Johann Hari

Before the bombs, the tide of poison and bile directed towards asylum-seekers in this country was beginning, at long last, to recede. The general election - in which the Tory party said refugees carry disease and are responsible for MRSA - seemed to have left a bad taste even in right-wing mouths. And something extraordinary was happened: even the asylum-hating press rallied to the cause of Zimbabwean asylum-seekers who faced being deported by the Government back to Robert Mugabe's tyranny. "For pity's sake, let them stay!" cried a newspaper that has dedicated oceans of newsprint to describing refugees as thieving, scrounging, swan-baking monsters.

All this died in the massacres on the London Underground. After I had checked my friends and family were safe, I said a silent (and strictly atheist) prayer: please, please don't let the people who did this turn out to be asylum-seekers. It was bad enough that 56 civilians had just died, but what if the attacks also prompted a backlash and a wave of deportations? Then, far more people would be tortured or killed as a result of being forced back to tyrannies and war zones. The blast-zone would stretch all the way to Somalia and Zimbabwe.

My relief that the first wave of bombers was not refugees came too soon. The second wave of suspects turns out, after all, to have been here because of the asylum process. With this revelation, every notion of restraint on the part of the press evaporated. The British media had been admirably responsible in their coverage of the Islamist attackers. They had given reams of space to the moderate Muslim majority who hate the bombers and to the myriad Muslim victims of the attacks. There is no doubt this helped to restrain the number of attacks on Muslims and contributed to the humiliation of the BNP in every by-election since.

But refugees are evidently a different matter. Everybody feels free to vilify and abuse them. One "newspaper" put on its front page this week: "Bombers are all sponging asylum-seekers: Britain gave them refuge and now all they want to do is pay us back with death." There was no attempt to distinguish between a tiny number of insane people, and the overwhelming majority of asylum-seekers. The same newspaper then compounded this by inviting its readers to text an answer to the question: "Should all asylum-seekers now be turned back?" Well, they are all guilty because of the actions of two people, aren't they?

Nor did they explain even the most basic facts. Muktar Said Ibrahim and Yasin Hassan Omar did not "come to Britain to kill". They arrived in Britain when they were 14 and 11 years old respectively - and they were fleeing genuine persecution. No amount of weeding out, no stricter border controls, no tests could have kept them out, short of becoming the only developed country in the world to refuse to take genuine child refugees.

These men were radicalised and turned to jihadism here in Britain, just like the British-born fundamentalists who struck a fortnight earlier. They are part of the same problem. Is anybody seriously suggesting we begin to turn away our share of children who are running for their lives, on the off-chance they grow up to become murderers?

It's not hard to see why people want to believe this jihadism is the work of people from Somewhere Out There - that it's all an alien implant on our streets. But these lads spent their teenage and adult lives on the streets of north London. Their jihadism emerged from within British society, just as it has emerged in Leeds. If we do not see this reality, we will waste time on false solutions, making us all less safe and causing terrible collateral damage to refugees in the process.

If the situation falsely hinted at by the right-wing press - of Islamic fundamentalists deliberately using the asylum process to get into the country and to plot attacks - does actually come to pass, then the law already provides for their exclusion. As Imran Hussein of the Refugee Council explains: "The UN Convention on Refugees is very clear on this. People who plot or commit crimes against humanity can be refused refuge, even if they are honestly fleeing torture and persecution in their home country. There is no need to rework the laws or conventions. They are already in place." These powers can be used more forcefully without violating the UN Convention or declining a single worthy refugee.

But the solution to the problem posed by the London bombers lies elsewhere. The first wave of attacks made us determined to more fully integrate British Muslims in order to reduce the risk of creating another batch of alienated, crazed people who loathe the society in which they live. The second wave of attacks should give us the same determination to integrate refugees.

Right now, many refugees are trapped in sullen, sunken situations that make it impossible to assimilate. An Oxfam study recently found that asylum-seekers in this country live well below the poverty line, with 85 per cent unable to feed themselves and their children properly.

Just this week, a report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons documented ongoing abuse at Yarls Wood detention centre, where innocent people are held with fewer rights than convicted prisoners simply for seeking asylum. There - to give just one example - inspectors discovered an autistic five-year-old child who had not eaten for four days.

Yet instead of ending this radicalising, rancid abuse - and making us all safer - the Government is giving in to the backlash and making it even harder for refugees to assimilate. It used to be the case that once somebody had proven they were fleeing persecution, they were guaranteed five safe years in this country. This meant they could begin to slowly rebuild their broken lives, find employment and, yes, integrate a little.

No longer. From 30 August, even legitimate refugees will be subject to deportation at any time at the whim of the Home Office. If these bureaucrats decide your country is now safe - as they did with, say, John Reyes, who they sent back to Colombia last year to be promptly shot in the neck - then you are on the plane back, no questions asked.

"This means that it will be much harder for refugees to find jobs," the Refugee Council explains. "Who is going to employ somebody who could disappear at any time? It is a disaster for integration."

In Britain today, we face two dangers. There is the risk of what jihadist murderers might do to us. But there is also the risk of what we might do to our country out of fear. If this attack makes us deport even more refugees, if it makes us even more cruel and hard-hearted towards people fleeing tyranny, then the death-toll of 7/7 and 21/7 will rise even higher still. Why make them into the bombs that keep on killing?

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Western Europe is suffering its worst drying-up since records began. The brittle, cracked reservoirs of Sussex are only the tip: the Spanish Meteorological Institute has just declared a seven-month long "severe drought", France is now patrolled by "water police" forcefully preventing farmers from irrigating their crops, and the country's environment minister declared last month: "The ground under our country is dying of thirst." According to the world's climatologists, this drought is only a harbinger. For much of humanity, this is what the 21st century will look like.

It is impossible to blame any one individual weather event on global warming. But almost all the patterns the climatologists have predicted - more frequent and intense droughts, a rise in global temperatures, and the rapid melting of glaciers, the Arctic ice cap and the Antarctic ice sheet - are coming to pass. How long will we pretend to ourselves it's all a coincidence? Climatologists have long warned us that one of the biggest consequences of global warming will be a transformation in the world's water supplies. Enough denial: it's time to prepare for a thirsty century.

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen has provided the clearest intellectual framework for these events. In the 10,000 years since the last glaciation, humanity has been living in a period known as the Holocene. This is when the world's weather settled down, and so did humanity. We began to live in villages and towns, and developed agriculture, writing, and all the other tools that make the lives we know possible. Over millennia, humans have evolved to live in the conditions provided by the Holocene. It is all we know.

