And on the seventh day, The Antagonist did not rest

In no particular order and in response to the few comments that managed to avoid the hysteria of unconfirmed fantasies which surround the events of London 7/7 and The Antagonist's Live Blog of events:

Comment: Alleagra | 07.08.05 - 9:54 am
Presumably you mean wealthy people like the multimillionaire Bin Laden?

Absolutely! It's exactly the same sort of wealth as that of any International oil barons whose fortunes are built on plundering the planet of its resources and holding the rest of the world to ransom over those resources. Why do you think the Middle East has always been such a hotbed of activity?

The Bush family are all multi-millionaires, probably more-so than Osama, if less well broadcast, and the Bush family have made considerable wealth from oil so the question must be, "What is the difference between Bush family and the Bin Laden family?"

Simple really, look at what's going on in the world around you right now. Bush has all the might and weaponry of the most technogically advanced military superpower in the world, along with the gung-ho support of a disposable youth that has grown up shooting Arabs on Playstations for 8 hours a day, backed by an ever-increasing budget that far exceeds the offense budgets of Russia or China and all of which is dedicated to fighting PNAC's well documented wars without frontiers which they have been pursuing since before the presidency was stolen from the American people in 2000 and landed in the lap of the Bush-family-heir to the throne.

Osama Bin Laden, on the other hand, only blows things up very occasionally and he's the terrorist.

Just because Osama blows up predominantly white people and Bush blows up nothing other than brown people doesn't make either set of victims any less human, nor either atrocity any less horrific.

The other members of the Bin Laden and Bush families get on very well indeed and the Bush family, in the guise of the Carlysle Group, takes very good care of the Bin Laden family's financial interests. Perhaps it was this reason that prompted the U.S. administration to very kindly allow 20+ members of the Bin Laden family to leave America on the only non-military flight in U.S. skies immediately after 9/11 while their errant family member was being held responsible for those attacks.

If readers are still having trouble making the distinction between the single and sporadic acts of mindless violence of a rich oil baron that we are led to believe lives in caves and can mystically evade the global surveillance systems that are probably watching you reading this right now, and the five years of perpetual, mindless violence of an oil baron that has the resources of the military industrial complex at his disposal and whose actions we are all tacitly supporting while villifying the former, then The Antagonist would suggest seizing the moment, right now, and reading something a little less challenging and more likely to support whichever misapprehensions you prefer to labour under.

Comment: Sam | 07.08.05 - 11:13 am
"23:02: Credit to Channel 4 News for interviewing an Iraqi dentist based not far from the site of the bus explosion who reminded us all of the "as many as 100,000 to 200,000 Iraqis" who have died at the hands of real terrorist atrocities."

Its a good point although probably way over exaggerated in terms of numbers (note the 100 000 people margin of error)
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Secondly, the overall aim of the Islamic extremist groups is to eliminate the west
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The broad aim of the west is not to eliminate a whole culture but to facilitate the stable and mutually beneficial interactions (trade and cultural) of all people whilst not jeopardizing its own interests. This is a wholly rational and positive end game.

Thank you, and The Antagonist takes on board your observation of the margin of error and counters that in any situtation where there can conceivably exist a margin of error of 100,000 dead people, or indeed any dead people as a result of any form of terrorism, one way or the other, something is desperately wrong.

In addition, nobody with a bit of fertiliser and semtex, in conjunction with a few past-their-sell-by-date pop-guns the West armed them with years ago, is going to eliminate the West. In fact, in case no-one had noticed, we're doing a fine job of that all by ourselves and no conventional terrorism is required. We can all continue to deny this for now but our protestations will be a lot harder to shout from under the water that increasingly more rapidly claims the land from under our feet faster than the likes of the Divine Right of Kings and good old fashioned colonialism managed it in the past.

Finally, "stable and mutually beneficial interactions" will never arise from war, nor from forcibly taking out a country's vital infrastructure components and media and then replacing them with foreign infrastructure and the same limited 'news' and 'entertainment' vision of the world as everywhere else. Sure, Iraqis might have watched low quality television beforehand but at least it was local, cultural low-quality television and not the high-quality global propaganda of corporate America.

Comment: Steve | 07.08.05 - 12:12 pm
Would it be fair to say some of these would be Muslims from within Iraq and other Arab countries who find it necessary to bomb their own people, assault a different tribe (step forward Saddam) or even attack those with a different shade of belief (hello, Iran), rather than engage in any political process?
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You state, reasonably, you want to avoid emotive language. I can't help feeling you have slipped a few emotional angles in there yourself.

You forget that Muslims and 'their own people' died in the blasts on the Underground. Again, let's not state untruths as if they were facts.

Iran and Iraq are big buddies now and Iran is training Iraq's soldiers. Again, written about elsewhere on this blog.

The Antagonist concedes the point about emotive language citing in defence only that, on occasion, you have to go in and reach people in order to pull them out.

In fairness, this tactic has had the desired effect and has inspired some degree of debate about the underlying factors that are crucial to understanding the events of 7/7, the wider global and historical context into which they fit and, in turn, what we should all learn from all of this.

Open debate about the issues can only be a good thing and, if there's nothing to hide, nobody's got anything to worry about.

If The Antagonist's original LiveBlog entry had screamed the indictment of Muslim extremists like every other blog, newspaper, TV and radio news report, etc., then the comments would largely consist of even more nonsense than they already do for, at the time of writing and three days after the event, nobody has yet fingered the Muslims for the blasts but everyone's talking about Al Qaeda, reprisals against innocent Muslims, and all sorts of other nonsense that has arisen from the original media fabrications.

No slightly tattered passports of Muslims appear to have survived the blasts, no DIY-terrorism manuals have been found and, to the best of The Antagonist's knowledge, no well-thumbed copies of the Koran containing a hand-written note of good luck and best wishes in the afterlife from Osama.

Until then, it is the choice of The Antagonist to hold the opinion that the original statement issued to passengers on the Underground at the time of the incidents was factually correct.

Furthermore, if staff or any of the sophisticated control and communications centres that monitor the Underground had detected even the vaguest suspicion of terrorist activity within the underground system, The Antagonist has the faith to believe that Underground management and staff would have elected to quickly and efficiently evacuate all passengers and staff from all tube stations immediately, rather than issue the usual placatory statements that would keep an Underground full of frustrated, late-for-work commuters hanging around in an environment that was already known, or suspected to be, subject to terrorist activity.

That the original power surge statement was retracted, or that an alternative story was released hours later in order to score more political points than The Antagonist can be bothered to list here takes no great leap of faith. It takes even less of a leap and even less faith in light of the Iraq war, the total absence of Iraq's WMD, or any feasible threat at all, and the unfortunate circumstance of whistleblower David Kelly whose invaluable work did us all a great justice and the man himself no favours at all.

Forgetting ancient history is almost permissable. Forgetting recent history is unforgivable.

Update, 14 July, 2005: London Blasts: Three Trains & A Bus, A Possible Explanation