In this former industrial town north of London, a small group of young Britons whose parents emigrated from Pakistan after World War II have turned against their families' new home. They say they would like to see Prime Minister Tony Blair dead or deposed and an Islamic flag hanging outside No. 10 Downing St.
They swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden and his goal of toppling Western democracies to establish an Islamic superstate under Shariah law, like Afghanistan under the Taliban. They call the Sept. 11 hijackers the "Magnificent 19" and regard the train bombings in Madrid, Spain, as a clever way to drive a wedge into Europe.
On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in Slough, west of London, their leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke of his loyalty to bin Laden. If Europe fails to heed bin Laden's offer of a truce -- provided that all foreign troops be withdrawn from Iraq in three months -- Muslims will no longer be restrained from attacking the Western countries that host them, Mohammad said.
"All Muslims of the West will be obliged," he said, to "become his sword" in a new battle. Europeans should take heed, he added, saying, "It is foolish to fight people who want death -- that is what they are looking for."
On working-class streets of old industrial cities like Crawley, Luton, Birmingham and Manchester, and in the Arab enclaves of Germany, France, Switzerland and other parts of Europe, intelligence officials say a fervor for militancy is intensifying and becoming more open.
In Hamburg, Mustafa Yoldas, the director of the Council of Islamic Communities, saw a correlation to the discord in Iraq.
"This is a very dangerous situation at the moment," Yoldas said. "My impression is that Muslims have become more and more angry against the United States."
Hundreds of young Muslim men are answering the call of extremists into groups affiliated or aligned with al-Qaeda, intelligence and counterterrorism officials in the region say.
Even more worrying, said a senior British counterterrorism official, is that the level of "chatter" -- communications among suspected terrorist figures and their supporters -- has markedly increased since bin Laden's warning to Europe this month. The spike in chatter has given rise to acute worries that planning is advanced toward another strike in Europe.
"Iraq dramatically strengthened their recruitment efforts," one counterterrorism official said. He added that some mosques now display photos of US soldiers fighting in Iraq alongside bloody scenes of bombed-out Iraqi neighborhoods. Detecting actual recruitments is almost impossible, the official said, because it is typically done face to face.
And recruitment is paired with a compelling new strategy to bring the fight to Europe.
Members of al-Qaeda have "proven themselves to be extremely opportunistic, and they have decided to try to split the Western alliance," the official continued. "They are focusing their energies on attacking the big countries" -- the US, Britain and Spain -- so as to "scare" the smaller states.
Some Muslim recruits are going to Iraq, counterterrorism officials in Europe say, but more are remaining home, possibly joining cells that could help with terror logistics or begin operations like the one that came to notice when the British police seized 500kg of ammonium nitrate, a key bomb ingredient, in late March, and arrested nine Pakistani-Britons, five of whom have been charged with trying to build a terrorist bomb.
Stoking that anger are some of the same Islamic clerics who preached violence and martyrdom before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
On Friday, Abu Hamza, the cleric accused of tutoring Richard Reid before he tried to blow up a Paris-to-Miami jetliner with explosives hidden in his shoes, urged a crowd of 200 outside his former Finsbury Park mosque to embrace death and the "culture of martyrdom."
Though British Home Secretary (interior minister) David Blunkett has sought to strip Hamza of his British citizenship and deport him, the legal battle has dragged on for years while Hamza keeps calling down the wrath of God.
Despite tougher anti-terrorism laws, the police, prosecutors and intelligence chiefs across Europe say they are struggling to contain the openly seditious speech of Islamic extremists, some of whom, they say, have been inciting young men to suicidal violence since the 1990s.
One chapter in Mohammad's lectures these days is "The Psyche of Muslims for Suicide Bombing."
The authorities say that laws to protect religious expression and civil liberties have the result of limiting what they can do to stop hateful speech. In the case of foreigners, they say they often are left to seek deportation, a lengthy and uncertain process and subject to legal appeals, during which the suspect can keep inciting attacks.
That leaves the authorities to resort to less effective means, such as mouse-trapping Islamic radicals with immigration violations in hopes of making a deportation case stick.
"In many countries, the laws are liberal and it's not easy," an official said.
While some clerics, like Abu Qatada -- said to be the spiritual counselor of Mohamed Atta, who led the Sept. 11 hijacking team -- remain in prison in Britain without charge, others like Mohammad, leader of a movement called Al Muhajiroun, carry on a robust ideological campaign.
Mainstream Muslims are outraged by the situation, saying the actions of a few are causing their communities to be singled out for surveillance and making the larger, non-Muslim population distrustful of them.
Muhammad Sulaiman, a stalwart of the mainstream Central Mosque here, was penniless when he arrived from the Kashmiri frontier of Pakistan in 1956. He raised money to build the Central Mosque and now leads a campaign to ban Al Muhajiroun radicals from the city's 10 mosques.
"This is show-off business," he says in accented English. "I don't want these kids in my mosque."
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
RSS