7/7, Terrorism and the Suppression of Reasons

By Carne Ross and reprinted with permission

Today is 20 years since the so-called 7/7 suicide bomb attacks in London. The 7/7 moniker was obviously an echo of the 9/11 label for the suicide attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, an attack that those of us in the city simply called 'it' because in the days after the attacks, 'it' is all we talked about. The appellation 9/11 was part of the government's campaign to make 'it' about something particular, namely the 'global war on terror' or 'G-WOT' as it soon became known in government circles. 'It' was transformed.

I was in New York when those attacks took place - the first hijacked plane flew over my head - and in London on 7/7. There was a very similar feeling in both cities - a hush about the streets, a sense of profound shock, fear. This atmosphere persisted for many days longer in New York, along with a moving sense of solidarity and mutual support among the inhabitants of the city - people caught your eye and smiled consolingly. Of course, the attacks in New York were much worse but also more shocking - in London, we had experienced bomb attacks before, notably by the IRA, at Harrods or in the City. In New York, 9/11 was very much the first major attack at such a scale.

It is nearly 25 years since 9/11. The war on terror, G-WOT, is still with us. Reminders, including physical, are everywhere. In London, as in New York, there are barriers at the entrances of office buildings where before 9/11 there were none. There are no litter bins on the platforms of the London Underground for fear they may be used to hide bombs.

Since 9/11, the word 'terrorist' and 'terrorism' have been thrown around in political debate with great frequency, but little definition. In the UK, US and elsewhere these words are now used to describe non-violent protest groups, such as Palestine Action in the UK, which - grotesquely - has been proscribed as a terrorist group. This last weekend, protestors demonstrating against this repressive measure were arrested under terrorism legislation. In the US, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described students who protest the slaughter in Gaza as 'terrorist sympathisers'. Mexican drug cartels and Venezuelan street gangs are named as terrorist. Members of the Trump administration have repeatedly referred to Antifa, the anti-fascist organisation, as terrorist though, unlike the UK, there is no law in the US that allows a domestic group formally to be designated as terrorist - in this case, the UK is even more illiberal than Trump's US. Trump has named those who vandalise Tesla dealerships as 'domestic terrorists'. Terrorist has become a word that the state uses to label - and of course demonize - anyone it disapproves of. The word has become almost meaningless, except as a term of law, or political insult, to intimidate and penalize those so designated. The term is also used to silence.

In the commemoration of the attacks of 7/7, the stories of those killed and the survivors are rightly in the foreground. But too often missing in the discussion is a crucial question - WHY did these attacks take place?

I grew up in the era of IRA terrorism. When I was a diplomat in Germany, there was an active PIRA¹ cell in Germany which sought to kill British solidiers or diplomats. My car carried false number plates to avoid us being identified as British diplomats and we were told to check under our cars every morning for car bombs (I rarely bothered). My boss in another embassy was sitting next to the British ambassador to the Netherlands when he was killed by another car bomb. She had a repeated and strange behavioural tick where she would look down and brush her chest. I realised that she was unconsciously replaying the murder when she was spattered with the blood and flesh of the ambassador.

For the period 1988-1994, IRA spokespeople were literally not allowed to speak on national news broadcasts - their words, absurdly, were voiced by actors, such was the repudiation of mere mention of their reasons. Margaret Thatcher, whom the IRA came very close to assassinating in the Brighton bombing of 1984, not only silenced the terrorists but declared that there would never be negotiation with them. The motives for that terrorism were rarely discussed for it was judged in government that to do so would somehow legitimize the acts performed as a result.

After 9/11 there was a lot of discussion on who might have committed the horrible attacks. There was almost none about why they had done it. One of the hijackers wrote a letter explaining his murderous actions - it was barely reported. The attacks were instead, and inaccurately, described as an attack 'against America' or American values or 'way of life'. This morning, I heard the then British home secretary at the time of the 7/7 attacks describe the murderers as 'evil' people who hated 'our values'.

This was not in fact the reason for the 9/11 attacks - or it was only part of the reason - which had much more to do with US Middle East policy, in particular the occupation of Islam's holy sites by the illegitimate and corrupt rulers of Saudi Arabia, who were propped up by America.

Likewise the 7/7 attacks were, in part, motivated by the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and by UK and US foreign policy, which the suicide bombers saw as hostile to Muslims, as the bombers themselves explained in videos recorded before their suicide attacks. These reasons were obscured. And in a more contemporary example, in discussing Hamas's horrific attacks of 7 October 2023, there was scant mention of why or the strategy that drove them - for, though we may rightly condemn the attacks - there was a deeper strategy, and of course an objective of that strategy - the end of occupation.

When I was head of the Arab/Israel desk in the Foreign Office in the late 90's, Hezbollah was not designated as a terrorist organisation but instead a resistance movement. Hezbollah originated in resistance against the Israeli invasions of southern Lebanon, and in particular the destruction and killings of civilians in Shia villages of the South. Today, we don't talk about that. Hezbollah was only proscribed after intense political pressure from Israel. Today, the British government is prosecuting a member of the Northern Irish rap band Kneecap under terrorism laws for waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians. It doesn't need to be stated that this was a non-violent act, let alone an act of terrorism.

And there is of course a reason for designating groups as terrorist - it is not only their methods, which may be horrible or, as now with Palestine Action, non-violent - it is to suppress the truth of government's own part in the motivation of the 'terrorist'. To admit Al-Qaeda was motivated by US Middle East policy would, in part, be to admit US government responsibility. To admit Hezbollah originated in resisting Israel's invasion of Lebanon, would be to point to Israel's own culpability. And, likewise, of course, the British government role in Northern Ireland in repressing the rights of the Catholic minority and that group's non-violent civil rights protests, an increasingly militarised repression that pushed the IRA toward greater and often indiscriminate violence.

