It would be a gross understatement to refer to last Friday’s explosion in London’s Parsons Green underground station as “terrorism-related”, as the city’s Metropolitan Police had initially projected. The fact that there were no deaths and only 22 persons were injured scarcely lessens the enormity of the mayhem ~ a faint echo of the bedlam and butchery in the London Underground on 7 July 2005.

In point of fact, the city witnessed yet another terror strike that was intended to kill with calculated malevolence.

Indeed, it was no less hideous than the Manchester bombing, which had targeted music lovers after a concert, or for that matter the lorries or cars that have been driven into crowds in Europe. This time, the City of London has had a miraculous escape.

Terrorist outrages are almost uniformly abominable, and the city’s latest timeline could have been far worse than it was.

There is little doubt that the “bucket bomb”, so called, was intended to kill and maim as many as possible; it would have been horrendous had that happened. It would be pertinent to recall that shortly after the horribly successful tube bombings of 7/7, another attempt was made to bomb London with homemade explosives packed into buckets.

Mercifully, that “cottage industry” was not effective in the end. The detonators went off, but without igniting the explosives. Apparently, the same was the case last Friday, but any convincing conclusion must await the findings of the investigation. Maybe the efforts to cut off terrorists on the make from the sources of the knowledge and skills that they need to make an effective device have been partially effective.

But more than a decade after London’s 7/7, the risk that the fascinating city faces is dangerously real. This is the awesome message of London’s 15/9 or 9/15, if you will. If the perpetrators are young, as generally believed, it must be the generation that has grown up on a diet of argument, pressure and persuasion against terrorism, advanced for more than a decade by the liberal Muslims of the United Kingdom, the media, and not least the “Prevent programme”, so-called.

Sad to reflect, the latest outrage underscores reality ~ a section of the young are yet to abjure the path of violence and terror that almost invariably targets the innocents… whether on 7/7 or in Manchester or at the Parsons Green station of the Underground. But that is no reason to give up the fight against terror.

In fact, the lack of excitement in Britain has been the striking feature of life in a country now chewing over the exit from Europe. The phlegmatic reaction suggests a degree of numbness. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump’s standard prescription on “larger, tougher and more specific travel bans” has been clothed with the caveat that “stupidly, it may not be politically correct”.

The terrorist must be enjoying a quiet chuckle.