There's only one problem. The Holocene is coming to an end. It began to die in the 1780s, when James Watt invented the steam engine and inadvertently changed the course of history. Since then, one creature - man - has become so numerous and so powerful that we are now altering the planet on a geological scale. We have mined and burned so many fossil fuels that we are changing the physics and chemistry of the planet we live on. Man has inaugurated a new climatological age - Crutzen calls it the Anthropocene - and the people of the 21st century are living through the transition. It's a massive, unwitting experiment - and we have nowhere else to go if we do not like the results.

Only now are we beginning to see what this new geological age looks like. Without drastic preventative action now, we are going to hit the highest temperatures since our species evolved in my lifetime - and one of the biggest differences is going to be the location and dependability of the world's water supplies. Last year, the United Nations - after surveying the world's chief scientists - issued a blunt warning. Over the next two decades, 30 per cent of the world's freshwater supply is going to become unusable in a world where 1.2 billion people already do not have access to fresh water.

There are three reasons why. Rainfall is not going to fall in the same place, or at the same times, as before. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, in the age of the Holocene, people depended on the short rains in March and the long rains in the summer to collect water and grow their crops. But as we move into the Anthropocene, the short rains have disappeared entirely, and the long rains have become erratic. The result is endemic thirst and hunger.

It gets worse. Much of the world's supplies of freshwater are stored in glaciers. For example, the major rivers in India and China only flow because glaciers in the Himalayas catch snow in the winter and it melts off in the spring, releasing the run-off into the Ganges, the Yangtse and many more huge rivers. But as the world warms, these glaciers are disappearing.

In the short-term, this causes flooding as far more water crashes down than normal, but within a few decades, it will cause them to dry up altogether. How will the hundreds of millions of people dependent on this water - for growing their food, as well as for drinking and sanitation - survive?

In South America, the problem is just as bad. Entire cities like Santiago and Lima are dependent on water from glaciers, and are left looking out on nothing but desert without it. We have built human settlements in the places convenient for water supply in the Holocene era - but in the Anthropocene era, freshwater will be in different places where it exists at all.

(I have a mental image of the climate change deniers - from George Bush to Melanie Phillips to John Howard - having a picnic in 2050 on the dry, glacier-free peaks of the Himalayas while people die downstream, and still demanding to know what all the fuss was about).

Finally, as sea levels rise because of the melting of the world's stocks of ice, they will contaminate much of the world's already-existing sources of freshwater. Try pouring a few teaspoons of seawater into a bottle of Evian and see if you can bear to drink it.

The defiantly optimistic part of my mind responded to all this by insisting: even if global warming is allowed to proceed, couldn't technology eventually sort this out? When this comes to pass, can't we build desalination plants and use the 98 per cent of the world's water that is currently undrinkable?

But Stephen Tyndall, director of Greenpeace, explained: "There's two problems with that. Desalination is very energy-intensive, and burns up a lot of greenhouse gases. So while it treats the immediate symptoms of global warming, it actually makes the problem worse in the long term. It's like giving an alcoholic another bottle of vodka. And desalination is incredibly expensive. The rich world might be able to afford it. But as for the poor - we could already provide freshwater to a billion people who don't have it, and we don't. So the idea that we are going to help out all the people affected by global warming by providing desalination is, unfortunately, just not borne out by history."

So the only safe, sane, option is to stabilise the world's climate now by drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions - but it isn't happening. The G8 summit in Gleneagles ended with fossil fuel business-as-usual. It looks like we are plunging deeper into the Anthropocene, ready or not.

In this thirsty era, global politics is going to be transformed in ways we can only glimpse today. Fortune magazine - the bible of the world's global corporate elites - calls water "the oil of the 21st century" and "the precious commodity that will determine the wealth of nations". The well-known environmentalist pressure group, the CIA, says that by 2015, access to drinking water could be the major source of international conflict around the world.

So enjoy Europe's warm, dry summer. It is coming at a terrible price.

Welcome to a Tale of Two Cities. Over the past fortnight, the hymns to London have been endless and gorgeous - but few have acknowledged that this is a megalopolis with a dirty secret: we are not one city at all. There is Daytime London, which arrives at work at 9am to find its offices clean, its bins empty and its carpets cleansed. You know this world. Its inhabitants have an average wage topping £25 an hour. They go to theatres and movies and bars, and easyJet to every corner of Europe. They congratulate themselves daily on living in the most ethnically and socially mixed city on earth.

But there is another London that wakes in the night. It staggers on to the night bus at 4am to filter across hospitals, schools, and the temples of global finance and media to collect our rubbish and dispose of our crap. The average wage is under £5 an hour. The people who live in this other London do not go to theatres or cinemas or on holiday - they cannot afford it. They have been inhaled by London's economy from Africa, South America and every poor country in the world, and they see our self-congratulatory multiculturalism as a bitter joke. Thank you, thank you for letting us come here and skivvy for you 12 hours a day for less than a fiver an hour. How tolerant you are.

In February this year, something extraordinary happened: the London of the night began to rebel. Starting in Canary Wharf, a wave of cleaners' strikes across Britain has forced up the wages of some of the country's poorest people - and today, it hits the heart of our democracy: the Palace of Westminster.

Evrad Ouale is a 27-year-old from Ivory Coast who has cleaned in the House of Commons for four years. He lives in a dingy single room with his wife, and has not left the M25 area since he started the job. He scrambles for overtime, working 60 hours a week, but he admits that even when he is working ever conceivable hour, "You can barely live. It's horrible. We have no choice but to strike. We cannot continue like this".

The way they are treated in Parliament is a grim metaphor for the way most of Britain's 1.5 million cleaners live and work. Their designated area is a filthy Dickensian basement plagued by rats and the stench of the Palace's sewage. Unlike parliamentary researchers or security guards, they are banned from entering the lavishly subsidised House of Commons restaurant between noon and 3pm, as if they were part of an Untouchable caste. They are given 12 days' holiday - that's 12 - a year, and paid £4.85 an hour. If they were British citizens, they would be entitled to have their wages topped-up through the government's excellent Family Credit. But since almost all the cleaners are migrant workers, they are forced to live at rates everyone admits are way below the poverty line.

And within Parliament, the policy that has driven down the numbers and wages of cleaners over the past 20 years can be seen in all its fetid glory. The cleaners in the House of Lords are directly employed by the state, while responsibility for employing cleaners in the Commons has been contracted out to private companies who are paid a bulk fee to provide the service. The difference is a slap in the face: in the Lords, cleaners start at £7.89 an hour, receive a decent pension, and get 30 days' paid holiday a year - a package that seems utopian to their contracted-out neighbours in the next chamber.

