The memorial to the victims of the London terrorist attacks of July 7, 2005.
LONDON — It was nine years ago on July 7, 2005, that four suicide bombers killed 52 people on the London transit system during the morning rush hour, introducing Britons to a kind of terrorism that Americans had confronted on Sept. 11, 2001.
This week, the memory conjured grief and defiance in uneven measures: In Hyde Park, just hours before survivors gathered on Monday to recall the bloodshed, the steel pillars that form a monument to the dead were defaced with stenciled slogans redolent of that era: Blair Lied, Thousands Died; 4 Innocent Muslims.
Britons probably did not need what one survivor called this “immature act” to grasp that Islamic militancy has not gone away, and may indeed have intensified, its focus widened to the highways and deserts and battered cities of Iraq and Syria, drawing ever more young Britons to the black banner of far-flung jihad.
The police in the northern city of Manchester, for instance, said that twin 16-year-old girls of Somali descent who disappeared in June were probably en route to join a brother fighting for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — the fierce militants who have spilled from Syria into Iraq and declared an Islamic state.
That disclosure came after intense news coverage of a group of young British Muslims — three from Cardiff, Wales, and one from Aberdeen, Scotland — said to have traveled to Syria to join militants who now include an estimated 500 British Muslims.
In court this week, two women from London denied a charge that they had tried to help finance terrorism. One of them, the prosecution said, had been found carrying 20,000 euros, or $27,000, in high-denomination bank notes in her underwear when she tried to board a plane to Turkey — the conduit to Syria — in January.
Time has woven the July 7 bombings into the national memory, dulling the shock that flowed from the realization that the assailants were not citizens from some exotic, distant society, but, mostly, British-born Muslims who had grown up in a land that prided itself on tolerance and inclusion.
Since the so-called Arab Spring, however, a new militancy has arisen, beckoning young Muslims in Britain and many other parts of the West to join its ranks. It has become axiomatic to conclude that some of them will return to wreak havoc in their own lands.
Indeed, in an online posting showing what appeared to be homemade bombs, one Briton in Syria, Nasser Muthana, 20, declared: “So the U.K. is afraid I come back with the skills I have learned.”
There is, however, a counternarrative, evoking the fine balance between national security and civil liberties, and to the ever-more strident calls for tighter security laws such as those introduced in recent days by France and the United States. On Thursday, Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to enforce stricter electronic surveillance laws.
“It is a loud official drumbeat and it is getting ever louder,” The Guardian newspaper said in an editorial.
On the anniversary of July 7, moreover, Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain’s MI6 secret intelligence service, said that the latest fighting in the region was “essentially a Muslim on Muslim affair” and that both the government and the media were exaggerating the threat.
“It is time to move away from the distortion that 9/11 understandably created in our national security stance,” he said. “We must continue to cover the Middle East as a political requirement but without putting the incipient terrorist threat to ourselves at the center of the picture.”
The view contradicted the Western orthodoxy.
“This is a global crisis in need of a global solution,” Eric H. Holder Jr., the United States attorney general, told a European audience this week. “If we wait for our nations’ citizens to travel to Syria or Iraq, to become radicalized, and to return home, it may be too late to adequately protect our national security.”
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