The implications of today's attacks..

David Horovitz from the Jerusalem Post on the implications of today's attacks.

For the British landscape, and the behavior of its people, will likely be much changed by today's devastation. Israelis, these past five years in particular, have tragically had to adjust to a reality in which, wherever we gather in any kind of crowd, we must assume that lurking within our midst may be somebody determined to blow us up. Americans, too, have gradually had to shed the free-world assumption that the people with whom they come into banal, everyday contact delight in the simple gift of life. Now Britons, too, a fundamentally decent and trusting people, will have to learn to regard each other with a new, sorry suspicion.

The London Underground and bus services will have to be secured as never before; hitherto, a uniformed security officer was the exception, not the rule. There will likely be calls for a wider distribution of firearms among Britain's police, who traditionally do not carry guns. Prominent public institutions and tourist sites, even places of worship and movie houses and shopping malls, may from now on be deemed to require the kind of security that, to date, had been the unfortunate norm only of Britain's synagogues and other potential Jewish targets – the places where, until today, it had been anticipated that terrorists would be most likely to strike.

While there will doubtless be some who will seek to brand Britain the architect of its own suffering, to claim that Blair's alliance with US President George Bush on Iraq, perhaps even his relatively sympathetic attitude to Israel, are to blame for London's bloodshed today.

But most Britons, I suspect, will want to find the unity, discipline and tenacity they last had to show in the darkest days of World War II. And most Britons, now as then, I suspect, are fully capable of recognizing the true nature of their enemy.