Posted on 08/11/2006 2:02:13 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
LONDON - One was an athletic teenager who had grown into a devout young man, another a soccer-loving convert to Islam. The youngest was 17, the oldest 35. Many were born in Britain and all were reared here.
As police held 24 young British Muslims accused of plotting devastating airline bombings, both the authorities and their neighbors sought Friday to understand how ordinary communities spawned a terrifying plot.
Police have not identified suspects, but 19 names were made public Friday by the Treasury after the government froze their bank accounts. They have names of Muslim origin, many of them common in Pakistan. At least 14 of the 24 live in London, four in leafy High Wycombe, 30 miles away, and two in the central city of Birmingham.
It is unclear how the men met or who the ringleader is, although suspicion has fallen on the only one identified who is over 30 — Shamin Mohammed Uddin, 35, of east London.
The father of three of the arrested men, Faisal Hussain, collapsed into tears, telling Britain's ITV News that his sons — Nabeel, Umair and Mehran — weren't involved any plot.
"They went to prayer and they were Muslims, that is the only thing they were guilty of," he said through an interpreter in an interview broadcast Friday.
At least nine of the suspects lived in Walthamstow, a typically polyglot London neighborhood of modest brick houses and small apartment blocks, halal butchers, pubs and fast-food restaurants. It is an ethnically mixed community with a smattering of affluent professionals and a large Muslim population served by several mosques.
"Walthamstow's a happy, chilled-out community," said resident Hajra Mir. "We weren't expecting this."
That sense of shock was repeated across the neighborhood. Residents said it is a friendly, quiet area where people respect their neighbors. Several of the suspects had lived there for many years and attended local schools.
But several men from the neighborhood have been linked to the Saviour Sect — an offshoot of a disbanded radical Islamist group, al-Muhajiroun, which was based in nearby Tottenham and gained notoriety for praising the Sept. 11 hijackers.
A Walthamstow leader of the sect, Abdul Muhid, has been charged with soliciting murder during an angry protest earlier this year over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons published in a Danish newspaper. He had previously been arrested for calling for the killing of British troops while proselytizing at a Walthamstow market.
Last fall, a rally planned by the group at a community center was banned by local officials after organizers distributed leaflets portraying an Islamic fighter holding a rocket launcher outside the prime minister's Downing Street residence.
Local Muslim leaders say the area's major mosques are vigilant about keeping radicals away. But several of the suspects appeared to fit the pattern of radicalization seen in the bombers who attacked the London transit system: young men born and bred in Britain, raised in moderate homes, but drawn to a more uncompromising version of Islam than that practiced by their parents.
Suspect Assad Sarwar, 26, lived with his parents in a run-down house in High Wycombe.
Neighbor Nawaz Chaudhry, 17, said Sarwar had become increasingly strident after the July 7, 2005, transit system bombings that killed 52 people.
"He started talking about terrorism and acting like it's OK to blow up people," Chaudhry said.
Waheed Zaman, 22, grew up in Walthamstow, across from the modern brick Masjid-e-Umer mosque. Neighbors remembered an athletic boy with plenty of non-Muslim friends who had grown increasingly devout in recent years, wearing traditional dress and growing a beard.
"As a kid, religion was never a problem for him," said a childhood friend who gave only his first name, Darren. "I'm a Christian and it was never a problem for him."
Residents said Zaman, a biochemistry student who headed the Islamic Society at London Metropolitan University, did community work, urging local kids to attend the mosque and stay away from drugs.
A few blocks away, Oliver Savant grew up with his English mother and Iranian father. Neighbors recall a youth who loved soccer but had become increasingly isolated from his neighbors after he converted to Islam a few years ago, changing his name to Ibrahim.
"Oliver started putting on Muslim robes and growing his beard long a few years back," next-door neighbor Paul Kleinman, 66, told The Guardian newspaper.
He was one of at least three converts to Islam among the suspects. Neighbors identified one of the High Wycombe suspects as Don Stewart-Whyte, 21, a recent convert who had changed his name to Abdul Waheed. Another High Wycombe suspect, Umar Islam, 28, had a West Indian background and changed his name from Brian Young when he converted two or three years ago.
"In my heart I don't think this boy is bad," said next-door neighbor Parkhash Dhanjal, 62. "He is a nice boy."
One of the transit system bombers, Jamaican-born Jermaine Lindsay, was a convert, as was Briton Richard Reid, who was convicted of trying to blow up a trans-Atlantic airliner in 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes.
___
Associated Press Writer Katie Fretland contributed to this report from High Wycombe.
A British police officer, second right, stands by as Muslim men attend Friday prayers at a mosque in the Walthamstow area of north east London, near where a number of homes were raided by police, Friday Aug. 11, 2006. British authorities on Friday named 19 of the suspects being held in connection with a plot to blow up U.S.-bound commercial jets and ordered their assets frozen, and Pakistan announced five new arrests. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)
and if they don't stop puzzling,, the headline may soon read
Homegrown terrorists overrun Britain
Hmmm, what made him into a monster?
Was it his athleticism?
Was it his love for soccer?
