It’s important … that those engaged in terrorism realise that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism upon the world.
— Tony Blair, in his first statement to the press following the 7/7 London bombings
The Blairite objection to terrorism cannot be its means, since he, too, considers the killing of a certain number of civilians an acceptable sacrifice for the greater Good … It is the ends, then, in which the difference must reside … Blair is supernaturally confident that he is on the side of the angels, that he is pursuing the Good, whereas his enemies are Evil. The problem is that they [the London bombers] think exactly the same way.
He tells us that we are in a war. But to many Muslims … it is as obvious as it is to Blair what the right, the only side, to be on is. It is the side of the poor and the oppressed, not the side of the hyper-privileged and the massively well-armed. The rage, the righteous sense of injustice that led those four to give their lives and take the lives of others … that anger needs to be channeled by other forces, forces which don’t counter oppression with repression, which don’t transform rage into outrage.
— Mark Fisher, ‘The Face of Terrorism Without a Face’
Next week, it will have been twenty years since the London bombings on the 7th July 2005. It is a day I remember well because we spent the whole day at school watching the news, moving from classroom to classroom throughout the day, where every teacher had the same live news coverage projected onto whiteboards. I spent that time trying to get in contact with friends who were there on a school trip (who thankfully kept out of harm’s way).
Looking back, it is striking to see what has and hasn’t changed with regards to how this day is remembered and discussed. For the most part, there is a difference in language and contextualisation. Even in Mark Fisher’s 2005 blogpost, quoted above — though he expresses support with the peoples of the Middle East, and lays the blame for the bombings firmly at the feet of Tony Blair for his role in the invasion of Iraq — there is a clear distance felt between himself and anyone of the Islamic faith, who are still tacitly othered in his language.
This aside, what is interesting is that it was far more clear in that moment — that is, far more clear in 2005 than it was in 2001 — that this brand of ‘terrorism’ — in which innocent people are killed indiscriminately for the purposes of a vicious repression borne out of fear — was recognised as a daily reality experienced by many in the Middle East. The 7/7 bombings simply marked the first instance where this reality had spread to our own shores.
In light of the recent attempts to proscribe Palestine Action, many have noted how designating the organisation as ‘terrorists’ cheapens the acts of domestic terrorism, like those on 7/7, which we have previously experienced. Palestine Action’s sabotage of military-industrial infrastructure in this country bears no resemblance to the bombings and murders that have been perpetrated on Britain’s streets, nor are they as violent as the actions of other direct-action groups who have sought to fight for their rights and against colonial occupation, like the Suffragettes or the IRA. But because their tactics nonetheless involve the destruction of property for political ends, it is designated terrorism all the same.
What’s notable is that this is not really the aim of most “terrorism” in the first place. It has been utilised for the sake of a legal definition, perhaps to include those bombings in which (whether miraculously or intentionally) no one has been killed or injured — a legal definition that has nonetheless been stretched as of late.
Looking back on the blogospheric discussions of the mid-2000s, another term is used to describe the violence of suicide bombers: horrorism. For Alex Williams, this term — coined by “the literary buffoon Martin Amis” in the aftermath of 9/11 as “part of the nomenclature he used in his pitiful misreading of Islamist terrorist activities” — even had a positive valence. It “conveyed … a non-dialectical amassing of negativity … a horror piled upon horror, a critical mass capable of pulling the subjectivity attached to the organic human substrate through to some nether-zone of dissolution”, which Williams argued could be used to conjure “[t]he irresistible inverse image of 9/11”, whereby, “[i]nstead of flying the planes into symbols of western capitalism, we plunge the financial-capitalistic contents of the towers into the human world itself, dissolving, sundering, shattering…” (Here we have an image that evokes that most violent current within accelerationism, for which it has since been denounced.)
The “horrorism” of 9/11 or 7/7 was intentionally spectacular. It sought to replicate the new normal in the Middle East in the West, bringing the reality of life under terrorisation and occupation home to those otherwise ignorant of what was being done in their name. Things are very different today, twenty years on, and Williams’ edgelording has not aged well (with this no doubt being the reason that the blog has been deleted). But I think it is still worth returning to this sense of horrorism, even in Amis’s usage, as it contains an important distinction that is now worth making all the more.
