Britain's Homeless

It didn’t take long for the sound of appeasement’s drums to fill the air. Barely a week following the terrorist attacks in London, a new report has been issued by the former Royal Institute if International Affairs (now called “Chatam House”) that seeks to link this attack to – you guessed it – Britain’s support of the United States in the War on Terror. The report’s authors – both academics at British Universities – conclude that UK military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has made Britain a more likely target for terrorism, claiming that there is “no doubt” that the “invasion has enhanced propaganda, recruitment and fund-raising for al-Qaeda”. My simple answer to this is: So what?

Leave it to a couple of academics in Britain’s cloistered system of higher education to draw such a simplistic conclusion and call it “scholarship”. Yes, I will grant that the enemy, now under attack in many quarters around the world, has stepped up its recruitment of suicide bombers and may, in fact, be finding more takers. Certainly this seems to be the case in the London bombings, where four apparently “normal” British Muslims were brainwashed into strapping explosives to their bodies in a suicidal/homicidal jihad against London commuters. These young men were somehow recruited to do such an evil deed – and I will grant prima facie that the war in Iraq and the relentless pursuit of the terrorists world-wide made their recruitment easier.

But this is hardly the lesson we should be taking from the London attacks of July, 7. While it surprises me not at all that university academics and others on the Left would seek to pile on the U.S. and its approach to the war on Terror by drawing the simplest cause/effect relationship (i.e. “terrorists hate the US; Britain and the US are allies; therefore the terrorist also hate Britain”), its practical impact is to cloud the deeper – and far more troubling – issue: What causes young, well-bred young men to do such evil things?

Now, I’m no sociologist – but I do have a theory. For the past thirty years, Britain – as well as the whole of Europe – has been engaged in an orgy of "multi-culturalism". First came liberalized immigration laws that opened the floodgates to the former colonies, filling first London and then other major British cities with a steady stream of Indians, Pakistanis, Africans and Arabs. Under the goals of creating a diverse cultural palette, social norms and rules were created to encourage the maintenance of cultural and social practices – language, religion, social customs and diet. While the food in London got remarkably better, the result was to enshrine these minorities in a cocoon of their own making; shielding them from what it meant to be British and to live in a place fitting of its name: the United Kingdom. Instead of building a diverse and assimilated society, the efforts of the multi-culturalists had the opposite effect: segregated groups who see their first allegiance to their former land and their current faith.

This self-segregation had unintended consequences – especially among young muslims. It is here that the lack of assimilation into Britain itself created a particularly vulnerable younger generation – not steeped in first hand knowledge of their own history and -- unlike their parents – often without knowing what it means to actually live and work in the Muslim world. For these young men, Islam is an abstraction. In the right hands, such an abstraction can be used as a weapon, an incitement to action against a foe that doesn’t actually exist.

The real threat to the UK is not the United States, nor the brave efforts of the Blair government to stand aside the US in the war on terrorism. The real threat is the generation of Muslims in Britain who exist without roots and largely without a home. These homeless are seeking a connection to something greater than themselves, and have found it in dogma that inspires, cajoles and mobilizes them to kill people.