The concept of "Londonistan," which came to prominence after the 7/7 bombings and has become the subject of a book by Melanie Phillips, is deserving of attention. Theodore Dalrymple's "The Suicide Bombers Among Us" offered an early peek behind the scenes, and was particularly interesting in linking young Muslim men's fear of women and corresponding impulses to dominate them to the atractiveness of Islamist hate in other areas.
Even the New York Times can't ignore the phenomenon - and the more Britain's authorities and police look at London's Muslim communities, the more worried they are becoming. From the New York Times Magazine article:
"Lord Carlile of Berriew, a Welshman who is Britain's independent reviewer of counterterrorism laws, has wide access to classified intelligence about terrorism plans. He is the last person you would expect to hype the dangers. For one thing, his party, the Liberal Democrats, has reaped electoral gains by opposing Tony Blair's war on terror, particularly Blair's belief that Iraq is a front in that war. For another, Lord Carlile has made a name for himself as a civil libertarian - a champion of legal underdogs from the terminally ill to the transsexual - and civil libertarians are the ones who have led the opposition to antiterror measures. "How serious is it?" he asked, sitting beside a conference-room table in his law chambers off the Strand on a sunny morning this spring. "Very. Complacency, tempting though it is, is the worst possible attitude. We've been fortunate we haven't had more attacks. There will be more."
Some excerpts:
"Like most modern 'diaspora' immigrants, the Pakistani-British visit their native country with little difficulty. There were 400,000 British visitors to Pakistan in 2004. All countries with large Muslim diasporas are vulnerable to the worldwide Wahhabi radicalization fomented at mosques and cultural centers financed by Saudi Arabia's government and its private charities. But on top of that, Britain is vulnerable to radicalizing trends of South Asia: India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. These trends risk becoming Britain's own..."
It helps to understand that people are one of the Pakistani economy's largest exports, and that remittances from foreign countries are an even more important percentage of GDP in Pakistan than they are in Mexico. See Winds' coverage of Pakistan and Bangladesh for more on the Islamist dynamics there, and esp. our coverage of Bangladesh's slide toward the violent, imperialist side of Islam.
Worse...
"But over the past quarter-century, Britain has seen a dispiriting tendency toward segregation, or resegregation. Young newcomers have not found a niche in the service economy as easily as the arrivals of 40 and 50 years ago did in the industrial one. Others, born in Britain, have cast about for identities other than the British one they were raised with. In 2001, the northern industrial towns of Oldham, Burnley and Bradford experienced several days of violent racial mayhem between white and Asian gangs. A Home Office report issued in the wake of the riots found 'separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks,' producing living arrangements that 'do not seem to touch at any point.' "
This is all aggravated by trends Winds has reported on extensively...
"South Asian religion has changed, too. The Islam that most immigrants took to Britain from the Indian subcontinent was a pious traditional Sufism, marked by great reverence for the Prophet Muhammad and an elaborate system of mentorship, under the control of various pirs, or holy men. Probably the majority of Britain's 1,500 or so mosques have their roots in Sufism. This kind of Islam has not been wiped out, but it has been losing ground in South Asia and Britain alike to simpler, more fashionable trends in Sunni Islam. The Deobandi school, which was founded in Pakistan in the 19th century, has grown increasingly conservative - and distrustful of non-Islamic cultures - under the influence of the Saudi Wahhabis."
What a polite way to describe organized racism and the promotion of violent hate.
"At least since the Afghan war in the 80's, hard-line Deobandi madrasas have spread throughout Pakistan. Jamaat-i-Islami, the sectarian and highly politicized movement started by the journalist Abu A'la Maududi, has grown since the 60's and is influential in the largest Muslim group in Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain (M.C.B.). While the M.C.B. has no official government status, it does claim to speak for much of the Muslim population and is the government's interlocutor of first resort when integration is at issue."
It is frankly amazing to see this bit in the ultra-liberal New York Times Magazine, but here you go:
"The Muslim Council of Britain now boycotts Holocaust Memorial Day every January, on the grounds that it focuses too exclusively on the genocide committed against the Jews. In response, Asim Siddiqui, the young leader of a London-based Muslim group called City Circle, organized a separate Holocaust memorial event. City Circle declares itself 'nonaligned to any overseas or established doctrinal organization.' Siddiqui is clearly a courageous and independent man. Yet the M.C.B. still gets more invitations to governmental meetings and is accepted as the logical outlet for the community's demands after, say, an antiterrorist raid. It is a good example of how the 'traffic light' strategy can fail. Its incentives drive community representatives toward radicalism. Strident political voices are not just admitted to conversation - they are the preferred voices, because they are seen as more 'authentic.' If the government's top priority is finding people with the street credibility to dissuade potential terrorists, then the ideal Muslim interlocutor is someone who shares the terrorists' goals while publicly condemning their means. Standing up for Holocaust victims and for fellowship among Britain's peoples is not much of a credential."
...and then there's this. As I've pointed out before, it's not as if people who were otherwise tolerant and inclined to peaceful cohabitation with other faiths suddenly snap one day... there's a long transmission belt of hate involved, resulting in human weapons that require only a trigger - and really, any trigger will do:
"Whether Iraq is a "cause" of terror or a mere pretext is a difficult question. Radical jihadists have threatened and attacked countries that opted out of the Iraq conflict. And if Iraq "causes" someone to become a suicide bomber, it is almost certainly not in the way Western liberals understand political causation. The terrorist may already hold jihadist views. He may be whipped into bloodlust by images on TV or the Internet. He may regard the invasion of Iraq as an incursion upon the prerogatives of the Ummah — but the source of his anger is unlikely to be any supposed violation of international law. In the end, though, it may not matter if everyone means something different by "Iraq." A shared opposition to the war tightens the identification between radical and nonradical Muslims, and between both those groups and some members of the non-Muslim Western left, and this muddies the terms with which the battle of ideas around terrorism is fought."
The collaboration of various segments of the western left goes far deeper, of course, from encouragement via "multiculturalism" of the segregation that helps to encourage violence, to apologetics for terrorism, to outright co-belligerence with Islamic terrorism's practitioners against the West.
Caldwell doesn't deal with that aspect at length, largely because he's more interested in what's going on outside the West's internal war. Which is a proper attitude to take in such situations; the world is not just a reflection of our own internal concerns.
You can read the whole article here." It's worth your time.