Does anyone need a clearer illustration of what happens when cleaners are contracted out? Study after study has found that there are no "efficiency savings" contributed by the privateer middlemen. No: they simply slash the wages of the poorest people (or lay off swaths of cleaners) and pocket the difference.

This isn't merely a matter for your conscience. It affects your health, too. Since contracting-out began to tear through our public services in the early 1980s, the number of cleaners has nearly halved - and the rate of hospital infections has soared.

So it is time to learn how our cleaners are treated, in both the public and private sectors. The workers' rights organisation NoSweat interviewed a number of cleaners who toil in Canary Wharf - our little chunk of New York scraping the sky - in January. One typical African woman, Marcia, explained how her 12-hour day panned out: "We are not allowed lockers because we might steal something and hide it there. When we leave in the morning we are searched by security men. There are no women security officers."

Once she arrives at work, she is strictly forbidden from having any further contact with the outside world. She is not allowed to take in a mobile phone, and she is not allowed to use the phones there. "So, if the kids are sick, I can't ring home and check if they are OK. And once we start work, we are not allowed to rest. There is a supervisor or team leader behind you all the time. Apart from in the break time - 30 unpaid minutes - we cannot sit down". For all this, she receives a few hundred pounds a week to live in central London and raise her kids.

So should we simply despair? Are Britain's cleaners condemned to poverty wages, a level set solely by The Market and never to change? No. Until this year, many people argued that an industry like cleaning is impossible to unionise: staff turnover is a revolving door, the workers speak little English, the workforce is fragmented and demoralised. But the Transport and General Workers' Union (T&G) has proven that this is a myth. Within a few months of recruiting, nearly 80 per cent of workers for Emprise and Mitie - two of the main cleaning firms in Europe - were paid-up union members. Starting in the Canary Wharf complex, they began to demand a living wage at the towering sum of £6.70 an hour, along with decent holiday time, sick pay and working conditions.

And it worked. Barclays agreed to meet the demands, and now most companies in the Wharf have matched them. According to the T&G, only a shamed handful now refuse to pay a living wage - the Bank of America (annual profit: $2bn), Credit Suisse ($3.9bn) and Lehman Brothers ($672m).

The excuse offered by neo-liberals for paying poverty wages - that it drives companies abroad - is exposed as a sham: are banks going to fly in workers from Bangalore to empty their bins? And anybody who claims that there is no need for trade unions anymore should be dragged to speak to the Canary Wharf cleaners - and the cleaners still fighting for a living wage.

As the capital's cleaners begin to strike, I think it is time to end London's self-congratulation about our ethnic diversity. I love London and its spirit over the past fortnight, too. But while you are standing on carpets cleaned by hidden-away black and Asian people who earn a pittance for the privilege, please don't tell me this is a multicultural paradise.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Welcome to a Tale of Two Cities. Over the past fortnight, the hymns to London have been endless and gorgeous - but few have acknowledged that this is a megalopolis with a dirty secret: we are not one city at all. There is Daytime London, which arrives at work at 9am to find its offices clean, its bins empty and its carpets cleansed. You know this world. Its inhabitants have an average wage topping £25 an hour. They go to theatres and movies and bars, and easyJet to every corner of Europe. They congratulate themselves daily on living in the most ethnically and socially mixed city on earth.

But there is another London that wakes in the night. It staggers on to the night bus at 4am to filter across hospitals, schools, and the temples of global finance and media to collect our rubbish and dispose of our crap. The average wage is under £5 an hour. The people who live in this other London do not go to theatres or cinemas or on holiday - they cannot afford it. They have been inhaled by London's economy from Africa, South America and every poor country in the world, and they see our self-congratulatory multiculturalism as a bitter joke. Thank you, thank you for letting us come here and skivvy for you 12 hours a day for less than a fiver an hour. How tolerant you are.

In February this year, something extraordinary happened: the London of the night began to rebel. Starting in Canary Wharf, a wave of cleaners' strikes across Britain has forced up the wages of some of the country's poorest people - and today, it hits the heart of our democracy: the Palace of Westminster.

Evrad Ouale is a 27-year-old from Ivory Coast who has cleaned in the House of Commons for four years. He lives in a dingy single room with his wife, and has not left the M25 area since he started the job. He scrambles for overtime, working 60 hours a week, but he admits that even when he is working ever conceivable hour, "You can barely live. It's horrible. We have no choice but to strike. We cannot continue like this".

The way they are treated in Parliament is a grim metaphor for the way most of Britain's 1.5 million cleaners live and work. Their designated area is a filthy Dickensian basement plagued by rats and the stench of the Palace's sewage. Unlike parliamentary researchers or security guards, they are banned from entering the lavishly subsidised House of Commons restaurant between noon and 3pm, as if they were part of an Untouchable caste. They are given 12 days' holiday - that's 12 - a year, and paid £4.85 an hour. If they were British citizens, they would be entitled to have their wages topped-up through the government's excellent Family Credit. But since almost all the cleaners are migrant workers, they are forced to live at rates everyone admits are way below the poverty line.

And within Parliament, the policy that has driven down the numbers and wages of cleaners over the past 20 years can be seen in all its fetid glory. The cleaners in the House of Lords are directly employed by the state, while responsibility for employing cleaners in the Commons has been contracted out to private companies who are paid a bulk fee to provide the service. The difference is a slap in the face: in the Lords, cleaners start at £7.89 an hour, receive a decent pension, and get 30 days' paid holiday a year - a package that seems utopian to their contracted-out neighbours in the next chamber.

Does anyone need a clearer illustration of what happens when cleaners are contracted out? Study after study has found that there are no "efficiency savings" contributed by the privateer middlemen. No: they simply slash the wages of the poorest people (or lay off swaths of cleaners) and pocket the difference.
This isn't merely a matter for your conscience. It affects your health, too. Since contracting-out began to tear through our public services in the early 1980s, the number of cleaners has nearly halved - and the rate of hospital infections has soared.

So it is time to learn how our cleaners are treated, in both the public and private sectors. The workers' rights organisation NoSweat interviewed a number of cleaners who toil in Canary Wharf - our little chunk of New York scraping the sky - in January. One typical African woman, Marcia, explained how her 12-hour day panned out: "We are not allowed lockers because we might steal something and hide it there. When we leave in the morning we are searched by security men. There are no women security officers."

Once she arrives at work, she is strictly forbidden from having any further contact with the outside world. She is not allowed to take in a mobile phone, and she is not allowed to use the phones there. "So, if the kids are sick, I can't ring home and check if they are OK. And once we start work, we are not allowed to rest. There is a supervisor or team leader behind you all the time. Apart from in the break time - 30 unpaid minutes - we cannot sit down". For all this, she receives a few hundred pounds a week to live in central London and raise her kids.

