Twenty-one years ago on Tuesday, Islamist terrorists carried out four suicide bombings during London’s rush hour. Fifty-two people were killed, and more than 770 were injured.
The attacks were claimed by al-Qaeda, but the terrorists were homegrown. Three out of four of the terrorists were from Leeds and lived within walking distance of one another.
This was the warning that 7/7 gave Britain. Islamist terrorism was not just a headline from the Middle East but a domestic threat, formed in British towns and cities and preached in English accents.
The British state responded. CONTEST, the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, had been developed before 7/7 and consisted of four strands: Prevent, Pursue, Protect, and Prepare.
After the bombings, it was used as the public framework for Britain’s response. Former prime minister Tony Blair promised that “the rules of the game” were changing.
He imposed harsher deportation rules, new terrorist offenses, controls on extremist preaching, and stronger border measures.
The Terrorism Act 2006 created offenses around encouragement of terrorism, dissemination of terrorist publications, preparation of terrorist acts, and terrorist training.
In 2007, the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism was created inside the Home Office. Intelligence coordination improved, and public places became better protected.
And operationally, at least, there has been progress. The 2023 CONTEST strategy said 39 late-stage terrorist attacks had been disrupted since March 2017.
But ideologically and sociologically, CONTEST has been nothing short of a failure, with the country in a far worse position with regard to Islamism.
The aim of ‘Prevent’ was clear: stop people becoming terrorists. There was an understanding that radicalization had to be tackled at the source before it was planned. A good idea in theory.
But Prevent became weak as a result of political fear of Islamophobia. This was, and continues to be, sometimes very justified.
The fear of anti-Muslim hatred is real. Tell MAMA recorded 6,313 anti-Muslim incidents in 2024, its highest annual total since it began monitoring.
The existence of anti-Muslim hatred cannot paralyze the state in the face of the threat of Islamist extremism. This is what happened: Prevent lost sight of the threat or was not given the political backing to really identify it.
The 2023 Shawcross Review, a UK government-commissioned independent review of Prevent, exposed this.
At the time, 80% of the Counter Terrorism Policing network’s live investigations were Islamist, while only 22% of Prevent referrals in 2020/21 concerned Islamism.
Sir William Shawcross described “timidity” around Islamist extremism and warned that Islamist ideology was being misunderstood or overlooked.
Prevent referrals increase
THIS SHOULD have caused action. And it did, to a degree. Official statistics for the year ending March 2025 revealed a record 8,778 referrals to Prevent, a 27% increase from the previous year.
But despite high referrals, only 17% were actually adopted into the channel intervention program. In 2024, Shawcross accused the government of disregarding key recommendations from his review, warning that the public had been left “at risk.”
Even more worryingly, these statistics come as the 2023 CONTEST strategy described Islamist terrorism as the largest terrorist threat to Britain by volume and severity.
Since 2018, it has accounted for 67% of attacks and roughly three-quarters of MI5’s counter-terrorism caseload.
Extreme right-wing terrorism is dangerous and must be policed seriously, particularly with the rise of the far Right, but it only accounted for about 22% of attacks over the same period. There is a clear hierarchy of danger here.
Islamism does not begin when the bomb is built, or when the terrorist goes into a synagogue, as on Yom Kippur. It works through individuals turning a foreign issue into intimidation of Jewish people.
It normalizes antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism. It works because politicians are too scared to call it what it is.
There have been attacks in England. The Hatzola ambulances, the Golders Green stabbing, and the aforementioned Yom Kippur attack.
But it is the normalized antisemitic rhetoric that the government is too scared to properly confront that allows those attacks to happen. The rhetoric that justifies October 7 as “resistance” and that calls it “genocide” while inverting the Holocaust.
The 7/7 bombings were the first instance of homegrown Islamist terrorism in the UK, and was an early and aggressive symptom of what could come. Successive governments could have done something about it, strengthening policing, and the Prevent program.
The question that is already discussed at every Shabbat table, but that should be on the lips of every single person in Britain: how much longer will people ignore the truth before the damage is irreversible?