As well as a multiculturalist refusal to look a problem in the eye. From the Globe and Mail, with thanks to Z:
LEEDS — On a summer evening, the Leeds neighbourhood of Burley takes on a red-brick, working-class charm, as families sit on their front porches and eat fish and chips, and the thin walls of the tightly packed row houses echo with domestic bluster.
It is a ramshackle, urban mix of tie-dyed students playing their music from top-floor windows, Jamaican families cooking fish-head stew in the back yard, and a great many Pakistanis, of every imaginable faith and occupation.
It is the kind of neighbourhood where the Mahmood Halal Butcher sits next door to Luciano’s Pizza, Donairs, Burgers and Southern Fried Chicken, whose sign unfortunately reads “Fastest Gun in the West — Leaves the Rest for Dead.”
Unfortunately, because right across the road is the ugly council-owned townhouse that appears to have been the laboratory that produced the bombs that killed more than 50 people in a terrifying series of explosions on the London transit system last Thursday.
Into this house, on irregular occasions and in a variety of subcompact cars, shuttled the four young men who police now believe killed themselves in the bombings. It was also visited by a number of older men who may have been the ringleaders, recruiters and trainers of their Islamist terrorist cell. For that reason, and because the house may well be packed with explosives, investigators were virtually taking the building apart last night, and moved out 600 of the neighbourhood’s residents.
But the four now suspected of being the bombers did not hail from these rough-and-tumble quarters.
In at least two cases, they seem to have come from comfortable middle-class backgrounds, where there was little to suggest that they would become major terrorists.
That’s because of the persistent inability of authorities to admit that terrorism does not spring from poverty, and that the connection between the two has been disproven many times. But they can’t admit this partly because they fear the alternative: if terrorism doesn’t come from poverty, then from what does it come? This is a question that they fear even to ask.