Eventually, the British government realised this fundamental truth, though it would never admit it publicly. In Northern Ireland, the British government for a long while publicly refused all negotiation with the IRA or their political representatives, Sinn Fein. In fact, the British government held secret contacts for many years. Those talks continued and intensified during the government of Margaret Thatcher. During the IRA hunger strikes, Thatcher loudly rejected all negotiation but in fact was herself amending - in her own handwriting - secret messages to the IRA to discuss the terms under which the hunger strikes might end.

Tony Blair often takes the credit for ending The Troubles, as the decades of violence in Northern Ireland were known. But in fact the first steps towards peace were taken by Thatcher. Perhaps it was her own experience of political violence that motivated her, but it was her government that deepened discussions with Sinn Fein, discussions that also included the Irish government and led to the groundbreaking Anglo-Irish agreement whereby, for the first time, the republic was given a role in the government of Northern Irelan, laying the foundation for the peace agreement - the Good Friday agreement - under the Blair administration.

Today, Sinn Fein is the largest political party in Northern Ireland, its vice-president, Michelle O'Neill, is First Minister of the devolved administration. The Queen shook hands with Martin McGuinness, a man who was once a senior commander in the IRA, allegedly responsible for some of the worst murders of The Troubles, including the torture and execution of supposed informers and the punishment of local - Catholic - troublemakers by kneecapping, where victims were shot in the knees with shotguns, crippling them for life (hence the - darkly ironic - name of the band). He is connected to the so-called 'proxy' bombing where a man was forced to drive an explosives-laden van at a British military checkpoint, killing him and five British soldiers, a sort of horrible suicide bombing by force. When the Queen shook hands with him, McGuinness was then the Deputy First Minister in the power sharing structure of the Northern Ireland government, power sharing established as part of the Good Friday agreement.

British officials are often wont to cite the Northern Ireland example as a lesson in how to make peace and of course there are clear lessons in that history. But no history is truly universalizable. In Northern Ireland, less than four thousand people died in roughly 25 years of The Troubles. In Israel and Palestine, at least 60,000 have been killed in Gaza in the last 2 years alone, while 1300 Israelis were killed on Oct 7th. An estimated 135,000 Palestinians - and 25,000 Israelis - have been killed since the foundation of Israel in 1948 - and more are now killed every day in Gaza. Every war, every history is different - often very different. It's too simplistic to transpose the singular lesson of one conflict to another.

But as we remember a terrible day in London, we can however also note the foolishness of suppressing discussion of the motives of the 'terrorists'. We can even question the use of the term 'terrorist' which is often used precisely to silence discussion of the root causes of conflict when it is only by addressing those root causes that the violence will end, as the British eventually learned in Northern Ireland. Terrorism is a term that obscures far more than it clarifies - and this is clearly deliberate. The word is instead a tool of states, and often a tool of repression not of terrorists, whose use of violence already renders them as criminal, but repression through criminalisation of those who non-violently seek for those causes to be addressed.

The saying 'violence is the language of the unheard' is often attributed to Martin Luther King, who in fact said 'riot is the language of the unheard'. But he made clear that you could not condemn violence without failing to condemn the causes of the despair and frustration of those whose voices are silenced. At the moment, and more and more, we only get the first part - the condemnation of violence. Its reasons, and there are always reasons, are expunged. Thus we can sadly predict more violence, more 'terrorism', more denunciations of 'evil' and those who 'hate our values'. And on it goes.

Unless there is a political consequence to the carnage of Gaza, such as the establishment of a viable Palestinian state, there will be a violent consequence, somewhere, somehow. Of that, tragically, we can be sure, just as there was a violent consequence to the slaughter of 500,000 Iraqis of the Blair-Bush invasion. Those consequences, visited on innocent commuters on London's trains and buses, were horrific and unjustifiable in any context, but so was the war. The word 'terrorism' conceals this truth and it is concealed because it is uncomfortable to the state and its leaders who perpetrated that crime.

I am worried that the ubiquity of the term 'terrorism' heralds a new era of state repression, whether by the US administration, the British government or the Saudi government, for instance, which uses the term as a camouflage for the violent repression of its minorities and those who dare question the autocratic rule of the al-Saud family, including a journalist, recently murdered by the Saudi state, who used Twitter to raise his criticisms of that corrupt, repressive and undemocratic state. Putin calls the Ukrainian government 'terrorist', China likewise the Uighurs. Supposedly democratic or authoritarian, 'terrorism' is a word that greatly suits the purpose of the state in justifying its own actions - whether invading Ukraine, slaughtering Palestinians or forcibly incarcerating hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in concentration camps in Xianjiang.

Something deeper is going on here. Governments, both autocratic or nominally democratic, for governments like the US and US are less plausibly actually democratic by the day, are steadily but surely losing legitimacy. As the world becomes more chaotic and less ordered - and who needs convincing that it is - their credibility and authority is leaking away as their maintenance of order and control slowly but steadily erodes and with that erosion the foundation of their claim to legitimacy is undermined.

The state's response is not to address the many profoundly important reasons why order is breaking down, from climate disaster to the collapse of democracy or political polarisation of all kinds, it is to intensify their efforts, expand their tools and widen and redefine the language of control. We see it in the inexorable and deeply worrying rise of intrusive state surveillance, on which I commented a week or two ago. We see it in the repression of protest, whether in the US or UK or the Middle East. And we also see it in the increasing use of the word 'terrorist' to describe anyone who opposes the state itself.

Provisional IRA - the term PIRA - pronounced ‘Pie-rah"‘ was the term we used inside the government