Alastair Down: We'll win the fight against mans inhumanity to man.

Byline: Alastair Down

LAST Wednesday afternoon at Newmarket, Channel 4 went on air late because of an extended news programme dealing with the jubilant reaction to the news that London had got itself an Olympics.

Exactly 24 hours later the programme was similarly delayed, but for very different reasons, as the news services struggled to throw a shape at the unfolding trauma in the capital city.

On Sunday I spoke to an old friend, blessed with a brain the size of an Ikea store, who is a close adviser to Ken Livingstone and who has played the pivotal role in putting together the financial package that secured the 2012 Olympiad. I rang him to say thanks and congratulations - something one does not do often enough in life - firstly for being an unsung hero of the successful bid but, even more so, for the role he will have played in fine-tuning Livingstone's extraordinarily perceptive statement made in Singapore as the city of which he is mayor came under attack.

At a hastily convened press call in his hotel lobby, Livingstone, just in control of his emotions, said: ``This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers. It was aimed at ordinary working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young andold. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion.''

He followed this with a ringing riposte to the terrorists, saying: ``In the days that follow, look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain and people from around the world will arrive in London to fulfil their dreams and fulfil their potential.''

It was the picture galleries of the assumed dead and known missing in the Sunday papers that confirmed the prescience of Livingstone's depiction of the London victims. Here indeed was an array of folk who could truly be described as being of every creed and colour, irredeemably sad snapshots of the melting pot that is London with a far greater array of cultural background and ethnicity than even New York's Ellis Island could boast at the height of the lemming rush to the United States.

IT IS clear that the racial and religious range of the slaughtered has not `played well' in the more moderate sections of the Arab and Muslim world, where newspapers have shown ill-disguised astonishment that the faces of those so barbarically robbed of life were not rank upon rank of white men and women, but a wonderfully multi-coloured hotchpotch of humanity. The very stuff of London life. And death.

Not that those who carried out these murders have the slightest regard for moderate opinion, be it held in Peterborough or P eshawar. Zealotry doesn't do mercy, fanaticism is immune to fellow feeling, loathing abnegates love.

But the broad church - broad mosque, even - of condemnation of Thursday's events may well change the terrorist perception of its targets. We are dealing with mindsets so far outside the easily comprehensible that normal language is rendered almost unusable, but it strikes me that many major sporting events provide mass assemblies of the very people terrorists hate most - WASPS, White Anglo-Saxon P rotestants.

Black and Asian faces are remarkable by their under-representation in the crowds at rugby matches, football games, golf tournaments and race meetings to name but four, and we should expect and encourage vastly enhanced security measures as we go about the business of our pleasure. This is not alarmist but a matter of practicality.

For all the very fine - and occasionally inspirational - words of the last few days, the fact remains that London was hit, by no coincidence at all, at the start of the G8 summit. It is unfair to say this was a lapse of security or a failure of intelligence, merely a brutal illustration of the fact that everything we value about our free society renders us utterly vulnerable.

In Srebenica yesterday they remembered the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys systematically eradicated by Bosnian Serbs under the eye of 400 European troops stationed there as UN peacekeepers. Man's catalogue of mailorder misery is too thick a volume for the combined fingers of the world ever to finish turning its pages.

But doggedness and simple human solidarity are mighty weapons. And our belief that they will eventually prevail defines all that we believe to be worth preserving.