with
Jonathan Dimbleby
Question: Are we starting to reap that
which we have sown?
DC: I don’t think, I don’t think that’s the
right way to look at it. As Simon
[Hughes] said, nothing can justify what happened yesterday. The fact that people’s mothers and fathers,
sons and daughters, were murdered brutally in London with those bombs, and
watching on the news tonight relatives and family members posting up posters of
their loved ones, and trying to find them and hoping beyond hope that they’re
still there is just the most heartbreaking thing to watch.
But we’ve got to be clear about
this, the 9/11 attacks, the bombs in the Kenyan embassy, the Tanzanian embassy,
the first World Trade Center bomb, the attack on the USS Cole, all happened
before the Iraq war, and this attack on our way of life and on our values, and
freedom in the West. The attack on
London was not just an attack on London, or even an attack on free people in
London, it was an attack on freedom everywhere. And we have to recognise that, and we have to be clear that this
.. there aren’t a group of people that we can negotiate with, there aren’t a
set of things that we can do to stop these people doing what they want to do.
JD: Do you believe ..
DC: Just let me make this point. After 9/11, one of them was quoted in the
newspapers saying we don’t want to negotiate with you, we want to kill you. And we need to recognise that we are up
against evil, and we have confront it and we cannot appease it.
JD: …
You sound as if you are arguing that the Iraq issue was irrelevant. Do you believe that?
DC: No, I don’t believe that it is irrelevant,
but what I’m saying is that there were a whole sequence of attacks, and murderous
attacks, like the 9/11 attack that happened way before this, and we sometimes
forget that those other attacks – on the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya,
the attack on the USS Cole – all those attacks were before anything happened in
Iraq, and so we have to be clear that what Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda is
doing, is an attack on our way of life, and they’re also actually trying to
divide us amongst ourselves, to divide Christians and Jew and Hindus from
Muslims in this country and we mustn’t let that happen. We’ve got to be very clear about this.