Thursday, July 07, 2005

London Subway Bombing



At this point (4:57am--I'm up with the baby) it's too early to tell exactly what happened. But seven explosions rocked the London Tube, and at least one double-decker bus was ripped apart.

Here is the live BBC coverage online.

It is being labeled a "major incident," and there are "bodies everywhere." Forty casualties have been reported thus far.

If they were Al-Qaeda attacks--which seems highly probable--then it was coordinated. It seems likely that NYC and DC will go into a state of high alert today.

According to National Review's "The Corner," "a source very close to Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu was scheduled to speak later today at an economic conference in a London hotel directly above the site of one of the subway explosions."

Update: Phil Johnson, who is in London right now, is okay. He had breakfast this morning with evangelical blogger Adrian Warnock, whose brother narrowly escaped the attack.

Here's an updated map of the attack:

Tom Bevin at Real Clear Politics writes:

the terrorists made a serious strategic blunder today. It could very well be that the terrorists have no strategy at all and are simply trying to inflict damage whenever and wherever they can. But whether strategic or not, today's attacks will almost certainly serve to stiffen - rather than soften - the spine of the Brits in fighting the war on terror. That goes for the United States as well. The reason is that the Brits are at their core an extremely tough bunch. Terrorists who may have sought a repeat performance of Madrid need to read up on history: when it comes to matters of courage, fortitude, toughness and tenacity, the British have a heck of a lot more in common with America than they do Old Europe. In fact, over the course of the last century there have been only a tiny handful of countries who have shown a consistent willingness to do the heavy lifting for the rest of the world to fight evil; to spend the blood and the treasure other countries were either unwilling or unable to spend to defeat the evils of Nazism, Communism and now radical Islamism. Along with America, Britain has always been one of those countries - and she always will be.


(HT: American Thinker)