So should we simply despair? Are Britain's cleaners condemned to poverty wages, a level set solely by The Market and never to change? No. Until this year, many people argued that an industry like cleaning is impossible to unionise: staff turnover is a revolving door, the workers speak little English, the workforce is fragmented and demoralised. But the Transport and General Workers' Union (T&G) has proven that this is a myth. Within a few months of recruiting, nearly 80 per cent of workers for Emprise and Mitie - two of the main cleaning firms in Europe - were paid-up union members. Starting in the Canary Wharf complex, they began to demand a living wage at the towering sum of £6.70 an hour, along with decent holiday time, sick pay and working conditions.

And it worked. Barclays agreed to meet the demands, and now most companies in the Wharf have matched them. According to the T&G, only a shamed handful now refuse to pay a living wage - the Bank of America (annual profit: $2bn), Credit Suisse ($3.9bn) and Lehman Brothers ($672m).

The excuse offered by neo-liberals for paying poverty wages - that it drives companies abroad - is exposed as a sham: are banks going to fly in workers from Bangalore to empty their bins? And anybody who claims that there is no need for trade unions anymore should be dragged to speak to the Canary Wharf cleaners - and the cleaners still fighting for a living wage.

As the capital's cleaners begin to strike, I think it is time to end London's self-congratulation about our ethnic diversity. I love London and its spirit over the past fortnight, too. But while you are standing on carpets cleaned by hidden-away black and Asian people who earn a pittance for the privilege, please don't tell me this is a multicultural paradise.

Feedback welcome at j.hari@independent.co.uk (please mention if you do not want your e-mail to be posted on this site)

There's been a very large response to last week's articles about jihadism and how to udnermine it. Here are a few:

A worker for the Red Cross wrote:

“I was very interested by your recent points on Radio 4 and in your column about the role of women in the fight against ‘the virus’ of jihadism. I served in Iraq last year and was struck by the amount of power and influence that women wielded, in apparent contradiction to their status as second-class citizens. For instance, after we sacked an incompetent and corrupt police recruit, it was his mother who turned up at the guardroom and harangued the bemused officer about the perceived injustice of her son’s treatment. The recruit himself, a man of 25, stood behind her, looking rather pathetic.

I gather that the Shi’a cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, has many of his decisions made for him by his mother: his own dubious intellectual gifts tending to let him down and embarrass him in negotiations. Sadly, the number of female ‘shahida’ – in Palestine and Chechnya also shows that Muslim women can be as disposed to extremism as their male counterparts, though I think few would disagree that al-Qaida-type activities are predominantly masculine.

I would not wish to overstate the case, but I wonder if there is a secret matriarchy within Islamic societies. Any culture that commonly treats women with disrespect, also relies on them heavily (perhaps the former is caused by the latter): in ‘relegating’ women to the domestic sphere, it also gives them control over this crucial arena (Lysistrata?). A women’s movement within Islam could indeed be (part of) the cure.”

Nelson Jones wrote:

“You said you thought positive discrimination in favour of Muslim women was a good thing. I agree. But the single most effective form of such discrimination is a law like that recently introduced in France banning the wearing of the hijab in schools and the like. It's invariably represented in Britain as a form of religious discrimination, as anti-freedom, illiberal and so on. There's been no debate. In France, where there was such a debate, it was led, or at least joined in vociferously, by Muslim feminists, most of whom campaigned in favour of the ban. Why? I suspect because, however much we may wish to deny it, and however sincere are those Muslims who think their religion requires it, the hijab really is the problem. From the covering up of women all else follows: not just forced marriages, and honour killings, and genital mutilation, but also the marginalisation of women in Islamic discourse, the non-existence of female imams, the ghettoisation of an increasing number of young Muslims, male and female. Indeed, the belief in female inferiority, which is a consequence as well as a cause of the hijab, is, as you so rightly say, at the heart of so much fanaticism.

Take off their veils, by force if necessary, by violating individual wishes if necessary, and the revolution you desire will become far more likely.

The French feminists know this. British feminists know it too, but are too frightened to say anything because of the tyranny of cultural relativism. But what has been the result of the British liberal approach? Ghettoes. In France, the tradition of cultural assimilation and a secular state has somehow allowed the emergence of Muslim feminists who are not afraid of calling for the hijab to be outlawed. A new generation of Muslim women will, as a result, grow up in France who have not been taught to be ashamed of their hair or to avert their gaze in public. Someone should say that here. Preferably a Muslim woman.”

O.C. Alexnader in Pasadena, California wrote:

“A friend recently referred me to a link of your blog and your articles on the terrorst attacks in London (“Having created these fundamentalists, are we condemned to fight them all our lives?”). I found the articles both interesting and also absolutely infuriating in their total ignorance and foolishness, so much so that I am sending you an email.

One of the things that amazes me about both leftists and conservatives in America and Europe is their stunning arrogance in believing that they are the center of the universe and that, in a kind of political and psychological perversion of Newtonian mechanics, that they are the ACTION to which everything else is the opposite REACTION. These fools also desperately hold on to the simplistic view that all history has a single simple cause and if you understand the supposed “root cause” of terrorism, etc., that you magically know everything about it and the source of a possible solution.

For example, Britain and Russia sparked the
modernization of Iran in the 19th century, which also led to democracy and led to a constitutional monarchy (like the UK) and a parliament. During this same period, the Shahs and fundamentalists also jockeyed for power, with Britain and the US ultimately toppling the increasingly autocratic (but democratically elected) prime minister Mossadegh in favor of the Shah of Iran. But since both the Shah and the fundamentalists always looked at democracy as alien to Iran and Islam, it is simply a delusion to suggest that Britain just suppressed happy-dappy democratic movements that everyone else was high on. The same is true of Iraq.

Also note that the Islamic caliphate (based in Turkey but symbolically the head of all Islam) was abolished by the Turkish National Assembly and its president (and dictator) Kemal Ataturk, who came to power on his own, but was too modern for the rest of the Islamic world (from the Wikipeida): “Seeking to limit the influence of Islam on Turkish political and cultural institutions, which he regarded as one of the principal causes impeding Turkish development, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the 1300-year-old Islamic caliphate on 3 March 1924 and established a western-style separation of church and state ("mosque" and state) in Turkey. While promoting a secular Turkish state, Atatürk maintained the traditional Ottoman tolerance of religious diversity and freedoms,
but viewed these freedoms in the western Enlightenment sense of freedom of conscience. Atatürk prized science and rationalism as the basis of morality and philosophy.”

