Blair "Shocked" that London Bombers were British

Addressing questions at the House of Commons, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he found it shocking that the four men inplicated in the July 7 series of terrorist bombings that killed more than 50 Londoners were British-born Muslims. If Mr. Blair is truly "shocked" by the revelation, then that fact only demonstrates just how blind he is to the reality around him. Young British-born Muslims have been linked several Islamist terror attacks abroad over the past few years, and radical Muslim clerics and agitators have made London the epicenter of their outreach activity since the early 1990s. Just a week before the London attacks, the Sunday Times reported that more than 70 British-born Muslims had travelled to Iraq to attack British and American troops there.

The growing problem of militants from Britain travelling to Iraq has been highlighted by Eliza Manningham-Buller, director-general of MI5, in recent briefings to Tony Blair.

The MI5 boss warned the prime minister that would-be suicide bombers and other fighters who want to kill British and American troops were using “a number of routes” to get to Iraq from Britain. Most have travelled to Damascus in Syria before being smuggled over the border to meet rebel leaders.

Senior police sources say that they are trying to unravel a British-based network recruiting “martyrs” for the Islamic “holy war” in Iraq. The operation emerged following the arrest last week of a 40-year-old man who is alleged to have shared a house in Manchester with Idris Bazis, a 41-year-old French Algerian who blew himself up during a terrorist attack in Iraq four months ago.

Anti-terrorist detectives believe that Bazis travelled from Britain to Iraq in January after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, appealed for volunteers to carry out suicide attacks in a bid to undermine the election.

“We shouldn’t be surprised that there are people travelling from the UK to Iraq to fight or try to fight,” a security official said. “You’re looking at dozens of people in total coming from the UK since the war.”

The official said that the recruits were mainly young Muslim men in their twenties and thirties who had volunteered independently of each other. They ranged across the social classes.

Thus, Mr. Blair can hardly claim to have been unaware of increasingly violent tendencies of many young Muslims in Britain. More damning is the recently leaked UK government white paper detailing radical Islamist recruitment of British-born Muslim men in UK universities. That this paper, or numerous other warnings from British intelligence regarding the growth of Islamic extremism in Britain, never crossed the desk of the prime minister, or that he has never once been briefed on the gravity of the situation, simply is not credible.

This leaves us with two equally distressing possibilities. Either Mr. Blair's faith in the fantasy of multiculturalism is so strong that he simply ignored the mountain of evidence warning of pending violence from Britain's Muslim community because that evidence wasn't "politically correct." Or, perhaps worse, he feels he has to profess surprise at terrorists' origin in a "politically correct" rhetorical effort to deny the evidence of rising Islamist extremism in Britain and deflect blame from the Muslim community, which now comprises a significant percentage of the electorate. In either event, it is clear that the current British government is unable, or unwilling, to admit the extent or even source of the problem - the burgeoning Muslim community in Britain. If the British PM feels compelled to lie about being shocked that British-born Muslims would attack London, what hope is there that the UK government can successfully combat the problem ... and what hope is there for the survival of Britain and British culture in the long run?