The headline in the Telegraph’s article is “Middle Class and Britishâ€:
Twenty-four terrorist suspects being held last night over an alleged plot to blow up as many as 10 transatlantic jets include middle-class, well-educated young men born in Britain. At least one of them converted to Islam only recently.
As Britain remained on a “critical” level of alert, it emerged that among those arrested were the white son of a former Conservative Party worker, the son of an architect and an accountant and a heavily pregnant woman. Some had studied at university and came from families that owned several properties or ran their own businesses.
Anti-terrorist police were continuing to search properties in High Wycombe, Bucks, Walthamstow, in east London, and Birmingham. Sources said they had found “a number of things that are causing interest”. Many of those being questioned are believed to be Britons of Pakistani origin, although police have not confirmed that.
The Bank of England has released the names of 19 of the 24 suspects arrested so far. Not that you can tell anything from. Some of the names certainly look to me to be obvioius aliases. The newspaper accounts, rather deliberately as some have pointed out, have observed that, although a number of the suspects are males with Pakistani antecedents, others are Britons whose ancestry is British as far as anyone cares to look. There have also been reports that some of those apprehended are of Caribbean or North African origin and at least one woman. All that unites them, apparently, are a hatred of the United Kingdom and the United States and their adherence to Islam.
Or is it? We don’t have the details yet and, indeed, may never have them. I can’t help but believe that these young men (and, perhaps, women) have fallen under the influence of radical imams financed from abroad. The sort of prior restraint that would be required to prevent that from happening is very nearly as disquieting as the kind of ethnic or religious profiling that some are undoubtedly lurching towards.
UPDATE: What’s going on with British Muslims? Is it Britain’s foreign policy? Why do there appear to be relatively fewer radicalized American Muslims? All of these questions and many more are considered in Eteraz’s post, “Muslim Musings on British Muslims”.
