Terrorism needs no reason. Reasons still underpin it.
On 16 September 1920 a horse wagon exploded on Wall Street. Thirty-eight dead. Hundreds wounded. No one was convicted. We still do not know, as a matter of court record, who lit the fuse. We do know there were reasons. Flyers signed βAmerican Anarchist Fightersβ had already been dropped nearby: free the political prisoners, or it will be sure death for all of you. Five days earlier Sacco and Vanzetti had been indicted. Historians point to Mario Buda and the Galleanists. The Bureau of Investigation never closed the circle. Wall Street swept the glass, reopened the Exchange, and went back to work. The scars are still in the marble at 23 Wall Street. There is no plaque.
On the same calendar date, 219 years earlier, James II and VII died in exile at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. His only surviving legitimate son, thirteen-year-old James Francis Edward Stuart, inherited the Jacobite claim to England, Scotland and Ireland. His friends called him James III and VIII. His enemies called him the Pretender; later, the Old Pretender. That was not a mystery. It was a reason. A Catholic heir had been born in 1688; the Glorious Revolution followed; Parliament barred Catholics from the throne; the Act of Settlement of 1701 settled the crown on the Protestant house of Hanover so that this boy and every Catholic Stuart after him would never wear it. Louis XIV recognised him as king. Spain and the Pope followed. England attainted him. From that inheritance came the risings of 1715 and 1745, foreign intrigue, and a generation that toasted βthe king over the water.β James himself was cautious, devout, and unsuccessful. He never sat on those thrones. The claim still produced armies.
Two 16ths of September. One unsolved bombing. One dynastic claim that never became a reign. In both cases the violence, or the threat of it, had a politics underneath. Anarchists wanted prisoners freed and capitalism punished. Jacobites wanted a king they believed had been stolen by statute. Terrorism does not require a reason that we find respectable. It requires a reason that someone finds sufficient.
That is the first half of the argument, and it is the easy half. History is full of men who killed for a pamphlet, a creed, a succession, or a grievance that would not survive a quiet afternoon in a court of law. The hard half is now.
Today we often have both the identity and the reason. Manifestos are posted. Organisations claim the dead. Intelligence services name networks. Cameras record the act. And still the convictions do not arrive, or they arrive so late that the word justice has already gone cold. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been in custody for a generation as the alleged architect of 11 September 2001. A trial date has been pushed toward 2028. A confession was thrown out because of how it was obtained. Victim families are still waiting. That is not an unsolved wagon on Wall Street. That is a known man, a known plot, and a system that cannot finish the case.
So the question is not whether terrorism has reasons. Of course it does. The question that has to be asked, without theatre, is whether terrorism is, in practice, legal.
The law on the page says no. Murder is murder. Conspiracy is conspiracy. Material support is an offence. States write statutes, fund agencies, and hold anniversary speeches. Then the machinery stalls: torture taints evidence; jurisdiction fights last decades; pleas are signed and unsigned; defendants age out; some are deported instead of tried; others serve terms that look like ordinary crime while the political costume is quietly folded away. When the identity is known and the motive is published and the court still cannot produce a verdict the public can trust, the prohibition becomes a sermon. Sermons do not deter men who already have a reason.
The Jacobites at least forced Parliament to say what it was doing. The Act of Settlement was an open choice: religion and politics over blood. You can argue with that choice. You cannot pretend it was hidden. The Wall Street bombers hid and ran. The modern failure is different again. We advertise the names and then fail to close the book.
A society that will not convict what it can identify has not legalised terrorism by statute. It has legalised it by neglect. Reasons will keep arriving. They always have. The only question left is whether the law still means what it says when the reason is already on the table.


