By Don Melvin
Now that police allege the four men who detonated bombs on the London transport system last week were native-born British Muslims, the country may have a particularly combustible mix: strong networks of radical recruiters and a large population from which to recruit.
Britain has a relatively large Muslim population, spread in various areas throughout the country. Three of the suspects who investigators say may have been suicide bombers were from families of Pakistani origin living in or near Leeds, about 190 miles north of London.
No one doubts that the vast majority of British Muslims are law-abiding and patriotic. Muslim organizations have condemned last week's bombings, which killed at least 52 people, and promised to work to solve the crimes and prevent future attacks.
But as a small percentage of Muslim youth around the world have become, over the last 15 years, more susceptible to appeals from radicals, so too have British youth.
"There are a large number of Muslims who are relatively unassimilated and unintegrated into British society," said Jonathan Stevenson, a counterterrorism expert with the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. "So that makes it a fairly ripe recruiting ground."
According to a document commissioned by British Prime Minister Tony Blair after the train bombings in Madrid last year - and leaked last weekend to the Sunday Times - a network of "extremist recruiters" is circulating on British campuses.
The document said Britain may now be harboring thousands of al-Qaida sympathizers. Al-Qaida is the terrorist organization believed responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States - and perhaps last week's London bombings, as well.
With its teeming diversity and what were regarded, until recently, as lenient asylum laws, London has become in recent decades a center for Middle Eastern research institutes, political foundations and a host of Arab news organizations.
In the process, it also turned into a center for radical Muslim politics.
“You could say that London has become, for the exponents of radical Islam, the most important city in the Middle East," wrote Stephen Ulph, an expert on terrorism with the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based research organization.
London has been known for more than a decade as a hotbed of radical Islam. Osama bin Laden's public relations office was originally set up in here.
And many notorious terrorist crimes have had links to London. Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person in the U.S. charged in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, attended a London mosque led by the radical cleric Abu Hamza Masri.
So did Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," who tried to blow up an airliner in December 2001.
Omar Sheikh, sentenced to death for the murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002, was a British-born Pakistani from a prosperous middle-class background who became radicalized after seeing reports of the slaughter of Muslims of Bosnia.
The list goes on.
French officials, who felt the British were too free in allowing radical Islamists to operate, took to calling the city "Londonistan."
Stevenson said British authorities tended to feel that shutting radicals like Abu Hamza Masri down would only drive them underground and make them harder to keep an eye on.
In the end, authorities did act: the cleric is currently on trial on charges that include encouraging the murder of Jews and other non-Muslims.
But such lenience, analysts believe, allowed terrorism suspects to develop an effective network for recruiting. That, Ulph wrote a year and a half ago, "now makes the threat of an attack within the United Kingdom a very real danger."
Socioeconomic background does not appear to play a role in determining who is vulnerable to extremist appeals, said Magnus Ranstorp, director for the study of terrorism and political violence at the University of St. Andrew in Scotland.
"What is common is that they, at some stage in life, experienced a personal crisis that makes them susceptible for manipulation, that makes them susceptible for seeking belonging," he said. "And if they are at the wrong place at the wrong time, recruiters, more senior individuals, can really sort of brainwash them."
Beyond that, Ranstorp and Stevenson said the war in Iraq has pushed some young Muslims to radicalism.
The report prepared for Blair took the same view. Iraq, it said, is a "recruiting sergeant" for extremism.
In a published interview, Blair took issue with that analysis.
"September 11 happened before Iraq, before Afghanistan, before any of these issues and that was the worst terrorist atrocity of all," he said.
An estimated 1.8 million Muslims live in Britain, making up 3 percent of the population. Muslims have a long history here: Britain's first mosque was built in 1889.
The Muslim population burgeoned in the 1960s as waves of immigrants moved to Britain, many from Pakistan.
Analysts warned that a backlash now against British Muslims could lead to increased alienation among Muslim youth, making the situation in the country ever more threatening.
The fact that the London bombers were British is troubling, said Stevenson, "because it simply reinforces the view that the global jihad has essentially metastasized and has become a network which can recruit from anywhere."
"The situation in Europe is getting very close to a critical one," he said. "Radical Islam is on the rise and, given the number of Muslims that are in Europe - and given that that number is probably going to increase because of labor demands - this is something that national jurisdictions have got to get a hold of sooner rather than later".
