Word: britain
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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...
...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...
Here's another lesson from London. Human intelligence routinely trumps fancy and often legally problematic surveillance techniques. The key to discovering the plot was apparently a citizen from Britain's diverse Islamic community who, in the days after last summer's bombings in London, overheard something troubling. He contacted authorities. An investigation took root. Imagine: a Muslim man sitting across from a British intelligence official at a café, off hours. They have little in common. Some would say they are natural opponents. But a thread of shared interest leads to the passing of information and, a year later, to saving...
...sense of dread can be attributed in equal parts to the identities of the suspects (24 men and women believed to have been born in Britain, one of whom has already been released without charge), to the supposed imminence of the attacks and to their purported targets: more planes falling out of the sky. But our collective shudder is by now practically instinctive. Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have conditioned ourselves to spike every triumph in the struggle against terrorism with a shot of anxiety. Try as we might to secure the perimeter, we walk in the shadow of risk...
What's lost in the hand wringing about the vulnerabilities and security holes exposed by the London plot is how much the counterterrorism community got right. Over a year ago, Britain's MI5 launched an investigation that spanned at least three continents. Pakistani officials helped track the British suspects, and U.S. intelligence provided intercepts of the group's communications. "It was really a joint effort, the kind of cooperation you probably wouldn't have had before Sept. 11," says a U.S. official who is regularly briefed on terrorist threats...