Islamic fundamentalists, and later Osama and his buddies, always saw the elimination of the caliphate as a betrayal, and have been trying to re-establish it. But this abolition had far more to do with the national interests of the “Young Turks” and Kemal than it did with ANYTHING coming from the US or the UK.

By the way, in April 1924, a month after the abolition of the caliphate, that old devil Adolf Hitler was sentenced to prison, where he dictated Mein Kampf, his idiotic racist “ode to joy” of Aryan supremacy. And while Hitler played on Germany’s sense of humiliation at the end of World War One, to suggest that “Nazism was born in the stunned and cruel humiliation of the Versailles Treaty” as the blogger does, is not only factually incorrect, but almost too stupid for words.

Another by the way: the Ottoman Empire had joined World War One on the side of Germany, thinking that their best national interest against Britain and Russia lay in supporting the Kaiser. The defeat and loss of power of the Ottoman Turks, and the ripple through the Middle East, had as much to do with their backing the losing (and more dictatorial) side than it did with big bad Britain supporting “tyrants” in the middle East.

Lastly, let me note again the legacy of one of the last Mughal emperors, Aurangzeb (ruler of the Indian Mughal Empire from 1658 until 1707), again from the Wikipedia:
“Aurangzeb's influence continues through the
centuries, affecting not only India, but Asia, and the world.
He was the first ruler to attempt to impose Sharia law on a non-Muslim country. His critics, principally Hindu, decry this as intolerance. His supporters, mostly Muslim, applaud him, some calling him a pir or Caliph.

He engaged in nearly perpetual war, justifying the ensuing death and destruction on moral and religious grounds. His one-pointed devotion to conquest and control based on his personal world-view has continuing resonance in our current world. Even now, political groups of all kinds point to his rule to justify their actions. Without much effort, one can follow a direct line from Aurangzeb to many of the political and religious conflicts of the present day.”

Aurangzeb didn’t have the West, Britain, the US or anybody else to blame for his despotism, his intolerance, nor can the Islamic zealots who use him as their poster-child claim that America made them do it.

Democracy is not the sole property of the West, but fundamentalist and despotic tyrants, from the Khmer Rouge to the Taliban to the Jacobins of the French Revolution, from Hitler to Osama to Pol Pot, all rise from a complex and twisted mindset that revels in dominating others and which sees salvation in imposed puritanism, and cannot simplistically be laid to the mantra of “when the bad West happens to good oppressed inherently democratic non-Westerners.”

Your proposed solution, empowering women in the Middle East to rise up strikes me as just plain odd (not wrong or unhistorical). I just don’t understand how societies which forbid women the right to vote or to move freely within the society is going to magically allow women to start businesses with “micro loans”
just because Western progressives want to make love, not war. The fundamentalists who view democracy as alien certainly view women’s liberation as dangerous to Islamic society. And given how the Taliban shrugged off all attempts from the West to influence its political and social policies, I just don’t see how pressure based on leftist fantasies are going to make any appreciable difference in Iraq, Iran or other Mid East nations if the men AND women of that region are not committed to a more inclusive path.”

J.A. Russel of Hertfordshire, England wrote:

“You state we have to realise 'the extraordinary intoxicating power of political ideas", and then decribe the 'utopian philosophy' of a religion namely Islamism, and a religious 'a leap of faith'. Politics doesn't really come into to much extent. The assassins believe it's Islam against the infidel westerners with their decadent life style which they wish to impose on the faithful in the Middle East.

The problem with assassins is their fanatical devotion to a religious ideal. They are not afraid of dying and even look forward to it as early entry to paradise and to the company of martyrs who have gone before. The loved one who they leave behind will join them in paradise in the fullness of time. It cannot be met by any political argument no matter how sophisticated or tolerant. It's and entire way of life that is at issue for them.

"Trigger a rebellion of Muslim women" indeed, for God's sake get real. Some of the assassins have been women, and mothers have congratulated their sons on volunteering to become suicidal assassins.
There are plenty of women 'jihadists'. Your admission that 'a rebellion of Muslim women' would be a 'glacially slow, slow fight', immediately confines it to the dustbin. In the long run we are all dead.

The inferior position of women is enshrined in the Muslim religion. Polygamy is sanctioned religiously and legally. We can do nothing about it on a the world scene. We can however do something in our own Country. We can make polygamy illegal for Muslim and Christian alike. We can make the wearing of garments which expose only the eyes or deny any scope for self expression by women illegal. The Burkah (as used in Afganistan) should be made illegal. Islam is an intrusive religion, they do not need elections and political parties the Koran has all the answers. We must legally insist in our Country that such intrusion in the lives of the people is minimal.

Finally the only way we can avoid another 7/7 murderous scene, is to locate responsibility for the acts of the assassins to their source.
The nearest and dearest of the assassins all cry we are innocent, not guilty, we had no idea etc. etc. These pleas should be ignored and due process of law implemented. All children, teenagers, young men and women are products of their environment. They are what their parents, relatives, teachers, neighbours, and associates have made them. They did not get their monstrous ideas out of thin air.

Legal action should be to arrest the parents charging guilty by association before the crime. If that fails then a charge of criminal negligence should be made.

Muslim parents throughout the length and breadth of this Country must be made to realise that the excuse 'we didn't know anything your honour', will not be accepted. They should know exactly what their children are about all the time. They should know of any weird ideas that they begin to hold and espouse and take remedial action in good time.
They live here and glad to do so, hence by implication they will respect our laws, and our way of life.”

A writer who wished to remain anonymous wrote:

“Whilst I strongly agree with the sentiments in your article I feel it necessary to take issue with your conclusions. I am a first generation (Sri Lankan) Asian and I am an ESOL teacher teaching both 15 –19 year old students (in the main unaccompanied minors living on their own in foster care or hostels) and Community Classes where women who are not allowed to go to colleges can go once or twice a week for English lessons.

These women are sometimes despised by their school age children because of their lack of literacy skills and have very little influence on the behaviour of their families. My younger students feel disenfranchised by everything around them; not only the pressures of living with no family support but also by their religious leaders who make very little effort to liase with them. It’s very much a case of do as I do or else you are acting against Islam. These young people need to be listened to and included in decisions about the local community; the alternative is only too apparent.”

Nick Gibbs from London wrote:

“I remember watching all those men in Baghdad pulling down Saddam's statue, with not a woman in sight, knowing that there'd be problems ahead. You can't expect much understanding and forgiveness from a section of society that is so frightened and separated from their women. I'm not sure I understand where in Islam this separation occurs.

