Connect: I was eight when Birmingham, the town where I was born and grew up, had the heart blown out of it by two IRA bombs.
On November 21st, 1974, 21 people died as the devices exploded in two city-centre pubs. It was a tragic and remarkable time.
My own memories of the event remain those of a child. In my Nan and Grandad's sittingroom, my only recollection is of an abnormal hush. It was fear. Fear of what was next - and not from any bombers. Even the lodgers, who'd pop in on their way upstairs to get change for the meter or to share a racing tip, were keeping their heads down. My grandad was right to be worried. He was a machine erector from Co Leitrim who was always in and out of the midlands' big, heavy engineering firms. The same big car firms where Brummies were pulling together in the face of terror to picket out their fellow workers - the ones with the Irish accents.
At 8.14pm on the evening of the bombings a man with an Irish accent had telephoned a Birmingham newspaper with a warning. It was the IRA. An enemy of the British state with clear political aims - a known and quantifiable foe.
But this clarity did not help the police investigation. Six men were arrested. Six random men. Well, not that random. The suspect group, as I'm sure my grandad and my uncle feared, had been narrowed down to those with an Irish accent. In 1975, Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker were sentenced to life imprisonment for the Birmingham pub bombings. Between them they would serve 96 years in prison for a crime they did not commit.
Birmingham paid a heavy price that November day. Twenty-one people lost their lives. Some 182 more were maimed and injured. Six men lost their freedom and Britain's second city lost a bit of its soul. For a city that is noted for being magnificently diverse, the little bit of diversity that was proudly Irish stepped back from the municipal plate. Britain, with its proud legal and governmental tradition that it exported liberally to the four corners of the globe, lost some of the final vestiges of its moral high ground, exposed as a knee-jerk nation that let hate and fear cloud its action - and its reaction.
I'm sure that somewhere in London at the moment there's an eight-year-old Muslim girl who's sitting in the family living room, wondering why the grown-ups are so quiet. Maybe she's been to pray, seen the smashed windows on the mosque and felt the fear and apprehension. Shame heaped on shame. More than 50 people were slaughtered in the English capital as they went about their everyday business on Thursday, July 7th. And now the suspicion . . . Home-grown suicide bombers, who nurtured their fundamentalism in Leeds, not Afghanistan. There could be more. They could be anyone. Well, not anyone - Muslims. Muslims such as Pakistani national Kamal Raza Butt, who was beaten to death on a Nottingham street last Sunday by a gang of youths who called him "Taliban". He was, in fact, on holiday.
Tony Blair has cautioned the British public about tarring all Muslims with the same brush. Clearly some of them are not listening. The Irish have been there before.
Writing in the Daily Mirror this week, Kevin Maguire said that "unlike the IRA bombers, there seems to be no possible compromise nor solution that any government or the people of Britain can offer . . . It is not faith that drives these people to travel from Yorkshire to deliver death and destruction on the capital, but an ugly psychosis which found its expression in the despicable acts of last Thursday."
Two points. First, I'm wracking my brains for that "solution" on Northern Ireland. Second, pathologising another person's political beliefs as a form of madness - even if you are fundamentally opposed to them - erects a road block in the way of a solution.
On BBC's Newsnight last week, Gavin Eisler interviewed London MP George Galloway. Odious lickspittle though many believe him to be - apart from the majority of voters in Bethnal Green and Bow, that is - Galloway has a perspective on the war the British government is waging in Iraq that should be heard.
Hearing opinions that stand outside the cosy orthodoxy of the politics of condemnation is part of the solution. By interjecting each time Galloway began a sentence, Eisler prevented viewers from hearing them. It is a technique that Gerry Adams, among others, will be familiar with - interviewer as moral arbiter rather than conduit.
If we are to find out what drove four jeans-wearing, cricket-playing young men from Leeds to mass murder, it's time to listen - and to hear some uncomfortable beliefs.
Allowing a climate of fear to be generated silences ordinary, decent people, some of them Muslims, others not, from telling you what they really think about the new world order and Anglo-American policies of global military intervention. If you don't listen, you don't hear, you don't learn, you don't understand and you won't resolve.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Iraq there's an eight-year-old girl for whom the world has fallen silent - forever. She's not an official statistic; we don't count Iraq's dead. Does that make you angry?
• Eddie Holt is on holiday
