Christians Under Attack

Behold!" reads an official police notice on the waiting-room wall at the Bethnal Green police station, in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets. "Fear from people should not prevent one from saying the truth if he knows it." It is a hadith saying of the Prophet Muhammad, stuck amid a row of posters urging Britons to do their civic duty and report any crimes they might get wind of. Tower Hamlets, which includes large Bengali and Somali communities, is a majority-minority borough. Someone there apparently felt that the hadith poster might help woo those for whom civic duty was an insufficient spur. Today, Britain has more than a million and a half Muslims. A million live in London, where they make up an eighth of the population. They are not just the refugees and tempest-tossed laborers of the developing world, large though those groups may be. London's West End is full of Saudi princes and financiers, and journalists and politicians from around the Arab world; its East End is home to erudite theologians from the Indian subcontinent, along with some unhinged ones. In the 1980's and 90's, a hands-off government allowed London to become a haven for radicals and a center for calls to jihad. Culturally and politically (and theologically and gastronomically), London ranks among the capitals of the Muslim world and is certainly its chief point of contact with the United States and the rest of the West. Since last July 7, when four young British Muslims used backpack bombs to take their own lives and those of 52 others on London's public-transport system, getting information out of the city's various Muslim communities has become a desperate preoccupation of British law enforcement.

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."

British unease about terrorism has deepened in recent weeks. In early June, hundreds of London police officers, backed by chemical-weapons experts, raided a row house and shot a man in Forest Gate, a heavily South Asian neighborhood, reportedly acting on a tip that some kind of cyanide device was inside. They discovered nothing — aside from hostile neighbors and the outrage of several influential Muslim organizations.

Not long before, a report on last summer's bombings, issued by the Home Office, which is in charge of national law enforcement, told a disturbing story of normal English Muslim kids turning into terrorists. Three of the bombers were Englishmen of Pakistani descent from Beeston, a neighborhood in Leeds. One was a Jamaican-born Muslim convert from nearby Huddersfield. A few years ago, all of them would have been considered part of the new, multicultural England branded "Cool Britannia" in the press and bragged about by government and citizens alike. Especially demoralizing was the posthumous video message of 30-year-old Mohammad Sidique Khan, the ringleader, which was broadcast on Al Jazeera two months after his death. His claims that Muslims were being mistreated throughout the world were familiar enough from other suicide-bomber videos. But Khan's thick, native Yorkshire accent — like something that had strayed out of a film adaptation of a Brontë novel, or a documentary about striking miners — was disheartening to British viewers. By then, Khan's white childhood friends had made it known that they had called him Sid and had been really fond of him. One told the BBC, "I just thought of him as a Beeston lad, and that's what he was — a Beeston lad, born and bred."

Seven or eight major plots were reportedly broken up between 2001 and the July 7 bombings. One involved a ricin attack on the Heathrow Express train planned by terrorists linked to a radical Algerian group. Since July 7, there have been four more serious terror plots — including a widely reported incident last year on July 21 when four suicide bombs failed to detonate. The would-be terrorists were arrested days later, but not before a Brazilian on his way to work was mistaken for one of them and shot dead by the police in the Stockwell Underground station. Considering that Britain is less despised among the world's Islamist radicals than the United States, and that its Muslim communities are, by and large, smaller, better-integrated and more prosperous than those on the continent, this is a lot of activity.

II.

"Let no one be in any doubt," Prime Minister Tony Blair told the country a month after last July's attacks. "The rules of the game are changing." Britain has been adjusting its terror laws since the Blair government came to power in 1997. But Sept. 11, 2001, sparked calls for broad new government powers, and July 7, 2005, has created a consensus — a fragile one, but a consensus nonetheless — that even those are insufficient. The new rules Blair spoke of were to be found in a 12-point plan that included tighter enforcement of asylum and deportation, blacklists of extremist bookshops and bans on hard-line Islamist groups. Some of the measures were discarded as too punitive, but the ones that remain have dominated parliamentary and public debate ever since. After the bombings, Blair warned that those who do not "share and support the values that sustain the British way of life," or who incite hatred against Britain and its people, "have no place here." In February, he added that Islamist preachers who condone terrorism "should not be in this country." It was tempting to assume that Blair was simply hardening his line, moving from Islam-Is-Peace to Love-It-or-Leave-It. But the government insists that it will do everything in consultation with the country's 1.6 million Muslims, half of whom are under 25, with the goal of winning their hearts and minds.  READ MORE CLICK HERE

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/magazine/25london.html?...