Britain Finally Faces Up to Its Homegrown Jihadist Problem
Scotland Yard estimates that at least 500 Britons have joined Islamic State.
On Monday last week British Prime Minister David Cameron proposed legislation to prevent citizens who joined the Islamic State and other terrorist groups from re-entering Britain to "wreak havoc." His proposal followed the Aug. 19 release of a video showing a jihadist who spoke with a British accent appearing to behead American journalist James Foley. One day after Mr. Cameron's announcement, the Islamic State posted a video showing the murder of American journalist Steven Sotloff, ostensibly by the same Briton.
The jihadist's nationality shocked Britain and the world. It shouldn't have. Scotland Yard estimates that at least 500 Britons have traveled to the Middle East to join the Islamic State. British-born terrorists have been the most numerous, violent and influential of European jihadists since well before 9/11.
Why Britain? The reasons include the nation's tradition as a sanctuary for dissidents; a defendant-friendly judiciary; a law-enforcement system with few Muslim informants; a profligate version of multiculturalism; and the misfortune of having Pakistan as the main source of Muslim immigrants.
Most jihadists who call Britain home aren't immigrants. They are the alienated children of immigrants. These second-generation immigrants regard Pakistan as their ideological lodestar, and like other British Pakistanis vacation there yearly—where they can contact that country's ample supply of extremists. The second-generation British Muslim is often subject to discrimination by "Anglos," yet he spurns his parents' folk Islam, along with their traditional ways. Into this cultural vacuum steps radical Islam, providing an identity that claims to be unique and modern.
British jihadism emerged in the early 1990s. Disaffected Muslims began flocking to the sermons of London's foreign-born imams, or to listen to their audiotapes, spewing anti-Semitism, homophobia and calls for violent jihad. Typically these preachers, regarded by the government as dissidents from overseas, were entitled to welfare benefits.
Among the welfare recipients was Abu Hamza, an Egyptian imam. His Finsbury FIF.LN +0.40% Park Mosque harbored an all-star team of terrorists—including "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, the 9/11 "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui, would-be Los Angeles airport Millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam, and Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who the Pakistani government says murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
For crimes including soliciting murder and inciting terrorism, Abu Hamza was sentenced in Britain to a mere seven years. He was eventually extradited to the U.S., where in May he was convicted on 11 charges, including conspiring to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon in 1999. Abu Hamza will be sentenced Sept. 9 and will almost certainly receive a life sentence.
For years British law enforcement did not consider foreign imams a domestic threat, since they preached against their countries of origin—such as Algeria, Syria, Egypt and Jordan. That perception ended on July 7, 2005, when four British Muslims detonated bombs in London that killed 52 commuters and injured another 700 on trains and buses.
The suicide bombers (three of Pakistani descent) died in the explosions. But prosecutors were unable to convict the surviving collaborators, in large part because British police were without ties or informants that could crack the code of silence of the Muslim community in Beeston, where the killers lived or trained.
This is tragically ironic because the U.K. takes pride in multiculturalism. But as Amartya Sen, the Nobel-laureate economist, puts it, what Britain has is "plural monoculturalism." This does not promote the mixing of different cultures in a national culture, but rather focuses on preserving cultural identity.
Thus alienated Muslims can learn from mosque, media and university that they should not, as the prominent Islamic Leicester Institute instructs Muslims, "accept British values or to adopt a British identity" but "express their own identities, explore their own histories, formulate their own values, pursue their own lifestyles."
Most British Muslims are loyal, upwardly mobile citizens, play cricket and football and enjoy pubs and often attend university. Yet to spend time, as I have, in the streets of Beeston, or to listen to sermons in London's radical mosques, is to enter a world where "infidels" are suspect, toleration proscribed and integration abhorred. In this universe young Muslim men often prefer to watch jihadist videos or heed the message of "Al-Wala' wa'l-Bara'" (Loyalty and Repudiation), a tract translated by a Saudi-backed London publisher that affirms "Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends," and "whoever of you takes them for friends is (one) of them."
Britain has fewer Muslims than France or Germany, yet its jihadists exceed the number in those countries. In 2006 U.K. authorities uncovered a plot to explode trans-Atlantic airliners bound for America with liquid explosives; liquids were henceforth banned from carry-on bags. All 19 suspects were British-Pakistanis with East London addresses.
As a result, a year later Jonathan Evans, then general director of British domestic security service MI5, acknowledged that there were 2,000 individuals known to be "involved in terrorist-related activity in the U.K." In 2008 Mr. Evans said there were more. Last year the new MI5 general director, Andrew Parker, noted that from Sept. 11, 2001, to the end of March 2013 "330 people were convicted of terrorism-related offences in Britain"—and all of them were British Muslims.
Nowhere else in Europe have authorities felt the need to release a jihadist head count, but in confidential briefings no Belgian, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish security official offered me estimates at a fraction of British appraisals. Britain possesses a deeply rooted and insular radical Islam culture. This is why British investigators are having such a tough time identifying the murderer of the two Americans and why British tweets praising the killings abound.
Mr. Leiken is the author of "Europe's Angry Muslims: the Revolt of the Second Generation" (Oxford University Press, 2012). His website is rsleiken.net.