On July 7, 2005, four British-born Muslim men carried home-made explosive onto three London subway cars and a double-decker bus and detonated them, killing 52 and injuring more than 700.
A year after the carnage and chaos, the British capital has more or less returned to normal.
But as Doug Saunders reports in today's Globe Shattered faith, fresh optimism and split opinion the terror attacks did have a deep impact on many Britons.
Mr. Saunders notes that the British response to the tragedy is markedly different from that of Spain and the United States.
"Unlike the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States or the March 11, 2004 bombings in Spain, the British attacks have not brought the nation together under a unified rallying cry — of war, in the case of the U.S., or of withdrawal from war, in the case of Spain," he writes.
"A year later, Britons are deeply divided over the most appropriate response to the attacks. What unites them, if anything, is a sense of anger at their own government — though for surprisingly varied reasons."
Saunders also noted in Thursday's paper, the fear isn't entirely gone , especially in the Muslim community.
Doug Saunders, The Globe's London correspondent, was on-line earlier Friday to take your questions on the London bombing's aftermath. Questions and answers will appear at the bottom of this page.
In 2001, Doug Saunders became the first person to win three National Newspaper Awards in a row. He was a long-time reporter in the Toronto bureau before a stint in Los Angeles, where he was nominated and won in the critical writing category four times. He is now based in The Globe's London bureau, where he writes about international issues.
Editor's Note: globeandmail.com editors will read and allow or reject each question/comment. Comments/questions may be edited for length or clarity. HTML is not allowed. We will not publish questions/comments that include personal attacks on participants in these discussions, that make false or unsubstantiated allegations, that purport to quote people or reports where the purported quote or fact cannot be easily verified, or questions/comments that include vulgar language or libellous statements. Preference will be given to readers who submit questions/comments using their full name and home town, rather than a pseudonym.
Michael Snider, globeandmail.com: Hello Doug, thanks for joining us today. And welcome readers, thanks for joining us as well. We're a little low on questions for Doug (a common occurrence for a summer Friday) so readers, if you've asked questions before on other discussions that never made it into the chat, now's your chance.
Doug, I'll start you off. While I was reading your pieces, I kept wondering how a similar event might affect Canada. We were close, I suppose, considering what the number of young men arrested in Toronto last month were allegedly planning. Do you see any similarities, notwithstanding the obvious fact it wasn't Toronto's transit system that was attacked, between the issues currently in Britain and those in Canada?
Doug Saunders: The most significant similarity is that 17 young Canadians were arrested in the Toronto suburbs on terrorism charges in early June this year, allegedly in possession with the chemicals necessary to make a huge bomb and plans to blow up targets in Ottawa or Toronto. Like the four young Yorkshiremen who carried out the July 7 attacks in London, the Canadians were native-born children of immigrants who seem to have fallen into an obscure, ultra-ascetic branch of the Muslim faith. This was combined with an incoherent rage at the world, and at Western culture, that is common among many teenagers. For a small group, this nihilism seems to make them willing to become terrorists. While last year many people said that this was unlikely to occur in Canada because our patterns of immigration are different, and other said that it wouldn't happen here because the kids were angry about the Iraq war, to which Canada wasn't party, both interpretations seem to have been proven wrong.
