather ominous...
...On the day after police and security officials announced that they had arrested 24 suspects, the left-wing Guardian wrote, with a hint of approval, that websites are already "chattering with distrust of ministers and the government's good faith...
...More recently, there was "Forest Gate"—the scandal named after the residential area in the London neighborhood of Newham, which has a Muslim population of some 25 percent...
...Will it last...
...I came via Zurich, and the mood in the airport before takeoff was both calm and creepy...
...Our flight was first diverted to Pittsburgh and then suddenly, without explanation, to Indianapolis...
...I had no complaints...
...I made it to London...
...This came on the heels of the July 7 subway and bus bombings that took 52 lives...
...The events of the last days have reignited British agonizing over how the country integrates its Muslim population...
...On the morning of 9/11, I was on a United Airlines flight out of Washington's Dulles airport...
Vol. 11 • August 2006 • No. 46
