Britain's Muslim Problem

...The situation is so grave that Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair declared on December 6, is no longer willing to be taken “for a ride” by Muslim extremists who abuse its hospitality, or by their coreligionists who alienate themselves by rejecting tolerance, democracy and women’s rights...

...In March 2004, however, hundreds of pounds of fertilizer, enough to manufacture dozens of bombs, were found in a warehouse near London...

...Countless mosques have sprung up in those areas...

...For many years MI-5 (the national bureau of investigations) and Scotland Yard’s Special Branch were aware of Islamic terror suspects on British soil but could do little about them...

...Besides disrupting London’s public transport services for months, the incident dealt a heavy blow to Britain’s important tourist industry...

...Hence Rashid’s “I’m not a terrorist” quip...

...It is not only the fear of Islamist terrorism, though, that makes Muslims objects of nervous interest...

...Inevitably, virtually all young British Muslims of Pakistani, Indian or Bangladeshi origin, identifiable by their swarthy appearance, have now become subject to hostile or wary glances as they go about their normal lives...

...Muslim girls are not banned from wearing religiously defining head scarves in British schools, as they are in France...

...The MCB retained its pre-eminence despite evidence that some of its components have terrorist connections abroad, despite the fact that some of its participating mosques are controlled by imams who preach hatred of non-Muslims, and despite its being seen as anti-Semitic for refusing to join in national Holocaust commemoration ceremonies...

...Politicians in several parts of the country have found it necessary to downplay policies they favor—such as reducing vast government expenditures on public translation services—to avoid offending their Muslim constituents...

...She warned that many more Britons were in imminent danger of being slaughtered in the country’s trains, streets and buildings...

...He went on to offer specific proposals for promoting greater Muslim integration in British society...

...Made increasingly assertive by the Iraq quagmire, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian controversy, and widespread anti-Americanism, international Islam has not stopped supporting bellicose Islamic groups here that organize street protests and threaten violence in response to perceived insults to Islam anywhere in the world...

...Not since the Protestant Reformation has one of Britain’s minority ethnic communities come under the close scrutiny Muslims now do from the media, the general public, and the country’s intelligence services...

...Indeed, they have provoked an overdue debate on what it means to be aMuslim in Britain...

...separation have begun to be discussed freely...

...They constitute about 3 per cent of the population, but those of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin live mostly in tightly knit communities in major urban centers...

...But the growing exposure by others of their self-imposed alienation has of late encouraged Muslims who disagree with the MCB to speak out...

...The second strand of the problem, as Blair pointed out, concerns whether the Muslims residing here, be they native-born or immigrants seeking a higher standard of living, actually want to be British...

...closer monitoring of religious groups that are awarded substantial sums of public money...

...Men like him arouse attention, and often a shiver or two, when they enter subway trains or buildings sporting backpacks of the kind worn by the 7/7 bombers seen on closed-circuit television...

...The Prime Minister’s speech was approved in the media by several Muslims...

...They included: making the speaking of English a requirement for British citizenship...

...Leading MCB figures rejected those charges as unjustified or exaggerated...

...England has a history of being a haven for immigrants, particularly from countries of the former British Empire...

...British Home Secretary John Reid still maintains it is a question of when, not if, a new Islamist atrocity will be committed here...

...requiring religious schools to twin with schools of other faiths...

...Blair was underlining the two strands of Britain’s Muslim problem...

...A survey has found that 40 per cent of Muslims would replace British law with Sharia law in communities where they are predominant...

...Speaking of a burqa-clad acquaintance, a British Muslim woman lamented, “We live in the same country but in a different century...

...seven men, most of Pakistani origin, were arrested for conspiracy to commit murder...

...The same is true of recent Asian arrivals...

...In desperation last November, normally secretive Dame Eliza ManninghamBuller, the head of MI-5, made an unprecedented public statement...

...She further reported that the security services had thwarted five major terrorist conspiracies since 7/7, while some 30 others were under high-priority investigation...

...Still, not until July 7, 2005, did the British public at large begin to take the Islamist terror threat seriously...

...In a London district with a large Muslim electorate, firebrand George Galloway’s unremitting anti-Americanism and fulminations against Israel won him the seat of a highly regarded member of Parliament...

...In the city of Bradford, they make up 40 per cent of the population...

...This is not a matter of intolerance...

...or the lawyer removed from a case who also insisted on remaining veiled head-to-toe while representing her client in court...

