Such Lovely Lads

By Michael Elliott

The neighbors' tales had a depressingly familiar ring. One arrested man was "as good as gold, a normal lad"; another was a "nice guy" who liked to play soccer in the local park; a third, said someone who lived nearby, was "a very caring boy" who, on learning that her dog had died, said, "If you need me, I'm there for you."

Sweet. But if British authorities are right, those three nice lads and others were involved in a plot to blow airliners traveling from Britain to the U.S. out of the sky. The British last week arrested 24 suspects, one of whom was later released. Most of them were from London, although six were arrested in High Wycombe, a market town between London and Oxford, and two in the city of Birmingham, in the British Midlands. A British official says the group had been monitored for more than a year and intended to use ostensibly innocuous liquids to construct bombs that would then be detonated in flight by disguised iPods and other devices. The British authorities believe that if the group had attempted to carry out the plot, it probably would have been successful.

The dimensions of the plot and similarities to other atrocities in the past two decades strongly suggest that the homegrown jihadists were not acting alone. "There is an al-Qaeda link," says the British official. A possible connection may be Rashid Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani descent who left for Pakistan a few years ago, after the murder of his uncle. Rauf, whose brother Tayib was one of those arrested in Birmingham, was detained in Pakistan before the police raids in Britain. Rashid Rauf's arrest was one of the factors that precipitated the decision by the British authorities to roll up the network, on the assumption that news of his detention would soon leak to Britain. Pakistan's Interior Secretary Syed Kamal Shah told TIME that Rauf has ties to al-Qaeda. "He is the key man, a very important man," says Shah. Pakistani sources say more than 20 people have been arrested there in connection with the plane plot, some of them apparently connected to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a fanatic Islamic militant group that is thought to have been responsible for a suicide bombing at the U.S. consulate in Karachi in 2002 and the murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl that year. A Pakistani official says Rauf--possibly with others--had been "visiting the same places and people" in Pakistan as two of the suicide bombers in last year's attacks on the London subway.

The path that radical British Muslims take between their suburban homes and Pakistan is by now as depressingly familiar as tales of those radicals' good nature. But it is of vital importance to understanding why Britain has become a key location for international terrorist activity. There are 745,000 people of Pakistani origin living in Britain, and no other nation in the developed world has to deal with the same flow of extremist information and ideologies that is transmitted into Britain, one way or another, from radicals based in Pakistan. "The big problem for the British," says a French official, "is not only the size of their mostly Pakistani Muslim population but also that those Muslims communicate better and more comfortably with people and places back in Pakistan than they do with many elements of British society."

Extremist ideas from Pakistan would not take root in Britain if the ground there was not fertile. Sadly, it is. Although the British Muslim community, 1.6 million strong, is not the largest in Europe, it plays host, says French terrorism analyst Roland Jacquard, to "arguably the largest number of radicalized young men." Polls bear out that conclusion. In a survey for Britain's Channel 4 this year, no less than 22% of Muslims agreed with the proposition that the subway bombings were justified because of "British support for the war on terror." Those under 24 were twice as likely to excuse the attacks as those over 45. A recent Pew study found that 15% of British Muslims identify themselves with fundamentalists. And among those British Muslims surveyed, a remarkable 81%--a percentage higher than that for Muslims not just in France and Germany but also in Egypt and Jordan--said they thought of themselves as Muslims first and citizens of their native country second.

Why is Britain's Muslim community seemingly so susceptible to radical ideas? Some of the pat explanations of a few years ago have had to be discarded. The well-known radical mosques that were at the center of "Londonistan" in the 1990s have had their wings clipped; as the investigations into the subway bombings showed, most young radicals don't get their ideas from mosques at all. They gather in youth clubs, gyms, bookstores or simply in someone's back room. (In a poll released in September by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, only 2% of British Muslims said the mosque was their primary source of religious knowledge; 31% cited books, pamphlets, websites and videos.) Nor can it be easily argued that social deprivation or ethnic discrimination breeds radicalism; many of those arrested last week were from middle-class homes--the sort that send their children to university--in standard British multicultural neighborhoods, where Muslims, white Britons and more recent immigrants from Eastern Europe live together.

Plainly, for some devout Muslims, modern Britain--an almost crazily nondeferential, undisciplined, messy society--is an unappealing place. In the Channel 4 poll, 35% said they preferred to have Muslim neighbors, and 28% thought British society does not treat women with respect. Of those ages 18 to 24, 1 in 3 said they would like to live under Shari'a law. At the same time, a series of high-profile cases have soured relations between the police and some in the community. Many Muslims interviewed this week brought up, unprompted, Forest Gate, referring to a police raid on a house in that East London neighborhood that led in June to one Muslim's being shot in the shoulder, although nothing was found that led to terrorism-related charges. "I haven't trusted the police for a long time," said Zee, a law student coming out of a mosque in Walthamstow last Friday. "I didn't even trust them before the Forest Gate raid. Just because we're Muslims, we're being targeted."

And then there is the foreign policy of Tony Blair's government and its support for the Bush Administration in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East. That too shows up in polls and interviews as an explanation for growing disaffection. "One minute the British government is not letting you take iPods on a plane in case you detonate a bomb," says Beena Faridi, of Britain's Islamic Human Rights Commission. "But at the same time they're letting America fly bombs to and from Prestwick Airport [in Scotland] so that the Israelis can collectively punish Lebanon for the kidnap of these two soldiers. It seems that the government has a double standard in its value of life, and that's just going to fuel the isolation of the Muslim community." Says Faridi: "Everything is building up." Britain hasn't yet figured out how to calm it down.

With reporting by Reported by Aryn Baker/ New Delhi, Theunis Bates/ Walthamstow, Jessica Carsen/ London, Jumana Farouky/ London, J.F.O. McAllister/ London, Bruce Crumley/ Paris, Ghulam Hasnain/ Karachi, Adam Smith/ Birmingham and High Wycombe