• Three reports have been published, the Home Office official narrative, which reports on the events of the day and what is known about the bombers prior to their violent deaths. There are some chilling details – the flowers which died as the homemade explosives poisoned the air, bleaching the hair of the men who mixed them in a bath tub. How the bombers hugged, ‘happy, even euphoric’ before setting off on their final journey to kill themselves, plus 52 other passengers.
• Then there is the Intelligence & Security Committee report. Despite Operation Kratos, the SO13 shoot-to-kill policy having been drawn up 6 months after September 11th, specifically to deal with the prospect of suicide bombers in urban areas, the report found ‘the fact that there were suicide attacks within the UK was clearly unexpected’. The report recommended that collaboration between agencies such as M15, M16 and the police needed to improve.
• And finally, the London Assembly report which was the first and only public interrogation of some of the facts. This report dealt mainly with communication and the preparedness of the capital to cope with a terror attack. Though its remit and resource and powers were limited, it turned up a lengthy series of failures in planning and management, whilst praising the heroic response of individuals at the scene and in the emergency services and police on the day. None of the reports has really looked at why July 7th happened, a question that continues to haunt survivors and bereaved, as well as, we are told, those in Government. Part of dealing with trauma’s aftermath is a need to understand why it happened, even if there are no easy answers to find. There is also a strong desire in many to take something positive from the experience, to learn lessons, so that future suffering and loss of life may be spared.

I, along with many others directly affected by the attacks have spent a great deal of time trying to understand what made four young men self-detonate so horribly on a grey July morning. Even saying you have spent time trying to think like a suicide bomber leads to sharp intakes of breath. Are we apologists, appeasers, deluded glorifiers of terrorism for trying to engage with the almost-incomprehensible? “You are either with us, or with the terrorists,” said Bush, famously. There is no middle ground. Or is there?

“Defeat them in Iraq and we will defeat them everywhere,” said Blair, blithely, as photographs of the corpse of ‘Enemy No. 1′, brutal al-Zarqawi were brandished to muted acclaim. It’s war, it’s the Long War…we will win, we are told, though the criteria for ‘winning’ are not clear. Nonetheless, we have no choice, they say. It’s Good vs. Evil, and God is on our side.

It’s a comforting world-view. Stories told to children for thousands of years speak of Goodies vs Baddies, Us vs. Them. “They” hate our freedoms. “They” hate us. They will not be stopped. They are inhuman. They want to kill and maim, they sacrifice human life for their will to power:

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions — by abandoning every value except the will to power — they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies…

The trouble is, parts of this State of the Union speech could just have easily have been made by Bin Laden: There is a war against Muslims, they will not stop until we are destroyed. They bomb innocent civilians, they torture, they imprison without charge, they bring terror to the hearts of crying children as the brutalising bombs rain down. Look at the pictures, watch the atrocities on DVD, watch the news… They sow discord and chaos, these oppressors, they hate our God and our way of life. You are either with us, the Ummah, the global family of your suffering brothers and sisters in Islam, or you are against us. Fight, with your heart and mind and body, for this is a holy war…

How can this wild rhetoric bring us any closer to peace, how can this dispel terror? I say it makes only more terror. We share the same planet, breathe the same air. We are the same species.

We seem hypocrites and bullies: we cannot bomb people into democracy, call for elections then refuse to meet with the winners, we cannot issue calls for freedom and start wars on the basis of massacres and cruelties and oppression, then refuse to look people in the eye when they mention Guantanomo. Abu Ghraib. Rendition. Collateral damage. Haditha. Internment without charge… We cannot call for Iran to not have nuclear weapons whilst busily buying more of our own. We cannot do all this, and think we are winning a war against terror. What hope do we have in defeating suicide bombs unless we listen to those prepared to consider being a suicide bomber?

Wanting to lash out in angry retaliation is a natural reaction after being attacked. But we have known for thousands of years that violence breeds only more violence, despair and hatred only more despair and hatred. We live in a world now where ideas can travel at the speed of thought. Ideas can change the world, but you cannot bomb them out of existence. The only way to fight an idea is with another idea. And the only way to give an idea substance is to give it meaning with your words, your actions, your life.

I spoke this week to two people who almost died in the London bombings. One, a man in his twenties, injured at Edgware Road is still spending his weekdays in hospital, where he passes long, painful, boring days learning to walk again. Once a 6’4″ body builder, the blast smashed through his huge body, killing outright those who stood behind him but leaving him cut in half, with a collapsed lung, missing a spleen and an eye and both his legs above the knee. He is now 5’11”. He is determined to fight for a public enquiry into July 7th so that we may learn the lessons of that day and act on them. So that others do not have to fight as he has done to make sense of a life utterly changed, he says.

The other person I spoke to was the last person pulled from the Piccadilly line train still alive. She was 5’4″ before the bombs, now she is 5’6″ on her new prosthetic legs. Last night we spoke of the anger in the aftermath, and the desire to make something meaningful with this new life after the bombs. She talked of how she wished to listen to young Muslims, to meet with them and answer their questions, to hear from them what they thought about 7th July.

“I could talk with them. It might help. If we met, if we heard each other,” she said, wondering about what she could do to work towards hope and healing. It might help indeed, if we listened more, and ranted less, sought common ground; if our actions were humane and compassionate, if we swallowed back our anger and looked, clear-eyed, towards a future where we might live shoulder to shoulder, side by side, with enough for all.It sounds hopelessly idealistic. It is idealistic. But is it hopeless? Not if we still retain the capacity for change, and hopefulness is part of that.

Bombs and bombers do not discriminate when they kill. They cannot. We are all potential collateral damage in this war on terror. “We are at war, and I am a soldier,” said Khan, the alleged ringleader, in his video before he blew himself to pieces. There was though, before the fanaticical idealism, the narcissistic, pitiless lack of empathy, four young British men, who liked cricket and football, who loved and were loved. There is a chance still, to turn back from the endless, hopeless cycle of blood upon blood, fear and terror and revenge, by understanding what changed these men into walking bombs.

This is the language of appeasement, some will say, this is glorifying terrorism. Well, both sides glorify their ideas and themselves; that is the nature of war and propoganda. I refuse to appease the thirst for revenge and blood with more violence. I know that trauma is not resolved by violence and revenge, and to try to move past it this way is futile. Somewhere in all this madness lies our common humanity, the moderate millions whose voices are drowned out by the bullies and the war-mongers. If the shouting was muted, the rhetoric calmed and the honest examination of WHY terrorism happens was engaged with as a public debate, then there might yet be some hope for us all. Terrorism is the messenger, not the message. Have we even listened to the message? Is it unreasonable to even try? At the heart of both Islam and Western democracy is a set of ideals about justice. I do not see what we have to lose by engaging our hearts and minds and listening to each other. I do not see how we can win this war without at least trying. Even if the thought terrifies and offends us, is it more terrifying, more offensive than living with the reality of murderous bombings, day after day after day, here and abroad?

The first step is to reach out into the darkness and listen for a stranger’s voice, as so many ordinary people caught up in the London bombings did instinctively, when the world exploded around them a year ago. In the midst of horror and fear, there is something more powerful even than a bomb, more powerful even than an idea. It is the instinctive recognition of our shared humanity, our intra-dependence on each other, that the only way we can keep each other safe is by working together and helping each other. We already know it in our hearts and our minds. Now if we live it in our actions and our words, we might create a whole world that is bomb-proof.