...Most pressing, of course, is the threat to life and property posed both by Islamists born here and those granted asylum as well as eligibility for generous state benefits...

...The MI-5’s discoveries of Islamist terrorist planning continue to stir forebodings...

...But stories in the press report the vexing, often offensive otherness of numerous Muslims in Britain...

...Many of them speak barely a word of English after living here for years...

...Men and women are identifiable as Muslims by attire more common in the streets of Peshawar or Dacca...

...The director of the Center for Intelligence and Security Studies at London’s Brunel University says more than 25 British campuses have been infiltrated by fanatics recruiting for jihad...

...On that day—7/7 as it has come to be known here—coordinated morning rush hour explosions by British-born, Pakistantrained Muslim suicide bombers on three London subway trains and a bus killed 52 people and injured 700...

...Another has been the formation of an Islamic Human Rights Commission to foster links with fellow citizens of “all backgrounds...

...Then there are the recurring accounts of girls being spirited to Pakistan by their parents to be forcibly married to much older men they do not know, and of honor killings here of young women by their fathers and siblings for romances with nonMuslims...

...Although media proddings did oblige the authorities to pay attention to the radicalization of some young Muslims by extremist imams, this was not a priority...

...Norman Gelb reports regularly for THE NEW LEADER on British affairs...

...For example: the dismissed schoolteacher who refused to take off her face-covering burqa while teaching elementary schoolchildren, even though they could not understand her...

...Whatever the reaction, such ploys are more than a joke these days...

...Accordingly, they felt secure in establishing their underground European headquarters here...

...In the London borough of Tower Hamlets, for instance, they comprise over a third of the inhabitants...

...He says it draws a laugh or a raised eyebrow...

...For a long time the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella organization of roughly 400 groups and mosques, was recognized by the government and the media as representative of the various Muslim voices in the country...

...British Hindu women of Indian origin draw no criticism for wearing saris...

...Their persistent foreignness is what troubles the general public...

...Al Qaeda and other Islamist organizations knew that as long as they refrained from terror attacks in Britain, the legal system, with its broad interpretation of human rights laws, would protect them...

...and greater recognition of the rights of women...

...That event, and indications of other Islamist plots, soon stretched MI-5 to the point where it called on assistance from MI-6, which like the CIA normally confines itself to external intelligence...

...The welcome it offered Muslims from those lands gave them the confidence to live as they chose and express themselves as they wished...

...Meanwhile, a number of British Muslim women have been openly critical of face-veiling, calling it an instrument for the subjugation of females...

...Yet with relatively few—albeit significant—exceptions, these people are not a danger to anyone...

...Predictably, the politically active Muslim Association of Britain called it “alarming...

...They also silenced their would-be Muslim critics by warning that public condemnation of the community’s shortcomings would amount to betraying Islam, promote Islamophobia, and set Muslims against one another...

...or the taxi driver who barred a seeing-eye dog from his cab because he said Muslims believe dogs are unclean...

...Neither do Sikhs for wearing turbans...

...It took the French government a decade to overcome the British courts’ refusal to extradite an Islamist given refuge who was believed to be involved in bombing the Paris Metro...

...And she cautioned that hundreds of young British Muslims are being radicalized, trained and prepared to commit mass murder, including “young teenagers . . . being groomed to be suicide bombers...

...Yet as investigators accumulated increasing amounts of information about Islamist activities, they were dismayed that the magnitude of the threat was still not fully grasped...

...There are approximately 1.8 million Muslims in Britain...

...The Muslim chaplain of London Metropolitan University has noted that Islamic extremists “filled with hate” have established themselves on British campuses...

...In his December pronouncement on the subject, Prime Minister Blair complained, “There is an unease, an anxiety, even at points a resentment that . . . our willingness to welcome difference, our pride in being home to many cultures, is being used against us...

...But at least differing views within the Muslim community on the issue of integration vs...

...To be sure, Britain’s Muslim problem problem persists...

...One consequence has already been the ousting of several hate-preaching imams...

...A Promising New Debate Britain’s Muslim Problem By Norman Gelb LONDON A Muslim journalist at the London Evening Standard has taken to introducing himself by saying, “Hi, my name is Rashid, but I’m not a terrorist...

...People here finally realized that religiously committed fanatics embedded in their country were bent on murder and destruction...

...As many as 200 terrorist networks in the country have been pinpointed, she revealed, involving at least 1,600 identified individuals “engaged in plotting or facilitating terrorist acts...