Mixed media: War of words

Don't blame the war

Australian view: It beggars belief that, fully a dozen years after the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Centre in New York by Islamic extremists, there are still apologists for evil who blame the victims every time terrorists attack. The attack has all the hallmarks of yet another atrocity committed by fundamentalists at war with the world. The goal of Islamic fundamentalists is to impose the religious role of their choosing on all Muslims, and subordinate the rest of us to their will.

* The Australian

London columnist: Few Westerners may subscribe to "the Jews did it" theory (although a vast number of Arabs do) but other, hardly more credible, reasons have attracted much greater support. It was Bush's fault, it was Blair's fault, it was the fault of American policy in the Middle East, it was the fault of all of us who have done nothing about the desperation of alienated Muslims. So many seem incapable of accepting that these things happen just because criminals do criminal things.

* Daniel Finkelstein in The Times

Internet columnist: Even if these bombs were a retaliation for Iraq, so what? That should still not make the bombings the focus for arguments against the Iraq war. Just as we criticise Bush and Blair when they cite terrorist actions as a justification for war so we should criticise anti-war activists who cite terrorism as an argument against war.

* Brendan O'Neill writing on www.spiked-online.com

Conservative blogger: The militant Islamists miscalculated in America, they miscalculated in Australia, and now they have miscalculated in Britain. We, Brit and American, will finish the job. There is a reason that English-speaking people have dominated the world for centuries: there is something noble in our culture that will not allow us to give up or give in, an idealistic fever to "let justice be done, though Heaven should fall".

* Dafydd in the Captain's Quarters blog

Time for a change

Indian view: Despite a triumphant Blairite creed whose appeal has denuded in direct proportion to the loss of the protagonist's boyish charm, the wider public view in Britain has been to consider the war on terror, or more specifically, the war on Iraq and its people, nothing more than a political stunt. Almost three cynical years on, the tragedy in London can only sharpen the realisation of the Iraq misadventure as a morally dubious stunt that has gone horribly wrong.

* Binay Kumar in the Hindustan Times

Yahoo columnist: How pathetic is it to keep arguing that fighting Baathist Sunni insurgents in Iraq is keeping us safe from al Qaeda terrorists and their offshoots on our soil? No one can seriously argue that if the United States and Britain had spent the past 46 months - and over $200 billion - focusing on al Qaeda rather than Iraq, these attacks would not have happened. But we can say without a doubt that spending that time and money in Iraq did not prevent them.

* Arianna Huffington writing on Yahoo News

From Lebanon: The London attacks are only a chapter in a long and all-out war that is taking place in a world of gathering data, tracking suspects and assets, storming hideouts and dismantling small cells. Perhaps for that reason the US and the other countries participating in the war on terror, should re-examine, once again, the different nature of this war in order to better adjust with its developments.

* Ghassan Charbel writing for Dar Al-Hayat

Arab view: The war on terror goes on as if this incident is justification for the war waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the problem is that the incident happened well after the war was waged. So this is a bit like prodding someone with a knife, then when that person retaliates in self-defence that becomes the reason for the initial prodding. If anything, the incident in London is the product of the initial aggressions in Iraq and Afghanistan; and, rationally, it cannot be its cause.

* Yamin Zakaria writing on www.al-Jazeerah.info