Then what could it have been.....oh yeah, the last part of the sentence, you know, the convert to Islam part?
LOL!
could have been taking too many header shots on the soccer field,, and not his Imam..
Coming soon ... to a theater near you.
In 20 years we'll have the same problems as Britain. Isn't multiculturalism wonderful?
It's really very simple, the Queen needs to step in here and lay out what British citizenship means, and the "alternatives to TOTAL compliance".
Nothing makes a Brit snap to like a direct Royal command.
It will feature a group of White Christian Michigan Militia members pissed off at the US Gubment, and their plot to blow up planes.
LOL
They are nothing more than terrorist training camps.
Some were converts, others had parents who moved to England NOT for the love of that country. All of them have one factor in common.
The truth is that they're breeding them there. Time for the Brits to face reality. They didn't face reality in WWII until the bombs rained down.
Little by little and without notice English muslims practiced their hate, until one day.....
"Oliver started putting on Muslim robes and growing his beard long a few years back," next-door neighbor Paul Kleinman, 66, told The Guardian newspaper.
He was one of at least three converts to Islam among the suspects. Neighbors identified one of the High Wycombe suspects as Don Stewart-Whyte, 21, a recent convert who had changed his name to Abdul Waheed. Another High Wycombe suspect, Umar Islam, 28, had a West Indian background and changed his name from Brian Young when he converted two or three years ago.
What do you want to bet they insist on being called Oliver, Don and Brian during the investigation/trial?
Ha,ha you have that right. The irony of the whole thing is that the I-Fs will cut the heads off all the Hollyweird hedonists first before anyone else. As a kid I remember the unending supply of movies about WWII where the Nazis were never depicted as anything but utter evil. There was no attempt to "understand" them. Todays moviemakers cannot make the distinction between evil madmen who would like nothing better than to cut their heads off and their fellow Republican citizens who are trying to protect their witless liberal fellow citizens.
They probably read newspapers and watched TV, in addition to studying their Holy War manual, without being told that these institutions make their money by dishonestly encouraging the hatred of their own countries and sowing political divisiveness that creates the so-called news.
So, they believed what they were learned and decided to blame and destroy the people who they were told were responsible for all the misery in the world.
Christianity down, Islamicism up, and a crusade is reborn.
The Brits are in quicksand... and they don't even know it. Being born in Britain means absolutely nothing to a devout, follower of Islam. While that doesn't make he/she a potential killer... it does mean that they will protect those of their own who are!
"Hmmm, what made him into a monster?"
Malt vinegar. It's Satan's devil juice.
The kids were raised in the U.K., but the parent is unassimilated enough to be unable to communicate even a fairly simple statement in English. THAT is a problem.
a recent convert who had changed his name to Abdul Waheed.
Looks like the job should be easy. Go down to the local name changing place and there you will find the usual suspects.
Well, let's see.
1. English schools no longer teach children to be proud of their country, so they have little if any emotional attachment to it and no idea of Britain's profound benefits to mankind
2. British mosques are NOT vigilant about screening out radicals.
3. English citizens are increasingly secular, providing their children with no concept of a God who values human life. The children are therefore defenseless against radical Islamic propoganda that promises them power and inculcates them with imaginary grievances.
4. England's insistence on multicultural relativism robs their children of any standards by which to judge good and evil.
Yes, there's just no understanding how these young men could have become Islamofascists.
You're so right. The only thing this story reveals is how surprised people are when yet another layer of the onion is peeled back....and again, and again, and again....Islam is revealed as the vile poison it truly is. This in essence is what this story is reporting. Simply the dichotomy of the folks who cannot see this evil and those who are aware of the threat. The freedoms of Western societies are precisely what is being used against us. The time for equivocation is over. This threat must be dealt with.
The notable thing about this article for me is the puzzlement. Why the puzzlement? There was a shock here in the UK when they found out that the transit bombers were British even though it was known that 100 - 1000 men from muslim areas like Tipton in the Midlands had gone to abroad to do the jihad thing. So why the shock when some of them decided to go that much further? Then we had the cartoons issue in London and now this. But still surprise! They'll be headbutting brick walls next and being shocked that it gives them a headache.
"Britain" isn't puzzled. All the "puzzled" subjects interviewed here are Muslim immigrants. Their "puzzlement" is FAKE. They are all LYING.
Seems I 've heard that before but he was a good boy.
Who is stupid enough to be puzzled by muslim terrorist at this late date? It is simple England, the muslims simply want to rule the world, if you don't want to go along with it, you will be killed by them. No big puzzle there!
"They went to prayer and they were Muslims...that is the only thing they were guilty of"
The way things go these days...that's enough .
Did it ever occur to the authorities and their neighbors that the COMMUNITY didn't "spawn" anything. These were moral cripples from the outset, and the community is the VICTIM, not the author.
And what's to "understand?" Do you try to "understand" a rabid dog? Do you try to mind-meld with a cockroach? Do you give cancer some couch time? No. You eradicate them. You crush them. You stamp them out.
So it should be with Islam.
