In January 2009, the head of Britain's Security Service (also known as MI5) boasted that his agents were succeeding in cracking down on potentially violent homegrown Islamists. Although conceding that "the battle [was] not won," Jonathan Evans told the Daily Telegraph that his agents were forcing would-be terrorists "to keep their heads down." He went on to note that there were undoubtedly terrorists planning attacks somewhere -- but probably not in Britain.
His optimism, however hedged, was understandable. His interview took place 3 1/2 years after the London terrorist attacks of July 7, 2005. During that period, the British authorities put dozens of would-be terrorists on trial and thwarted numerous attacks. In the immediate wake of 7/7, the Security Service's public critics had taken its bosses to task for infiltrating violent groups without doing more to break them up. Needless to say, Britain's domestic spies immediately set out to do just that, in a flurry of arrests and prosecutions.
But that, of course, was before Christmas Day 2009, when a young Nigerian -- the former head of the Islamic students' association at University College London -- tried to blow up an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight and shattered the myth of Britain's newfound imperviousness to Islamism. Though security officials in Britain insist that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab radicalized after he left the country for Yemen (Sanaa, in turn, blames everything on London), the case of the Underwear Bomber has dramatized the extent to which Britain remains a launching pad for jihad. (Nigerian Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka prefers the term "cesspit" to describe London's function as an Islamist breeding ground.)
Just in case the Brits hadn't figured that out, the usual anonymous U.S. State Department official was happy to do it for them. Last month, an official told the Daily Telegraph that their country "has the greatest concentration of active al Qaeda supporters [in the West]," posing a threat to Britain and "the rest of the world." The same article cited a fresh and ominous finding from the director of MI5. He estimated his service was aware of some 2,000 "radicalized Muslims" who might be involved in terrorist plots. That figure, of course, doesn't include the population of plotters who have escaped MI5 scrutiny, like Abdulmutallab. As if to underline the threat, on Jan. 12, the British government banned two of the country's most notorious Islamist organizations, Islam4UK and Al Muhajiroun, under a 2000 anti-terrorism law.
So why is this particular front in the war on terrorism proving such a challenge? Haras Rafiq, a British Muslim who founded a think tank to combat Islamic extremism, worries that a big share of the blame goes to his own government. For decades, he says, Britain tolerated plotting by domestic Islamic radicals as long as they targeted other countries, often ones in the Middle East. "We gave them freedom to preach violence and extremism -- [as long as] they were preaching it abroad and not in the U.K. They used that freedom to take over community organizations, mosques, TV stations," he says. "They've been building capacity for their viewpoint." He describes the radicals' techniques as strikingly reminiscent of those of 20th-century communists and fascists. The Islamists have also mimicked the Irish Republican movement by using ostensibly non-violent political groups to covertly radical ends.
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ANDREW STUART/AFP/Getty Images
Christian Caryl is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy. His column, "Reality Check,"� appears weekly on ForeignPolicy.com.
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KUFR_AKBAR
4:32 AM ET(tst)
February 4, 2010
Londonistan
No country outside "the Muslim world" is friendlier toward Muslim supremacists and Muslim terrorists than the United Kingdom. Patently anti-democratic Muslim organizations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir are legal there and are thriving. Numerous members of al-Qa'ida and Egyptian Islamic Jihad are not only free in the UK, but are generously supported by the British are quite free to incite terrorism /outside the UK/. Look into Sa'ad al-Faqih and Mohammed al-Massari, for example, who took money from Muammar Gaddafi to arrange an assassination attempt against Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah of KSA. Check out Yassir al-Sirri and his so-called Islamic Observatory for Human Rights ("Mursad"); al-Sirri is wanted in Egypt for an assassination attempt against Prime Minister Sedqi in which a 17-year-old girl was killed while she waited for a bus. Check out Hani al-Siba'i, who helped to run al-Qa'ida's principle online forum (Hesbah) until it was shut down (not by the British) and who still today eulogizes every dead Sunni terrorist he hears about. Or the guy who calls himself Abu Baseer al-Tartusi, a worshipper of Zarqawi, himself a Syrian fugitive and author of death-fatwas for al-Qa'ida. On and on the list goes. Abu Doha, the most senior Algerian terrorist in Europe, is free and at large in the UK and the British courts have even banned the British press from revealing that fact, ordering them to refer to him only as "U". His real name is Amar Makhlouf. I could go on and on, but if you want my advice for American foreign policy re Londonistan, start here: The CIA is running hundreds of assets in the UK. Gather up the names of every trouble-maker the CIA has learned, and ban every one of them from the USA and from any aircraft or ship that is American-owned or USA-bound. Keep British Muslim fascists in Britain so that they cannot murder anyone except their hosts.
Get in touch by email if you would like more on Londonistan.
DIRECT_HEX
6:27 AM ET(tst)
February 4, 2010
Scaremongering and Nonsense
You know, I love this. Every now and again some policy wonk or bored journalist decides that s/he's going to need a scary terrorism piece and the goes of and odes an "Evil in our midst" piece about Londonistan.
Let's clear this up - Londonistan is a term favoured by people akin to the WingNut tendency in the US. Their champion in Melanie Phillips who is about as shrill and nonsensical as you can get when it comes to political journos. She does things like think global warming is a hoax, spends two radio programmes telling poor people that its their own fault they can't work (not the genetic disability that is evident in one of her cases) and then spends entire articles wondering about gay people.
Britain has as many radicals as any other western country per percentage population, it just has a very visible population of Muslims who happen to be centered around certain areas. London itself is pretty close to the global village with you get every one of every race, religion, colour and creed in there somewhere.
Ohh and ISLAM4UK is 10 members. Loud. Shouty. Very good at publicity but 10 members. The SAME ten morons they were in the 1990s as they are now.
The reason you have so many dissdents in London is becuase historically its where Political dissidents end up, due to the unique nature of British culture. You might Islamic radicals, you also get Iranian Pro-democracy people, Russian human rights lawyers, Burmese protestors, Tibetan activists... the list goes on.
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