Islamic radicals find British haven

BenReilly · Jul 12, 2005

In Saleem Ali's world, it's all quite simple: The Jews control the global economy. The Americans are murderous thugs. And the British government was behind Thursday's attacks here.

Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered it, Ali said in an interview, for the same reason President Bush orchestrated the Sept. 11, 2001, carnage: "To cause panic among the public so that people will hate Muslims."

Welcome to Bethnal Green, a heavily Muslim neighborhood just a few subway stops away from the heart of tourist London. Hardly wild-eyed, Ali, 30, a shopkeeper, spoke with measured eloquence. He stood next to his younger brother and four friends, each of whom echoed his sentiments in tones so lighthearted that a reporter repeatedly asked whether they were joking. Not at all, they said as they excoriated the West and praised al-Qaida.

Although leaders in Britain's Muslim community have strongly denounced Thursday's attacks, experts say the spread of radical views among a younger generation of Muslims here has made the United Kingdom a hospitable venue for Islamic jihadists. Anti-terror analysts say it will be no surprise if those who carried out the London attacks turn out to be British subjects.

"I suspect it was homegrown individuals, with outside help," said Scottish-born Ian Cuthbertson, an anti-terrorism expert with the World Policy Forum in New York. "There is a strong jihadist Islamic fundamentalist streak running through Britain's Muslim community. There is also a very, very severe generational split.

"We have Muslims in Parliament and everything else, but that leadership just doesn't have any resonance with young Muslim men. And the fact that they are concentrated in ethnic ghettos means that it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle."

Britain's history of admitting large populations of poor, uneducated Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants from its former empire — along with a generous asylum policy that has allowed Arab dissidents to claim political shelter — has long made it a haven for Islamic radicals. And while the vast majority of British Muslims are law-abiding, a string of incidents in recent years has put the problem of the country's radical Muslim minority in stark relief.

In 2001, Richard Reid, a British convert to Islam, tried to blow up an American Airlines flight with shoes packed with explosives. In 2003, two British Muslims blew themselves up in a Tel Aviv, Israel, bar, killing three people. British-born "mujahedeen" were found fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and last spring, British police foiled a massive bomb plot by Muslims inside Britain, one operation among 700 arrests of terror suspects since Sept. 11.

Then there is Abu Hamza, the cleric who was allowed to preach hatred from his North London mosque for years before he was arrested and charged with supporting terrorism. And Abu Qatada, detained by the government as a threat to national security, then ordered released on civil-liberties grounds.
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http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002371705_lonmuslims10.html

SgtSchultz · Jul 12, 2005

We are the radicals. Western society tries to value all life.