[extropy-chat] [fwd] London bombings and toxic memes

[Damien Broderick]

A British friend writes:
=======================

"The British police have just announced within the past hour that
the four London bombings of last week were indeed suicide attacks.
Four 'suspects' died at the scenes of the bombs, they say.

"Moreover, it seems the four men concerned were from Leeds, West
Yorkshire (where I lived in the 1970s). They've raided a number of
houses there, including one in the Burley district (where I lived
for nearly ten years).

"I think these are the first-ever suicide bombings in Britain, or
indeed in Western Europe."

Further thoughts...

I lived in Hessle Terrace, just off Brudenell Road in the Hyde Park
area of Leeds, in 1972-1975. Then I moved about half a mile away, to
The Village Street, Burley, where I lived for the next seven years,
1975-1982.

Obviously the area has changed since I left Leeds in 1982, but it
was already getting pretty multi-ethnic in the 1970s.

The fact that these London suicide bombers were all young men from
Leeds, British born and raised, and who no doubt spoke with
Yorkshire accents, puts a weird slant on the whole event. They were
also, so I gather from news reports, all of Pakistani ethnicity.

This means that in all likelihood these first-ever suicide bombers
in Western Europe were not...

A) Foreigners
B) Arabs
C) Iraqis or Palestinians
D) People who had suffered injustices in far-off places
E) Relatives of people who had suffered in far-off places
F) Connected in any way, other than in their own minds, with the
problems of Palestine, Iraq or any other Arab country...

Nope -- they were young Brits of South Asian ancestry who had grown
up all their lives in England and spoke with Yorkshire accents. (Or
so it seems on the evidence so far.)

They did what they did out of ideological conviction, not because of
any personal experience of suffering, not because of any family
connections with the trouble spots of the Middle East, and not
because of any real "ethnic" identification they might have claimed
with the Arab world.

They did what they did not because they had any personal reasons,
but quite simply because their minds had been infected with a set of
very bad ideas.

Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have bad consequences.