Dear Everybody, hello again.

A friend of mine was being interviewed by a NewYork-based radio station, shortly after the bombs went off in London.  He was asked: “Why do people do acts like this?”, and answered: “Because of fundamentalism.”  “I agree, it’s all the fault of Islamic fundamentalism”, said the interviewer.  “No,” my friend jumped in, “I didn’t say Islamic, I said fundamentalism.”

This was fighting talk, when you consider that many fundamentalists of any religion do not think of themselves as dangerous.  They often don’t want other people to have freedoms of which they don’t approve; wanting to silence free speech and regulate people’s behaviour.  But they don’t see themselves as killers, rather as orderly people.

From one standpoint, my friend was right.  The problem is fundamentalism, because fundamentalists will always be at war with liberal values.  But from a fundamentalist’s point of view, the problem is liberal values, which allow people to make mistakes too freely.  There are people who passionately believe that freedom is less important than being right, even if they have been given freedoms in the society in which they live that they would deny to others.

When the Queen, after the explosions, said that the bombers would not be able to threaten our way of life, she was right: we are even more determined to assert the value of the freedoms that we have.  But this must include the right of minorities to exist peaceably among us.  Most of us in this country are the result of successive waves of invasion and immigration: Romans and their armies, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, European Protestants fleeing persecution, African slaves, Jews fleeing persecution, workers from around the world.

We have a society which has many strands.  Fundamentalism suggests that there is only one strand that matters.  Some fundamentalists separate themselves from society in order to have purity; others try to change society, either by growing in numbers or by direct action.  Our society is now composed of people not only from different bloodlines and backgrounds but with different ideas.  How is there going to be room for all of us?

God bless you in your building up of our society

David Head