The war on terror has reached my back-yard
It is late afternoon in North London. Behind my house, maybe 50 meters away, is the North Circular Road. Here, in this part of London, it's a six-lane highway. We tell people that we can hardly hear the sound of the trucks and cars as they pass, 24 hours a day. But right now we hear something we've never heard before: absolute silence.
The North Circular Road in this part of London has been shut down for several kilometres, stretching from Muswell Hill in the east to Golders Green in the west, by police. They have done so following the discovery of a white car, parked at a housing development called Strawberry Vale, a fifteen minute walk from my home. The white car was apparently used by at least one of the men suspected of involvement in last week's attempted suicide bomb attacks in London.
I decided to go outside and have a look. The first thing one notices is the silence. Then the kids. Kids walking, laughing, riding their bikes, photographing one another -- on the empty North Circular Road. Kids shouting to hear their voices for the first time without being drowned out by the sounds of traffic.
At one point, a police car comes speeding down the highway -- and I really mean speeding. I've never seen a car go so fast. A couple passes me, the man says to me, "wow". I nod.
There's a pedestrian overpass that connects my neighborhood to the one on the other side of the highway. People are standing in middle, talking, taking photos.
Three teenage girls are walking in the middle of the road, laughing, carrying on. One calls out to me, "Hello, mate!" Later I see the same girls standing on an overpass. They see a man walking down the road -- a man the British would describe as being "Asian". "Oy, fucking immigrant!" one shouts. The man pulls his hood even further over his face and passes underneath them.
I try to make it as far as the overpass from which I could get a view of the goings-on at Strawberry Vale, but the police have put up some tape. One lone officer stands guard, making sure no one gets through.
The war on terror has reached my backyard.
Many people I know have been touched by terrorism. Friends and family watched the World Trade Center burn and then collapse not on television, but from their rooftops. A first cousin was in one of the towers, but managed to get out before the building came down burying its thousands of victims.
I have friends who have experienced terror at first hand, a quarter century before the attacks of 11 September 2001. Terrorism didn't start with Al Qaeda. Does no one remember the Munich massacre, the killing of school children in Ma'alot, the Entebbe hostage-taking?
I lived through the Gulf War of 1991, spending night after night in a "sealed room" wearing a gas mask with my 9-year old son, Atropin needles at our side in case Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles were armed with nerve gas. To anyone who lived through that barrage, with dozens of Scuds fired at Israel -- a country not involved in the war to liberate Kuwait, the discussion of whether Saddam was or was not a terrorist or a friend to terrorists is laughable. Scud missiles fired at innocent civilians in a country you are not even at war with -- that's terrorism.
Here in Britain, journalists tend to write about "George Bush's war on terror" as if this is some kind of private conflict. (And as if John Kerry would not have continued the war.) The expression "war on terror" is nearly always put in quotation marks. British television recently showed a documentary program called "the power of nightmares" which argued, as Michael Moore does in the US, that there is no terrorist threat. It's just something the politicians made up. Well, that program was aired before 7 July, before 56 innocent Londoners were killed not by nightmares, but by real, actual Jihadi terrorists.
I write these words looking out the back window of my home, with the window open, and I hear the complete silence of the North Circular. That silence is reminder to me that the war on terror is very real, and it is closer than ever.
