The arrest of at least 24 people in London, Birmingham and other British cities last week for allegedly plotting to blow up planes en route from London to the United States is a chilling reminder of how deep the problem of radical Islam in the United Kingdom has become.
Nearly all of the suspects are British-born Muslims of Pakistani descent. While there appears to be connections with Pakistani extremist groups, possibly even al-Qaida, the inescapable conclusion of this plot is that many British-born Muslims hate their country and America enough to blow themselves up in airlines carrying innocent passengers.
British-born children and grandchildren of South Asian immigrants are increasingly being politicized as Muslims with identities separate from their host British societies by local and global charismatic persuaders called "preceptors," from imams in London to radical Islamic icons such as Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri.
Based on what we now know about the July 7, 2005, bombers from Leeds and others who have been radicalized in Britain, the pull of preceptors appears greater than the oft-noted push factors of joblessness, discrimination and alienation. The imam in the local mosque who says to a young Muslim man searching for an identity, "You are not Stephen, you are Abu Bakr," nurtures the disciple's feeling of loyalty, not to his British nation or to his ethnic background but to the cause of Islam.
The young Muslim male from Leeds is now able to identify with Muslim victims all over the world from Chechnya, Bosnia and the Palestinian territories to Iraq. He also has an explanation for his grievances against his host country: Islamophobia. He now thinks that they discriminate against him not, as in the case of other non-Muslim minorities, because of his dark skin color, but because he is Muslim.
The role of the Muslim leaders is part of the problem. They too often promote the grievance politics of Islamophobia and mobilize otherwise apolitical Muslims to alter government policies on the Middle East and domestically.
Military and criminal law-enforcement approaches are inadequate to deal with the terrorist threat because they focus on the operational but not on the motivational side. They focus on Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th 9/11 hijacker, but not on Abu Hamza al Masri, the imam who preached to Mr. Reid and Mr. Moussaoui at the Finsbury Park mosque in North London.
