What Happened On July 7?

In case you didn’t know, July 7 this year was International Kissing Day. GB News pointed that out with contempt as the presenter said  while the BBC and Sky News had acknowledged this on their homepages, they had ignored something far more important.

On July 7,  2005, four Islamist terrorists travelled to the capital and detonated four bombs killing themselves and 52 innocent people. Hundreds were wounded. Their plan was to blow up four London Underground trains; three of them succeeded but 18 year old Hasib Hussain was unable to detonate his bomb according to plan and ended up detonating it on the top deck of a bus about fifty minutes after the others. Hussain’s bomb killed 13 people excluding himself; it exploded outside the headquarters of the British Medical Association so there were plenty of doctors on hand to treat the wounded, which was little comfort to the survivors.

Like many Londoners this was personal for me, more so because I went to the British Library that morning. I always travel off-peak so there was never any chance of my being blown up, but it was a chilling thought all the same. When I arrived at London Bridge there were reports of delays but a different reason was given, the usual fog of war, I expect.

Condemnation was swift, including by Ken Livingstone, who was in his second term as Mayor. He would go on to blame Tony Blair for the bombings because of his complicity in the invasion of Iraq.

The 7/7 attacks were not entirely forgotten by the British media this year, but it is notable that they generated and continue to generate far less outrage than crimes an order of magnitude less serious. The 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence was exploited and continues to be exploited, as does the death of George Floyd which in spite of the jury’s verdict was at worse manslaughter. 

Like the even more deadly 9/11, the 7/7 attacks were used principally to justify the ever encroaching police state.