The London Effect

...When Mrs...

...The woman, from Leeds in the north of England, told the operator that her son, Hasib Hussain, 18, had left home the previous evening saying he was headed to London to visit friends...

...30 bus that killed 13 people...

...This week the British began to understand how high the stakes really are...

...The revelation that 7/7 was the work of homegrown British suicide bombers came as a new blow last week to a British public in mourning for the victims of its worst act of terrorism...

...A little more forensic work concluded that the woman's son had indeed blown himself up along with a dozen innocent victims...

...Even Tony Blair's critics seemed captured by a new sobriety in the face of this threat and pledged their support for him as he sought to lead the country into this new era...

...This was not an external assault, the work of uncivilized foreigners from the mean streets of faraway cairo or Damascus...

...The mood in the House of Commons last week reflected the mood in the nation...

...For years these clerics have been free to corrupt the minds of young Muslims...

...Hussain's own tragic ignoGerard Baker is an assistant editor of the Times of London and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Nor will the remarkable practice of giving clerics who have already been banned from the United States free rein to preach in London and across the United Kingdom...

...They showed large majorities in favor of keeping British troops in Iraq and, most strikingly, a jump in the number of Brits who believed their country should stay close to the United States in its foreign policy—now a clear majority —rather than striking out on its own or siding with the Europeans...

...Much more important, though, now, will be the task of undoing the damage to British domestic security from years of overindulgent policies that have done nothing less than cultivate the fanatical ideology of terrorism in Britain's own cities...

...The United States, after 9/11, saw the danger for what it was...

...It has been widely said that the crisis in the transatlantic relationship in the last few years has come from differing perceptions of threats from Islamic terrorism in the United States and Europe...

...First to go will be the absurdly tolerant approach to Muslim clerics who preach jihad across the country...

...Sad to relate, of course, within days that error had been cor-rected—and the broadcaster was back to calling them, in despicably neutral language, "bombers...

...That kind of incitement will no longer be tolerated...

...Suddenly there is a new seriousness in much of the political discussion about the challenge the United Kingdom faces...

...The anti-American, antiwar crowd, of left and right, allied with the apologists for terror on the extreme left and in some sections of the Muslim community, had been insisting that the threat of terrorism was either all a fantasy of George W. Bush's and Tony Blair's evil minds or, if it did exist, an entirely justified response by angry Muslims to the "illegal" invasions of Afghanistan and iraq...

...The London bombers lived in Leeds, and if you poke around on the website of the Leeds Grand Mosque (www.leedsgrandmosque.org...

...Ironically, instead of self-sufficient, successful Muslim communities, these places have become economically stagnant breeding grounds for a culture of alienation—with young Muslims especially nursing supposed grievances against everything about the society and the nation that has nurtured them...

...What the British people seem to grasp is that the real threat to their own lives now comes not from the British role in Afghanistan or Iraq or Israel's relations with the Palestinians, but from a global ideology, one held by fanatical Islamists in Kandahar, Falluja, Gaza, or Leeds, who will not be appeased by dialogue or changes in policy, who want nothing less than the overthrow of the basic values of British society...

...They had already determined that the blast patterns on one set of clothes belonging to a dead passenger were consistent with the damage to body and clothing associated with suicide bombers...

...With last week's grim discovery, the war on terror, at least in Britain, began a completely new phase...

...Blair's government will now urgently shift strategy to prevent the risk of even worse attacks than those of 7/7...

...Abroad, in addition to redoubling efforts in Afghanistan and maintaining support for the United States in Iraq and in the broader fight against terrorism, Britain will work even more closely with the United States to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction...

...In places like Leeds, Muslims have lived for years in largely closed neighborhoods, where the writ of English law hardly runs at all...

...There will be stepped-up intelligence activity and scrutiny of Islamic charities and even schools...

...The threat to Europe, and to Britain especially, is even greater than the threat to the United States, whose resident Muslims are better integrated and make up a smaller share of the population...

...These were people most Brits have happily thought of as their countrymen, the sort you might see in the fish and chip shop, with a thick Yorkshire drawl or an east London cockney chirp, a friendly coworker or fellow student with a smile on his lips and jihad on his mind...

...Hussain described to the hotline operator what her son had been wearing it was quickly relayed to the police at the bus murder scene...

...In this the British people are as ever somewhat ahead of their intellectual leaders in the media...

...the Europeans, including the British, not having had their own 9/11, were moved less...

...That now looks like a seriously flawed judgment...

...Last week I noted that the BBC had actually dropped its disinclination to use the word "terrorist" to describe the London bombers...

...rance of her son's involvement in the plot emphasized just how disturbingly embedded the terrorists had been in the everyday life of peaceable Britain—and, presumably, how many more may still be out there...

...But last week the phony war ended...

...For the last few years, since 9/11, and especially since the invasion of Iraq, Britain has been fighting a phony war, like the first eight months of World War ii, one that some even doubted was a war at all...

...opinion polls showed a sudden leap in support for Tony Blair, giving him his first net positive approval in more than two years...

...uk) long enough to get past the window dressing, you can have a little taste of what they have been fed by their religious leaders, such as this tidbit from a March 2004 sermon: "Take up positions in the Jihad, don't give in to sleep, and don't give in to failure and disgrace...

...To beat this fundamental weakness, the United Kingdom will need the active support of decent Muslim leaders who will urge the abandonment of the culture of victimhood hospitable to the mindset of the suicide bomber...

...Mrs...

...By far the biggest challenge the government will now face in this new phase of the war on terror will be to redress the damage done by years of a policy of politically correct multicul-turalism that has allowed alternative subcultures to grow like tumors in British society...

...In London, police had been painstakingly examining the remnants of the explosion on the No...

...The news seems already to have profoundly altered the debate in Britain about the war on terror...

...BY GERARD BAKER WHILE LONDON POLICE were sifting through the wreckage of three subway trains and a bus on the evening of July 7, an agitated woman was calling the emergency hotline that had been arranged for people to report missing family members and friends...

...When she saw the TV news of the bombings that Thursday that killed more than 50 people, she became alarmed for her son's safety, and after repeatedly calling his cell phone without success, reported him missing to the hotline operator...

...Expect the British parliament to agree quickly to domestic security measures that will go way beyond the Patriot Act in the United States...