Encouraging a female revolution will surely stimulate yet further anger and frustration within young Muslim men. We will have to suffer that pain and let it flow until perhaps, one day, it discipates. I'm sure you're right that it will be very slow.

It strikes me that most violence is a product of violence, and continues until some balance has been found. That certainly seems to have been the case in Ireland. This however is a different model, violence that aims to defend a position of authority rather than redress injustice. Has this happened before? Is there anything we can learn from history?

Keep writing as you do. It is very important that we use the power of women to overcome the horror of terrorism. But what do we do with our disaffected men? Perhaps we should revalue manual skills and physical prowess.”

Paul Lugman in the Midlands wrote: “ I read your article in today's Independent (15/7/5) where you referred to these young men being middle class and therefore not subject to repression and humiliation in their upbringing. I have to say you have not been living in the real world. The reality is that regardless of background or upbringing
if you are non-white I guarantee you would have suffered discrimination of variuos sorts in this country. When the police stop you in your own street for no particular reason they dont ask you if you are middle-class and then let you on your way!

I am british born and non-white and have been brought up in what you might consider as middle-class, but from my first day at school in this country to the present I have been subjected to what I would consider as humiliation and repression at the hands of my peers, teachers, the police etc. Sometimes I think that things have got better in this country but I am brought down to earth when reminded by some friendly plod that I am after all still just another 'black bastard' who should know his place...”

Ray Liffen wrote:
“Johann Hari (Independent, 15th July) has got the right idea when he suggests that to defeat the jihardists you need to undermine their ideology. He then fails to take the logical
step - which is to question the validity of the religion that is at the core of their faith.

The world's various god-based religions all have a fundamental problem - there seems to be no valid evidence for the existence of their various gods. Before the philosophers and theologians pile in at this point, let's just say that we're talking about valid contemporary
evidence, not old books, hearsay or 'wisdom passed down across the ages'.

Without the central focus of a god, a god based religion becomes a bit pointless and it's various interpreters (who preach holy war orwhatever) have no starting point.

Unless Johann Hari can demonstrate that the Muslim religion (or any other god-based religion) is worth having when it is based on an apparently empty core then would he agree that the best way to combat religious fanatics is to point out the central emptyness
of their religion?”

Tejas Kotecha of London Metropolitan Univbersity wrote:
“Subject to your article in The Indy on 13 July, although I agree with a lot of your points I wouls like to point out that the war on terror has no specific endpoint. For example WW1 and WW1 and all other wars in history have clearly defined endpoints such as the defeat of an army or the conquering of a territory.

The war on terror cannot be won by simply hard power (i.e. bombs and bullets)
but has to take into account what Harvard Porfessor Joseph Nye calls "soft
power" (incidentally the man who would have been sec of state for defence for
democrats had they won the election, and former assistatn sec of defence under
clinton) Soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction
rather than coercion, through culutre and policies of a state.

The only way to win over radical Islamic fundamentalism is through attraction
rather than military intervention using what nye calls "soft power"
I attach a recent article from nye wihich you may find incredibly useful in any
analysis you write for friday's paper or subsequent editions of the indy.

http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/news/opeds/2004/nye_softly_lat_042504.htm “

R.K Borland wrote:

“I agree with a lot of your article on fundamentalists but I disagree with your analysis of terrorist strategy. I also would take you to task on "Gallowayism".

George Galloway had the courage to attack American hypocrasy in America, up front and to their face. George may have some quirks about his behaviour, but his support for Muslims has some justice embedded in it. It is New Labours way to treat his like as loonies but they said the same about Enoch Powell who said "rivers of blood would run in the streets of Britain".
Who will deny that Powell's prophecy has now come true?

British Muslims seem to be planting bombs and retaliation is on the cards by right wing hard liners like the BNP!
The police are screaming for more powers when, before the attrocities of last Thursday, they were being accused of oppression by stopping and searching Muslims more than other ethnic groups.
Will this now get worse with Charles Clarke's promise of extra powers.
Remember the bombings in Birmingham and Guildford where the people who were arrested, tried and convicted, were years later cleared on appeal. Police knee jerk reaction and gross miscarriages of justice occured.

Palestine should be an independent country. This would allow them to charge Israel with invasion when Israeli tanks attack the civilian population, killing women and children while supposedly attempting to catch some fundamentalists. Israel would have to apply for extradition orders from a Palestinian government, as they would to Britain and America or any other so called civilised nation. Israel would not have the right to send tanks without a declaration of war and if the Palestinian government were attempting to root out terrorists, war would not be justified.

We have had this with the IRA sheltering in Eire who were or are active in Northern Ireland.
Britain has no right to invade Eire because their government condemn terrorists.

The Provisional IRA learnt its lesson about bombing people in Northern Ireland. The British government couldn't care less. Whilst Muslim fundamentalists were bombing their own people, the Americans and British said "so what"!

When they bombed America in 9/11 America sat up and took notice.

When the Provisional IRA hit Birmingham, London and most of all Brighton where the Tory part conference was being held, and they nearly got Maggie Thatcher, it changed the British governments attitude of "we don't talk to terrorists" to "let's get together"!

In their case violence paid.
Will it be the same for Muslims?”

John Dewhirst wrote:

“The revelation that the London bombers were British born Muslims brings into focus a long overdue debate in British politics that is far more emotive and sensitive than anything relating to Iraq. Whilst the discussion about immigration will be revived so too must inevitable questions about the desirability of concentrations of large ethnic communities. This might be an unpalatable topic for the chattering classes of metropolitan London but in provincial England it is a major issue that can no longer be ignored. In Bradford for example I fear we have the makings of another Belfast with fault lines that have already been exposed.

At a national level we are told about the net economic benefit of immigration. At a local level in the city of Bradford it is difficult to believe that mass immigration has done much more than import poverty and alien customs. A casual visitor to the city will see a typically English industrial urban fabric that has to all intents been swamped by an alien population in clothing more reminiscent of Kabul. The city has become an increasingly unfamiliar place, a discomforting experience for its indigenous residents. Young Pakistanis talk about a generation gap with their elders - the youth are angry and rebellious and I fear easy prey to the fundamentalist message.

Professionals in the city’s health and education sectors will testify to the added burden created by the immigrant community. Statistics also confirm the low economic participation rates of the Muslim population and generally low levels of educational achievement. Bradford has been a city of immigration for the last two hundred years but it is the Pakistani immigrants who have singularly failed to integrate and progress. Bradford is a city that would actually benefit from more immigrants from elsewhere to break the existing ethnic concentrations.