And if anyone is serious about "understanding" the nature of this threat, they're first going to have to remove their PC blinders and take a chance that the root of the problem is the very nature of this filthy religion itself.
You know, there's an amazing difference between Muslims and Christians. When your Christian neighbor gets saved or finds Jesus, you don't have to worry about him coming back home and plotting to kill you if you aren't quite so devout.
Naw. I eat that on my fish and chips all the time and I only occasionally sacrifice puppies to Satan. And I can quit anytime I want. Really.
Now, bangers and mash, on the other hand...
"They went to prayer and they were Muslims, that is the only thing they were guilty of,"
"In my heart I don't think this boy is bad," said next-door neighbor Parkhash Dhanjal, 62. "He is a nice boy."
Those 2 quotes explain it all.
The "religious" and social environment the "boys" lived in encouraged them to commit murder against people outside of their "religion"
Also, why are the police protecting mosques? Is that to send us the message that the Brits are evil and want to attack mosques? What a crock!
The Byzantines had a policy of tossing the Muzlims out of any area that they conquered, they felt that they couldn't be trusted to integrate, convert.
I can't see why they are puzzled. It is simple. The ethnic Pakistani diaspora make a wonderfully rich group for false flag or even direct recruiting. Either AQ the ISI or both are doing the recruiting. The objective is to weaken the UK and US - economically, in terms of will to fight, and ultimately, geopolitically. There, I've done MI5's and MI6's job for free. They should welcome this, my rates are normally quite high.
The Byzantines were very prescient, it seems.
What human being picks this up and thinks this is true, and or believe or cares what these idiot parents, who obviously were either complicit or not being good parents, think about their stupid terrorist kids that should never have disgraced the soil of Great Brittan. Gross stuff.
I am with you, but... one of my best friends is a highly educated Irish Catholic male adult from New England, and when I blamed my upcoming 4 hour wait at Logan Airport tomorrow on the frickin' Muzzie pigs, he countered that it was the Jooz' fault; that Mel Gibson's career was destroyed overnight and was a sinister plot to grab the headlines on CNN away from what should be #1, which is the Isreali atrocities in Beirut.
I kid you not for one iota of a second.
I am seriously considering not reading any world news in any form for awhile.
It seems that muslims have been allowed to come to England without any ties to England. They have not been compelled to assimilate and have been left to create little Irans, little Iraqs, little Pakinstans, little Syrias, little Egypts and little Arabias. In the name of freedom of worship, the Brits have allowed mosques to become the centers of sedition and treason. And have allowed those clerics to forment hatred and violence against their country and their people.
Nice boys don't try to blow up airplanes full of innocent men and women. When will Mulims stop blaming others and recognize the cancer within their religion.
25% of British Muslims think the Subway bombings were justified, and this sh*t still puzzles the Brits?
Holy crap, Brits are beocming as stupid as American liberals.
They paved paradise, put up a freakin' mosque.
A Walthamstow leader of the sect, Abdul Muhid, has been charged with soliciting murder during an angry protest earlier this year over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons published in a Danish newspaper. He had previously been arrested for calling for the killing of British troops while proselytizing at a Walthamstow market.
Last fall, a rally planned by the group at a community center was banned by local officials after organizers distributed leaflets portraying an Islamic fighter holding a rocket launcher outside the prime minister's Downing Street residence....
"He started talking about terrorism and acting like it's OK to blow up people...."
And yet, "We weren't expecting this."
Sigh. Where there's smoke, there's fire, don'cha know.
This is why so many of these "home-grown terrorists" are reasonably bright children of normal adults -- young adults who would be perfectly capable of living a normal life if they didn't have so much time on their hands while living in a socialism-induced malaise. There is a striking parallel between people like this (as well as the 9/11 hijackers) and American morons like Johnny bin Walker, New York City Jewish princess-turned-Peruvian revolutionary Lori Berenson, and that 1960s radical d!ckhead Abbie Hoffman. The one thing all of these people had in common is that they never had to work hard to earn a living.
I think it was Robert Bork who pointed out in one of his books that sheer boredom was one of the most underrated human conditions, in that it would often drive people to do things that even the most radical, zealous, misguided religious fervor would not.
That's what I feel like doing every time I read stories like this. ("He's such a nice boy. A few years ago he grew a beard, started dressing in white robes and refusing to shake hands with women. All he does is go to the mosque every day and read the Koran. He's a good boy. I just don't understand it...")
Good points, well made. Thank you.
Places like Al Bahah, however, are the realm of thousands of Third World guest workers, an inexhaustible poll of truck drivers and factory hands, manual laborers and domestics, shop clerks and secretaries, who welcome the jobs that many young Saudis don't want.
Bored young people with too much time on their hands: This is what the Saudis themselves regard as their seminal crisis, sown in the clash between borrowed modernization and threatened traditions- the root crisis from which a forest of others has sprung.
"The hijackers were a direct product of our social failures - a generation with no sense of what work entails, raised in a system that operated as a welfare state," a high-ranking government official told me. "We allowed them to grow up in pampered emptiness, until they turned to the bin Laden extremists in an effort to find themselves."
The debbil finds work for idle hands...
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