Bomb By Margaret Ryan

For three fraught hours I believed my girlfriend was dead. Hearing snatched rumours of a bomb in rush-hour London I desperately rang her mobile again and again. At that time of 10:54am on 7/7 this, for me, had started. In those hours a quiet despair filled me. My only response was to scour the newspapers and news blogs.

Distant to me were the repercussions of this event, of the political and religious backlash that will strike our papers for months. What could I do? My colleagues were concentrating on work. Bombs in London were a TV experience for them. My only action was to remain in the staff room calling her phone, thoughts disorganised, emotions displaced.

Finally my girlfriend called the school soon after one o'clock, alive but alarmed. But before I spoke to her I had already fixed the motivations of those who attacked us - motivations of angst; malicious and irresponsible. Because whatever rhetoric the terrorists chose to affiliate their actions with, those words lie on the soapbox of flimsy, hedonistic logic.

Because, my politically-minded friends, if my girlfriend was dead, her death would not be explained to me by The Iraq War. Or excused by poverty. Not even Dostoevsky's tribute to men too angry and too educated would remove the meaninglessness of her death, until one of us chooses to hijack it for a purpose. Even now, when she isn't dead.

So why read Bomb further? Because we will read and express strong, necessary opinions. Strong opinions to justify quantum leap connections between poverty - her death; foreign conflict - her death; religious ideology - her death. And these opinions will be eloquent. They will be coherent. They will be moving. In short, they will contain all the qualities of Blair's speech on the 7/7, a speech that stirred unknowing and short-termed patriotism in myself. And so while I leave others to make those speeches on the common arguments, I will leave you to ponder my point of contention against those who planted the bombs.

They killed Muslims. To ask why this is important, I ask you to judge the terrorists with this question: What brings you together? That factor is key; that ideology influenced their decision to sacrifice the lives of faceless people. Let's discount for a moment all other factors - political and economical - and assume they came together under a religious/philosophical cover, one of Islam and Al-Quaida. To sacrifice the lives of Muslims dangerously challenges why they ganged together in the first place. Because to justify those Muslim deaths, which they must do, they could say one of two things:

1. We didn't mean to. Sorry. 2. They weren't true Muslims, like us. Whatever that means. Although the first choice is probably most apt, I suspect the self-righteousness needed to justify civil violence will tend them towards the second. That they are the real, true, chosen members of whatever ideology they have chosen, and that those who died were not.

Because to believe otherwise would condemn them on spiritual grounds and that destroys the reasons they were brought together. Makes them terrorists, even. And when terrorists don't release a clear political rhetoric behind their actions, they risk being murderers. I spit this judgement out onto your screen. But don't you think the person who tried to murder my girlfriend would prefer being judged a murderer over what he fears most - being judged as an impotent, unknown statistic?

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