Replies

... But we cannot and must not connect disadvantage, even the self-imposed kind, with political extremism. The case of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh proves that. He is a little younger than me but we grew up less than a mile away from each other. Unlike Ahmed, however, I went to the local state school because my father was a cab driver and private education was out of the question.

Ahmed was wealthy. His parents sent their son to the best private school in the area, Forest School Snaresbrook, which was renowned for the quality of its education and the cost of its tuition. A leading school, free health care, safety and security, government programs to prevent racial or religious discrimination and an assured future: not too shabby.

Yet Ahmed became the leader of the gang that arranged the kidnapping of American journalist Daniel Pearl. He, of course, was the gentle and liberal young man who was forced to “admit” to being a Jew before his head was cut off and the video shown to the world. Ahmed had many Jewish classmates and Jewish teachers. They liked him and he, they say, appeared to like them.

A few streets away from where Ahmed and I grew up is one of Ilford’s many synagogues. Last year the rabbi, the cantor, the president and the warden of the Ilford Federation Temple were walking home from a service when they were attacked by seven young Muslim men. Shouting, “You’re dead, Jews,” the youths kicked and punched the four Jewish leaders and hit them with bottles.

Three years ago, the Ilford home of Anjem Choudary, the former British head of Al-Muharjiroun, a hard line Islamic group, was raided by anti-terrorist police. Another watched Ilford man is Sultana Parvin, from the organization Hizb ut-Tahrir. This group wants all Muslims to unite in a single Islamic state under the law of the Koran. After the London terror attacks, he said that “the whole discussion that should be taking place is why British foreign policy is so cruel.”

So what does a former local boy conclude from all this? I was back home just two weeks ago and this is what I found: The enormously successful British idea of what is best described as an “assimilation blanket” simply does not succeed with a significant number of young Muslims.

Most Irish, Jewish, West Indian, Hindu and Sikh people in Britain have a strong and usually absolute sense of Englishness. They even embrace local nuance and regional pride. It’s always the British way to absorb by indifference rather than try too hard to make newcomers part of the body national. The French do this and fail miserably. No blanket but an attempt to smother immigrants with the rough tricolour, generally out of an insecure nationalism.

Yet with British Muslims, the young have become far more devout and separatist and hopeless than their parents. Rather than embracing or trying to change the culture, they have rejected it. Compromise by the host community merely encourages the most militant that they are winning the battle. And nice old, ordinary Walthamstow becomes a model of failure and a rather sick icon of what went wrong.
—— National Post [Canada]

For all Danny’s great contacts, his stories weren’t leaping off the Journal’s front page. While he was writing about trading in Afghan currency, other correspondents were packing up to cover the war next door. But by late November, seven journalists had been killed there. “It’s too dangerous,” Danny said at a meal with other reporters before Thanksgiving. “I just got married, my wife is pregnant, I’m just not going to do it.”
Quietly, though, Danny was onto something much more compelling than the daily bombing reports: he’d found links between the ISI and a “humanitarian” organization accused of leaking nuclear secrets to bin Laden.

The group — Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (U.T.N.) — was headed by Dr. Bashiruddin Mahmood, former chief of Pakistan’s nuclear-power program and a key player in the development of its atomic bomb. Mahmood — who’d been forced out of his job in 1998 after U.S. intelligence learned of his affection for Muslim extremists — acknowledged making trips to Afghanistan as well as meeting Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. But he claimed that all they’d discussed was the building of a flour mill in Afghanistan. As for bin Laden, Mahmood said he knew him only as someone who “was helping in different places, renovating schools, opening orphan houses, and [helping with] rehabilitation of widows.”

That’s not how the C.I.A. saw it. According to the agency, Mahmood and another nuclear scientist, Chaudry Abdul Majid, met with bin Laden in Kabul a few weeks before 9/11 — and not to talk about whole-wheat bread. U.S. pressure got the scientists detained in late October, and they admitted having provided bin Laden with detailed information about weapons of mass destruction. But, for what was termed “the best interests of the nation,” they were released in mid-December.

All this had been reported. What no one had tumbled to, except for Danny and Journal correspondent Steve LeVine, were U.T.N.’s connections to top levels of Pakistan’s ISI and its military. General Hamid Gul — a former ISI director with pronounced anti-American, radically Islamist views — identified himself as U.T.N.’s “honorary patron” and said that he had seen Mahmood during his trip to brief bin Laden. Danny and LeVine also discovered that U.T.N. listed as a director an active-duty brigadier general, and ran down a former ISI colonel who claimed that the agency was not only aware of Mahmood’s meeting with bin Laden months before his detention but had encouraged his Afghan trips.

“It could be a big scoop — like your scoop,” Danny told Mir. But the Journal played the story on page 8 on Christmas Eve and it passed without impact....———The Jounalist and the Terrorist (Daniel Pearl and Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh)
Vanity Fair ^ | August 2002 | Robert Sam Anson