The Telegraph reports the conclusion of British authorities that Thursday’s terrorist bombings were the work of a foreign terrorist cell. Reuters reports that the city of Birmingham was partially evacuated last night in response to a security threat. In his Chicago Sun-Times column, Mark Steyn writes: “The question now is will the British return to the fantasy agenda of Bob Geldof or avenge their dead?”
On Friday Tony Blair announced a package of up to $3 billion in aid from the G8 to the Palestinian Authority, allegedly for “infrastructure for the Palestinian state.” Charles Johnson calls it “payday for Hamas” and observes that “terrorism works.”
I wonder what it would take for Mr. Blair (and President Bush) to entertain second thoughts about the wisdom of supporting the savages who do to Israelis what al Qaeda has just done to our British friends. Mr. Blair apparently believes that the Arab war on Israel is the cause of the Islamofascist terror war on the west [correction: see update 2 below]. It is a notion that has a tendency to place Israel uncomfortably in the position of the “faraway country” one of Mr. Blair’s predecessors famously referred to some time back.
UPDATE: For more on the aid to the Palestinian Authority, see this Newsweek interview of James Wolfensohn, an envoy to the Middle East on behalf of the “quartet” (the United States, the United Nations, Russia and the European Union), by Newsweek’s Kevin Peraino. Here is one pertinent question and answer:
PERAINO: There are a lot of Hamas mayors now in Gaza. Can you work with these low-level Hamas officials?
WOLFENSOHN: Well, it’s not for me to do it. I’m obviously aware of the difficulties of dealing with people who think about the destruction of the Israeli state. But at the same time I have to look at the issues of representation as a result of an electoral process. My own personal judgment is that it’s very hard to deal with armed individuals who are talking about the destruction of their neighbor, as [opposed to] people who are prepared to enter into the political process on the basis that arms and military action is the function of the state. I have to deal, or will deal with, the authority, whatever it is. So I don’t get into the issue of the local mayors at this moment. [But] if you have a state, or you’re looking to have a state, that is democratic, you cannot have in that state armed forces of 6, 8 or 10 different varieties. You just cannot have it.
The answer to the question seems to be “yes,” which is problematic not only for the reason implied in Wolfensohn’s concluding pont. Lavishing billions of dollars into territories dominated by terrorist savages, regardless of the number of terrorist chieftains, does not seem like a constructive response to the terrorist attack in London, particularly delivered by the leader of the country that just sustained it. For the breadth and depth of the mania confronting Great Britain from within, see this lengthy London Times article: “The hate.”
UPDATE 2: Carol Yowell points out the following AP announcement: “In a July 9 story about Prime Minister Tony Blair’s comments on overcoming global terrorism, The Associated Press erroneously reported that he spoke of easing the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Blair did not specifically mention the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his interview with the British Broadcasting Corp.”
This Gateway Pundit post bears on the subject of pending events in the Palestinian Authority: “Countdown to Palestinian civil war.”
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