It was not only the streets of London that came to a standstill for two minutes yesterday in memory of the 53 murdered and 700 injured in the suicide bombings a week before. People paid their respects by standing silently together throughout Europe and in places as far apart as Rabat in Morocco and Bali in Indonesia where 200 people, mostly foreign tourists, were killed two and a half years ago. It was a moving and telling demonstration of the contempt in which the fanatics of Al-Qaeda are held and the determination of all decent people to oppose them. But how many among the many hundreds of thousands of people mourning yesterday thought of other victims beside those blown apart and maimed in London? Who among the mourners remembered for instance the 24 Iraqi children whose innocent lives were ended by a suicide car bomber Wednesday in Baghdad? The assassin chose his moment carefully. US soldiers had left their Humvee to give sweets and bottles of water to an eager crowd of kids. He drove his car out of a side street and straight into the children. One of the hated occupying US soldiers died in the blast but so too did 24 kids, too young to be held guilty of anything except excitement at a handout of sweets and clean water. What sort of a cause could find the shedding of so much innocent blood anything other than a despicable, cowardly and a horrendous crime?

But if Al-Qaeda and their deluded allies continue to give such wretched proof of their moral and spiritual bankruptcy, much of the rest of the world continues to show a very partial attitude in their grief and anger at terror victims. The outrages of 9/11, Madrid and now London not unnaturally absorbed the Americans and the Europeans because they were wicked crimes that disrupted the normal peace and stability of their comfortable lives. Some 2,752 people died in the Twin Towers attack and the world howled. Yet five years before around 10,000 Bosnian Muslim males had been slaughtered in a few bloody days. Where were the howls of anguish then against the barbarity of Bosnian Serbs and their masters in Belgrade?

The savagery in Iraq has been exacting a daily toll of dead not only on the US-led coalition forces and the Iraqi police and army but most of all on ordinary citizens in Al-Qaeda’s still relentless attempt to destroy the new Iraqi state. No one is really sure how many such Iraqis have died but it is certainly many thousands. What is however certain is that everyone in the world should be caring just as much about these often faceless, unnumbered Iraqi victims as they do for the victims in New York, Madrid and London. Indeed, however, horrific those attacks, they were in truth little more than pinpricks on broad and powerful backs. These mass murders may have been catastrophic for families and loved ones of the slain but they have never come close to causing lasting societal damage to their targets. Not so in Iraq, where every day, every Iraqi knows that his life, and future safety and prosperity is constantly on the line.