The problem with this horrorism, no doubt, is that the spread of this violence was a poor tactic for raising political consciousness. “Horror piled upon horror” is both reactive and reactionary. We can — with some irony — see this very clearly right now; “an eye for an eye” really did make the Western world blind, allowing for the manufacture of renewed consent to keep terrorising citizens in distant nations. And everyone was caught in the crossfire. White communities in the UK felt terrorised because of what the state was doing in their name; Muslim communities in the UK felt terrorised because of what was being done in the name of their religion. It stoked further division and fear that undeniably led to a further entrenchment of Islamophobia in the West, and a general dissolution of inter-communal solidarity.
For those that denounced the proposed response to this ‘horrorism’ — both in terms of state military action and far-right vigilantism — it was clear from the start that an eye for an eye would not end well for anyone. Indeed, what was so abhorrent about Amis’s buffoonery was that his invocation of horrorism perpetuated this eye-for-an-eye worldview in the most moronic and reactionary terms. His attempts to distinguish ‘terrorisms’ past from the spectacular violence of the 21st century was warranted, perhaps, but as Terry Eagleton wrote, rebuffing Amis’s comments in 2007, this only betrayed the willingness of tacitly leftist public figures to fall in line behind Blairite ideology in a time of fear.
Eagleton explains how
Amis advocated [for] a deliberate programme of harassing the Muslim community in Britain. “The Muslim community,” he wrote, “will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children…”
Amis was not recommending these tactics for criminals or suspects only. He was proposing them as punitive measures against all Muslims, guilty or innocent. The idea was that by hounding and humiliating them as a whole, they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law.
What is so depressing about reading this twenty years on is how little this rhetoric has changed. The War on Terror never ended, nor did it begin in 2001. Western powers had long been harassing Muslim communities — and other communities besides — in this manner for decades (if not centuries).
The centrality of Palestine to this at present is that it is exemplary of this history of harassment, this terrorism, as it has been enacted on black and brown bodies in the Middle East; exemplary of the manner in which this terrorism persists, despite the West’s saccharine pronouncements regarding the injustices it has supposedly tempered.
Palestine is the focus not only because of what has happened since 7th October 2023, but because it was immediately clear to so many that the terrorist attack perpetuated by Hamas only gave Israel an excuse to respond with its own Western-backed brand of ‘horrorism’. October 7th was an attack not unlike 7/7 in this regard, and the response it provoked from Israel was so predictable that the sensitive arguments of those backing Palestine’s right to resist occupation immediately echo those made by figures on the left in the UK in the aftermath of 7/7 itself.
Compare Terry Eagleton in 2007 below to the brand of careful rhetoric utilised by someone like Owen Jones, for instance:
Suicide bombers must be stopped forcibly in their tracks to protect the innocent. But there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment.
October 7th, in much the same way, gave Israel a deliberate taste of its own medicine: indiscriminate killing, terrorising, and kidnapping. But Israel’s response was so predictable because, all around the world, Amis’s proposed tactics to this kind of resistance have since become normalised. Outside state harassment and the profiling of certain communities, the eye-for-an-eye tit-for-tat has continued ever since, with counter-terrorist forces routinely intervening in plots to enact acts of terror on British streets, whether orchestrated by Islamists or the white-nationalist far-right, and each with equal planned viciousness. But this further emphasises why the decision to proscribe Palestine Action alongside two neo-Nazi groups is so heinous.
Palestine Action has responded to the UK’s role in a global injustice far differently to the terrorist organisations that have stoked fear into the hearts of communities indiscriminately over the last few decades. In fact, they have responded in a manner far more aligned with Mark Fisher’s pleading in 2005: “The rage, the righteous sense of injustice … that anger needs to be channeled by other forces, forces which don’t counter oppression with repression, which don’t transform rage into outrage.”
To the contrary, the British state has not learnt a single lesson over the last twenty years. Faced with property damage and disruption to its weapons-manufacturing relationship with Israel, it has responded precisely with repression and outrage. Palestine Action have instead channeled their anger into a movement of solidarity with all communities in this country, and they have sought to counter the British state’s repressive mechanisms with a spectacle that brings their complicity to light — not through ‘terrorist’ acts that simply replicate horror from over there over here, but by disrupting the supply chains that continue to perpetuate that horror everywhere.
Palestine Action will not only find themselves on ‘the right side of history’; they are making that history, rewriting that history. They are demonstrating the ways in which horrorism can be curtailed for everyone in the twenty-first century, and in a manner that has clearly learned very important lessons from the recent past.
If the British state cannot see that, it is because it has truly made itself blind. It continues to perpetuate the War on Terror was terroristically as it did in 2003, after 9/11. Palestine Action are engaged in a War on Horror, and when framed in those terms, the British state cannot continue to reside on the side of an imagined good any longer.