THE OMERTAS KEEP PILING UP: London 7/7: the atrocity we don’t talk about.

And yet despite the scale of the atrocity visited upon London there has long been an awkwardness around the remembrance of 7/7. It has not been forgotten exactly. Prince Charles opened a memorial in Hyde Park in 2009, featuring 52 stainless steel columns to mark each of the bombers’ victims. And there has been a slew of insightful documentaries to mark the 20th anniversary this year on the BBC, Netflix and Sky. But 7/7 has never been invested with anywhere near the same cultural and political significance in Britain that 9/11 has for the US.

The disparity can be partially explained by the sheer magnitude of al-Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers. But there’s a more important reason. The London bombings raise troubling questions about British society that 9/11 didn’t raise about America. After all, the perpetrators of the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon were nationals from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – 9/11 could therefore be conceived as an attack mounted by people from outside the US. But that wasn’t the case with the perpetrators of the London bombings. They came from Leeds. And with the exception of Germaine Lindsay, who was born in Jamaica, they were all British born. 7/7, then, was an attack mounted by UK citizens. As former prime minister Tony Blair has put it recently, the London bombers ‘had been brought up in Britain and… enjoyed all the advantages of being British [and yet they still] wanted to cause deep, profound harm to our country’.

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And so on 7 July 2005, four young men arrived at London’s Kings Cross station with a plan to kill themselves and as many of us as possible. Because they believed they were pure, and we were not. It was an atrocity made possible not by the war in Iraq, but by a vicious Muslim identity politics. A vicious Muslim identity politics encouraged by Britain’s own elites just as much as by overseas Islamists.

This is why 7/7 has become the forgotten atrocity. Why Britain’s deadliest terror attack of the 21st century has left so little cultural imprint, and has had so little political impact. Because it raises uncomfortable questions, particularly about multiculturalism and integration, that the authorities do not want asked. But until we’re prepared to reckon with the homegrown sources of 7/7, the lessons from this calamity will remain steadfastly unlearned.

Better dead than rude, which is why a whole lot of Airstrip One’s recent history immediately goes down the Memory Hole: Rape Gangs and Liberal Silence.