London Bridge Is Falling Down

"Who says you own Britain anyway? Britain belongs to Allah" - Muslim activist Anjem Choudary who praised the 9/11 attack as "magnificent".

In the June 2007 issue of Vainty Fair Christopher Hitchens revisited the neighborhood of his youth, Finsbury Park, London. He writes that it has now become one of the breeding grounds for a new phenomenon - the British jihadist - and he asks how did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation? Hitchens goes on to say:

Until he was jailed last year on charges of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, a man known to the police of several countries as Abu Hamza al-Masri was the imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque. Overnight guests at his mosque's sleeping quarters have included Richard Reid, the man in whose honor we now all have to take off our shoes at the airport, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the missing team member of September 11, 2001. Other visitors included Ahmed Ressam, arrested for trying to blow up LAX for the millennium, and Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian who planned to don an explosive vest and penetrate the American Embassy in Paris. On July 7, 2005 ("7/7," as the British call it), a clutch of bombs exploded in London's transport system. It emerged that one of the suicide murderers had been influenced by the preachings of Abu Hamza, as had two of those attempting to replicate the mission two weeks later. Britain's former head of domestic intelligence, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said "over 100,000 of our citizens consider the July 2005 attacks in London justified." I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as "magnificent" and proclaimed that "Britain belongs to Allah." When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari'a, he replied: "Who says you own Britain anyway?" A question that will have to be answered one way or another.

What Hitchens is saying should come as no surprise to anyone. In November 1995 the Electronic Telegraph World News reported that a British-educated economics lecturer, Ramadan Shallah, became the leader of the militant Islamic Jihad movement. In March 1996 the same organization reported that Britain had become the undisputed overseas fund-raising and educational headquarters for Hamas. In August 1997 an Israeli security chief flew to London to investigate claims that suicide bombings in Jerusalem were planned in Britain. This was following reports that the terrorists had entered Israel on British passports. Israeli officials were said to have become increasingly frustrated by what they saw as British foot-dragging in curbing the activities of Palestinian hard-liners and the Israeli government made repeated calls for action to be taken against militants, said to be operating freely in the British capital.

After the massacre in Luxor Jack Straw promised new laws to curb the activities of international terror organisations based in Britain. At that time Britain had become the international centre for Islamic militancy on a huge scale. More Arab newspapers were published in London than anywhere else in the world and the capital had become home to a bewildering variety of radical Islamic fundamentalist movements, many of which made no secret of their commitment to violence and terrorism to achieve their goals.

On February 21, 2001 months before the 911 attacks the NY Times reported: Spurred by growing international alarm about Osama bin Laden's militant networks, the police in Britain and Germany have recently arrested more than a dozen Islamic radicals. American officials say some of those arrested were plotting terrorist attacks in Europe and elsewhere. American and foreign officials said the arrests were part of an intensified effort to crack down on a network with ties to Mr. bin Laden.” The United States and several of its Arab allies have complained that Britain offers a haven to groups plotting violence in their countries.

After the London 7/7 attack Peter Bergen published an article in the July 8 2005 edition of The New York Times entitled: Our Ally, Our Problem. He wrote: As the shock waves from yesterday's terrorist attacks in London reverberate across the Atlantic, a grim truth should become increasingly clear: one of the greatest terrorist threats to the United States emanates not from domestic sleeper cells or, as is popularly imagined, from the graduates of Middle Eastern madrassas, but from some of the citizens of its closest ally, Britain. Richard C. Reid, the "shoe bomber" who tried to blow up an American Airlines jet flying between Paris and Miami in 2001, is British. So is Saajid Badat, who pled guilty in London four months ago to plotting to use a shoe bomb similar to Mr. Reid's to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight in late 2001. And Ahmed Omar Sheik, who orchestrated the 2002 kidnapping-murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, is a British citizen of Pakistani descent who graduated from the London School of Economics.

Why have so many of these terrorists come from Britain? Many British Muslims are young and poorly integrated into society and therefore vulnerable to extremism. In fact, Muslims have the youngest age profile of any religious group in Britain; around a third are under the age of 16. The unemployment rate among British Muslims runs almost 10 percentage points above the national average of about 5 percent. In the case of 16- to 24-year-old Muslim men, the unemployment rate is 22 percent. Not surprisingly, polls of British Muslims show a considerable sense of anger. Eight out of 10 believe that the war on terrorism is a war on Islam, while a poll conducted last year, under the auspices of the Guardian newspaper, found a surprising 13 percent who said that further attacks by Al Qaeda or a similar organization on the United States would be justified. British authorities believe that between 300 and 600 British citizens were trained in Qaeda and Taliban camps in Afghanistan. For this reason, and because of Britain's relatively permissive asylum laws, Arab militants living in London sometimes jokingly refer to their hometown as Londonistan.

For more details see London Bridge Is Falling Down and A Muslim Britain.

Is the problem of muslim fundamentalism improving in Britain?

Posted May 22, 2007