July 7 Remembered

One year to the 7/7 bombings in the U.K.

Britain remembered the first anniversary of its own terrorist attacks on July 7, recalling the terror that swung through London, while the city silenced for two minutes to mourn the slain.

On July 7, 2005, four Britons blew themselves up on the London transport system, killing 52 people and wounding 700. This attack, however, according to a new videotape released this week by the Arabic news network, Al-Jazeera, is just the start.

"This is only the beginning of a string of attacks that will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq and until you stop your financial and military support to America and Israel," said a man identified as Shehzad Tanweer in a statement he recorded before his suicide bombing in London last year. Ayman al-Zawahri, a top-ranking al-Qaeda member is also seen praising Tanweer in the video, according to Reuters.

Statements by the city's police chief along with Prime Minister Tony Blair demonstrated the likelihood of another attack. The tape only confirmed that.

But there is another grim side to this story.

No one doubts how mournful July 7 is for all Britons and for the rest of the sane world, but somehow the Muslim Britons are not treated as among the sane lot. The whole Muslim community looks apologetically to the floor, as if responsible for the actions of those four radicals. The fact is that Muslim Britons, like millions of other Muslims over the world would disagree with the actions of those four men. But like the September 11 attacks, the July 7 attacks have had the common by-product of stigmatizing the whole Muslim community as terrorists.

The question that everyone should ask themselves is whether a whole community can be held responsible for the actions of a few that may pledge allegiance to a certain community? Logically thought out, probably not. It is impossible that a diverse population of 1.2 billion Muslims or even all the Muslims in Britain can be blameworthy for the actions of these four British men. If we follow the same logic, all Catholics cannot be held responsible for some radical that speaks in the name of the Pope and Jesus and blows up an abortion clinic, and along the same lines, some radical Muslim that speaks in the name of God can definitely not be taken as the average Muslim either.

With the arrest of the 17 Muslims in Canada, the detainment and continuing discrimination of Muslims in the U.S. and the ongoing mistreatment of British Muslims, there is only one thing that can be said to the policy-makers of these countries: locking these men up and eyeing the whole community like a hawk will not solve the problem; actually, holding a whole community suspect, as if taking them all to trial at once, may even erupt into unwarranted and unwanted reactions, such as the French riots last year. Unfair treatment and discrimination has led to a long terrain of unrest in the past. We should remember the 1960s and the civil rights movement in the U.S. People should learn from history.