This article by Thomas Hüetlin and Britta Sandberg in Spiegel (thanks to DFS) about the recently arrested British jihadists has this tagline: “They came from successful immigrant families and their English neighbors described them as nice boys who seemed harmless. So what turned the British Muslim youth behind this month’s massive terror plot into extremists?”
Hmmm. Could it be the jihad imperative as taught by the Qur’an and Sunnah, and emphasized as a Muslim duty by all the schools of Islamic law? Naaah.
Why didn’t this Muslim convert, Stewart-Whyte, get instructed in the true, peaceful Islam we keep hearing so much about? Why can’t its adherents manage to convince converts that theirs is the genuine article?
High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire is a quiet town 35 minutes from the hectic life of downtown London. Its residents can relax at a cricket match in their white outfits, tend to their roses and never feel the need to rush out onto their lawns in their pyjamas to lock up a forgetful child’s bicycle — which is almost always still there the next day.
About 100,000 people live in this idyllic commuter town, which seems to have preserved many of the more pleasant aspects of old England without ignoring the present. When the British Empire disintegrated, about 15,000 Pakistanis moved to High Wycombe, which would eventually boast one of the island’s first ethnic Asian mayors. The town is widely seen as a “successfully integrated community.”
But for at least one resident of High Wycombe, Jennifer Baker, the world is no longer what it once seemed. Baker lives at Number 17, Hepplewhite Close. Late in the night of August 10, several police cars stopped in front of a house down the street, Number 31, and dragged a man from a red Nissan Micra, a man Baker says was always a “particularly nice boy.”
This particularly nice boy was named Don Stewart-Whyte until six months ago, when he converted to Islam and took the name Abdul Waheed. He and 23 accomplices were accused of having plotted to blow up 12 airliners en route from Britain to the United States. According to Home Secretary John Reid, the authorities had amassed “substantial evidence” against the would-be attackers. This evidence presumably includes intercepted emails and wiretapped phone conversations, but also large sums of money, weapons and bomb-making chemicals. A suitcase containing explosive chemicals was found in woods near High Wycombe on Thursday. Videos featuring the likely martyrs surfaced on Friday, and on the same day authorities in the Pakistani city of Bahawalpur arrested Matiur Rehman, a high-ranking al-Qaida terrorist believed to be behind the thwarted attack.
Read it all.