Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Snowdonia Rules the Waves According to BBC News, two of the July 7th London bombers took a whitewater rafting trip in North Wales a month earlier. Two of the London bombers went whitewater rafting together in Snowdonia a month before they carried out the attacks, it has emerged. Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, and Shehzad Tanweer, 22, rode the rapids at Canolfan Tryweryn, the National Whitewater Centre, at Bala on 4 June. It is believed both Khan, who was a teaching assistant at a Leeds school, and Tanweer, a sports science graduate, organised outdoor adventure trips for young Muslims from the city. It remains to be seen whether the purpose of the excursion was purely recreational, or whether Khan and Tanweer were training to hijack canoes on the Thames and crash them into Buckingham Palace. 4:09:48 PM

Grueling Times In an op-ed piece in today's LA Times, John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge contrast the reactions of the British and American publics to terrorism on their native soil. Another big difference between Britain and the U.S. is the balance of power between left and right, especially in the world of ideas. In the U.S., the anti-war left has long been balanced -- many would say outgunned  -- by the right-wing intelligentsia. In Britain, the conservative intelligentsia offers remarkably thin gruel; the left dominates both the universities and the BBC. Even middle-of-the-road members of the chattering classes tend to blame the West for committing innumerable atrocities and assume that terrorists act out of poverty and frustration rather than nihilism and fanaticism. The only objection I have to this assertion is the use of "intelligentsia" to describe the right wing in America.  "Unintelligentsia" would be more accurate, since Neocons like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld got everything wrong about what the results of the invasion of Iraq would be.  In fact, I don't think the word "intelligence" should ever be used in any context, military or otherwise, when describing the Bush regime. I do like that British phrase "thin gruel," though.  It sounds like a breakfast I once had in London. 10:42:27 AM