The Politics of Homeland Insecurity: The Cybercaliphate and the Unbearable Lightness of Being British

Abstract

On July 7, 2005, a series of coordinated bombings severely disrupted the London transport system, claiming 56 lives. As Londoners recovered from the terrorist attacks, two facts emerged with increasing clarity. Firstly, the protean and previously unheard of “Secret Organization Group of Al-Qaeda of Jihad Organization in Europe” that claimed responsibility for the bombing of three trains and the Number 26 bus on that July day, had planned and executed the operation to cause maximum panic and loss of life.² The success of what one Oxford University-based Islamic scholar, Tariq Ramadan, has termed “interventions”³ and what the London Transport Authority, with a not dissimilar euphemism termed a “major incident” on July 7, and the failure of a second “intervention” on July 14, when another series of bomb attacks was foiled, dramatically illustrated the vulnerability of soft targets like mass transit systems to those prepared to countenance mass casualty terrorism.⁴ These “major incidents” also achieved the saturation media coverage that organizations that have recourse to extremist violence have craved since the Russian Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) launched their asymmetric revolutionary violence against the Czarist administration at the end of the nineteenth century.⁵

Colonialism and its followers, the apostate rulers, then started to openly erect crusader centres, societies, and organizations like Masonic Lodges, Lions and Rotary clubs, and foreign schools. They aimed at producing a wasted generation that pursued everything that is Western and produced rulers, ministers, leaders, physicians, engineers, businessmen, politicians, journalists, and information specialists. And Allah’s enemies plotted and planned, and Allah too planned, and the best of planners is Allah [Koran].¹