The concerns about Muslims are foremost in the minds of many people in other northern towns and cities – witness the rise of the BNP - and yet conventions of political correctness have meant that those concerns are either dismissed or not discussed at all. The only opportunity to express frustration has been for people to vote BNP. The Muslim riots in 2001 at least initiated an honest (albeit short) debate in the local paper about the myths of multi-culturalism in Bradford. In the wake of the London bombings the Muslim community in the UK, and in particular the Pakistani community, will come under the spotlight. However if you want to draw connections it is more relevant to look nearer to home in Bradford than in Iraq for the seeds of this awful phenomenon: the London bombings are the direct result of the failure of British immigration and not foreign policy.

There is no argument that the majority of Muslims are law-abiding. However many indigenous Britons will interpret the news about the identity of the London bombers as yet more evidence that, as in the former Yorkshire and Lancashire textile towns, the Pakistanis are aliens in our midst. It is the challenge for the Muslim community to convince otherwise. The implications of failure are frightening.”

Jasriat Singh from Birmingham wrote:

“Reading your article today i can't help
feeling that your support for the Iraq war has
something to do with your total denial that it could have something to do with the london bombings specifically and the islamist terror threat in general.President Bush's "they hate our freedoms" line is moronic, and your analysis is only more nuanced, not more correct.

You quote Bin Laden when it suits(Al-Andalus,
caliphates etc) yet ignore other unequivocal
statements by him (why he doesn't attack Sweden, for example).And anyway, Bin Laden is peripheral at best in this.He did not attack London, he is now merely a myth, not an active player according to most sources.

What convinces me about the centrality of Iraq to the threat is what muslims themselves are saying.The ones i know here are angered and stirred not by thoughts of caliphates, or our "perverted freedoms", but by images of dead muslims, especially in Iraq.the anger over
that war is not to be underestimated.

While if you listen to what Iraqis and other muslims abroad were saying about the London attacks, of the ones who condoned it, all of them cited revenge for muslim civilian deaths at the hands of British forces as the reason.not one mentioned hating our freedoms, or the goal of a caliphate, as reason for their lack of condemnation of the atrocity.So it makes more sense to think that these 4 Leeds Muslims had the same concerns as other muslims, not different ones, but that they reacted in a disgusting, murderous way.

Of course, there are a hard core of fanatics who do care about these other goals.Without doubt that is the case.but the truth is a terrorist movement is more succesful the more support it has amongst the population it claims to fight for.Look at how marginalised the "Real IRA" were compared to the provisionals.All because legitimate greivances were addressed.for these leeds bombers images from the Iraq war could easily have been the trigger for their actions.

If you don't believe me, ask the JIC.Anyway, i could live with this threat if what is going on in Iraq was just and moral.but it isn't.It's a catastrophe.

So that's my opinion, based on the evidence before me.Yet you would dismiss me and many other brits as Galloway-ites.a real unfounded slur.Are the JIC Galloway-ites as well?

You can confuse the issue with talk of Chechnya, 9th century Spain, etc- anything but the massive elephant of a war crime our government comitted that has now come back and hit the innocent of our country with a vengeance.You can ignore the fact that, when it comes down to it, Spain and Britain *have* been hit.Not France and Germany.

But Brits are not like Americans.We aren't so easily misled by establishment bullshit.We're intelligent.

Unlike many other journalists, i don't doubt you're reasons for supporting the war were sincere and for the good of iraqis.But i fear you're analysis is again wrong.Please reconsider.”

Adam Armstrong wrote:

“I normally enjoy reading your articles in the Indpendent, but I feel today
you were way off the mark.

The type of Islamic extremism we see today comes from the teachings of
Hassan Al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, not from Wahhibi-ism. They were
the first people in recent history to preach the concepts of revolution,
jihad without an Imam and the killing of supposed apostate muslims.

When the followers of this ideology were being persecuted in Egypt, they
were naively invited to many of the Gulf countries as religious refugees and
from there they spread their ideas in classrooms and lecture theatres.

In fact the teachings of Abdul-Wahhab and his son were primarily centred on
the concept of pure monotheism and the rejection of innnovated practices,
and rarely delved into other areas....and certainly not the concept of an
Islamic state. In fact the Jihaadees and the Wahaabis hate each other and
many Wahaabis were killed by the Jihaadees in Afghanistan, most notably the
leader of the Wahaabees, Sheikh Jameel Al-Rahman.”

A psychotherapist (who asked not to be named) writes:

“I agree with much of your article but I think that your support for the Iraq debacle blurs your vision at the end of the argument. You have argued the context which makes total sense for countries with oppressive regimes. But surely something more was needed to make this seem so personally relevant to some young Muslims in the UK. Afghanistan and Iraq were the fuel to the fire. It was the icing to the Wahhabi narrative. So the political context might account for 90% of the story but the invasions gave them the last 10%.

I am a psychotherapist and many years ago I worked with a man who had been an ETA terrorist in his youth. He wasn’t a psychopath. What the ETA cause gave him was a sense of meaning, purpose, a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood which fueled a void in his life. It also had the features of a cult. What so worries me with what is happening is that we have allowed a very powerful narrative to grow and develop. We now have a death cult, with these young men as fodder for the dreams of the cult leaders and we all know how difficult it is to defuse cults.”

Further feedback welcome at j.hari _at_ independent.co.uk

So Thursday's Terrorist Threat turned out to consist of four lads from Leeds, Yorkshire and Aylesbury. Suicide-murder is something we used to associate with the refugee camps of Gaza, the rubble of Grozny, or the market-squares of Baghdad. Now we are confronted by something that looks like jihadism as scripted by Richard Curtis.

This story is filled with clichéd picture-postcard images of Britain: cricket-lovers, a fish-and-chip shop where one of the bombers worked, a friend who describes them as "sound as a pound" - and an ending set on a red double-decker bus. Nobody expected the story of the London bombs to turn into a wholly British production - Four Weddings and a Jihad - and it is bewildering.

There are no simple materialist solutions: these men were not poor, they were not persecuted, they were not personally humiliated. No; if we want to find explanations for why people living in safe suburban streets would act this way, we have to realise the extraordinary, intoxicating power of political ideas.

This is hard for most of us to grasp in a largely depoliticised culture where we are more likely to discuss Coke vs Pepsi than justice vs injustice. But we know that otherwise comfortable people abandoned their ordinary lives to kill and die for the ideologies of Empire, Nazism or Bolshevism; did anybody really buy that guff about the End of History? Like its predecessors, Islamism is a utopian ideology that says violence now is a necessary and heroic step towards creating utopia tomorrow. It turns your life from being a random, dull sequence of events into a central part of a huge and heroic story. With one leap of faith, the London bombers were no longer stuck working part-time in a chippie in Leeds; they were soldiers in the International Jihad, doing the work of Allah himself to liberate Muslim peoples across the world.

