The Enemy Within

Terror attacks at select sites across the UK, and we look within. Well, there's no need to look for the suspects - the media already have them hung drawn and quartered under headlines such as The Docs of War and Doctor Evil.
On websites across the country you can see the messages popping up just minutes after Sky News starts running its 'breaking news' banner. "Send them, all home" the posters rant.
But even before that racism was lurking just below the surface. We (the white majority) never experience it, and find it easy to believe we left all that behind in the 70s.
But my eyes have been opened after taking in a couple of foreign visitors.
No, Chez Shaw isn't the latest Al Qaeda terror training camp. We're hosting foreign students for one of the local language schools.
Every day they come home, we ask them how their day has been, polite conversation through thick accents and broken English.
Then three days in the first reports. Both our student visitors, one German, one Swedish, had been experiencing racism on the streets. Shouts of abuse. Bad language. Threats. Just days into their visit and they were targeted, several times. In fact most times they go out there is some unpleasant behaviour.
Our German student was warned by the school not to tell anyone where he was from for fear of abuse or attack.
Perhaps my shock at this level of abuse to our foreign visitors is in part due to the fact I spend so much time online. The internet brings us closer together, it removes all social distinction, we talk with people of all races, colours and creeds withour even considering such meaningless variables. But when we step outside our door we look not with the virtual eyes of a 21st century citizen of Cyberspace, but with the cold, fearful eyes of a nation told it is under siege, nervous of the enemy within.
Terror attacks need to be put into perspective, and they need to be seen for what they are designed to be. Okay, the bombs didn't explode, the fires never caught, the lives were not lost - but the main aim of these attacks is to drive a wedge between us, to divide neighbour from neighbour, to make us fear, and retreat and shout abuse from behind the wall.
If we do that, if we even think that, the terrorists have won without lighting a single fuse.