So if we want real solutions, we have to admit this is not a battle against a shadowy Islamist army that can be stopped merely through police or military means. It is a battle to discredit an ideology that is never farther than a click of a mouse away.

Undermining an ideology is far harder than tracking down a network of criminals. It took seventy years and fifty million deaths until nobody would kill or die for Bolshevism. And many of the paths we take from here could make the problem even worse. We have all seen the Rumsfeld approach. Fill screens across the Muslim world with the orange jumpsuits of Guantanamo and the Muslims-on-a-leash of Abu Ghraib. Piss on the Koran. Show them who's boss. The Galloway approach is just as dangerous: give them what they want. Meet Osama's immediate demands and hope they'll leave us alone. Both encourage the totalitarian ideology to spread faster, one by beating it with a bloody stick and the other by offering it a carrot.

But it is possible now to see realistic ways to defuse the ticking-bomb of jihadism. One of the central tenets of this ideology is the inherent inferiority and weakness of women. Every jihadist I have ever met - from Gaza to Finsbury Park - has been a fierce ball of misogyny and sexual repression. If you haven't spoken to these people, it is hard to explain just how obsessed with sexual apartheid they are. At least two of the London bombers refused to make eye contact with women outside their families. Image the sheer effort and repression that required.

The best way to undermine the confidence and beliefs of jihadists is to trigger a rebellion of Muslim women, their mothers and sisters and daughters. Where Muslim women are free to fight back against jihadists, they are already showing incredible tenacity and intellectual force. In Iraq, mass protests by women stopped the governing council from introducing sharia law in 2003. In Europe and America, from Irshad Manji to my colleague Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Muslim women are offering the most effective critiques of Islamism.

The jihadists themselves know that Islamic feminism is the greatest threat to their future - that's why, in Iraq, the "resistance" has been systematically hunting down and killing the leaders of Muslim women's rights organisations. No ideology can survive on terrorising half the population indefinitely. When it comes, the Islamic Reformation will be drenched in oestrogen.

There are dozens of practical measures that could be taken tomorrow to advance this cause. Positive discrimination for Muslim women in the West would be a start. Irshad Manji has proposed massive programmes of micro-loans at very low interest rates for women across the Middle East to launch their own businesses or farms. Similar funds are already transforming the gender politics of Bangladesh by giving women financial independence and the freedom to reinterpret their religious texts on their own terms. In time - over decades - they pass this moderation on to their sons, and some of the murderous tension fades. This is a plan for a long-term war on jihadism based on hope, not only on more bombs.

But we also have to deprive the jihadists of the propaganda-gifts that have been handed to them on a bloody plate over the past sixty years. The brutal face we have shown to most Muslims rests on a deal that was made on a very unromantic Valentine's Day in 1945, on board the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal.

President Franklin Roosevelt cut a deal with the tyrants running Saudi Arabia: give us secure access to your oil - a quarter of all the world's supplies - and we will ask no questions about what you do with the cash. Kill democrats? Provoke Islamism? If that's what you have to do to keep the oil flowing, then we're right there with you, buddy.

Similar deals were made with almost every other country in the region - and Roosevelt's bargain continues to this day. I have (reluctantly) begun to think that, until we are no longer dependent on Middle Eastern oil, no amount of pressure will make our governments support real democracy and women's rights in the region. The risk of another 1973-style oil-price shock will mean they will always support the "stability" of control over the gamble of proper democracy, no matter how enthusiastically the methods of control are rebranded or relaxed. Until we stop being addicted to the petrol and the status quo in the Middle East, we are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

If all this sounds a long way from the No 30 bus, remember: it is an idea - a whole way of understanding the world - that caused the attack, and it is the idea that must be undermined.

But - even if we get on to the right path - this is going to be a glacially slow, slow fight. There will not even be a Berlin Wall moment to show us we have won. But if we start now, by the time I am an old man we might - just might - be asking whatever happened to all that jihadism.

Feedback welcome at j.hari _at_ independent.co.uk

Very few things bring London to a standstill. The death of a war leader in 1965. The death of a princess in 1997. And now, the silence following 7/7. At noon, the most relentless, noisy, hyperactive city on earth stopped. People gathered outside their offices, outside the Tube stations, in all our public spaces, and did something unheard of in London: they stood still.

At six - in the evening sunlight - thousands of Londoners gathered in Trafalgar Square for a vigil in memory of the dead. Skaterboys stood next to the Falun Gong, South African evangelicals lingered next to lesbians on bikes, city executives queued to sign condolence books along with firemen and Japanese tourists. Londoners are not self-conscious about their city like New Yorkers. We rarely talk about London, or express our love for it; we take it for granted that, as Henry James put it, "This place is a complete compendium of the world. The human race is better represented here than anywhere else in the world." So even now, waiting for speeches in honour of this place was a bit like building up to tell your sister you love her: it felt awkward, soppy, and ever-so-slightly wrong.

But then the African-Londoner poet Ben Okri took the steps at the far end of the square to read an elegiac poem about the city, and suddenly it seemed right. This is, he said, "One of the magic centres of the world/ One of the world's dreaming places. Here lives the great music of humanity/ the harmonisation of different histories, cultures, geniuses and dreams." And the first great theme of the vigil became clear.

Speaker after speaker explained to cheers that London's nationalism is to be beyond nations, to represent - as Ken Livingstone put it - "the whole world in one city". There were a few Union flags, one embroidered "We are not afraid", a few St George's crosses - and even more Australian, Turkish, Japanese and Welsh flags. Sir Trevor McDonald declared London to be "the great distant metropolis, a symbol of the universality of the modern world".
And then Mayor Livingstone outlined the other great theme of the vigil and of the week. "There are some people who want to talk about a 'clash of civilisations', but that is not London. This week in City Hall we hosted veterans of the Second World War.

"They told me how we had six years of bombs, and some nights hundreds died, some nights thousands did. But when they came back, they weren't bitter. They came back determined to build a better world, and they gave my generation all the things they never had. And we will be the same. This event has made us lift our hearts, not look around for people to hate."

And he was right: Sir Iqbal Sacranie, chairman of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, was cheered when he rose to speak. London refuses to be splintered; it refuses to hate.

London grieves, but it never rests. Already, our gaze was stretching forward seven years. Livingstone explained, "We will never be able to think of these Olympics without thinking of the people who have not lived to see them. But when they come to London, I assure you - in the front row, there will be the people who were maimed but survived, and there will be the relatives of the victims."

The crowd roared, and the noise echoes across the world: London is not afraid, and London is not divided.