Seething Unease Shaped British Bombers’ Newfound Zeal.
Related: Profile of Salafi jihadists….
Update: A British Jihadist.
Update II: This part of the article from The Prospect (an interview with a gleeful radical) is interesting:
Taseer: Given that the Koran is incontestable to the letter, and that it is unique because there is no another religion in which there is a text so pure, handed down from God to man, can there be a moderate Muslim?
Butt: No. You’ve hit the nail on the head. If someone believes that it’s the incontestable word of Allah, how can he take a moderate view? We must fight if it is the will of Allah. I don’t want to say that Muslims don’t believe in Allah, but what I will say is that their faith in Allah is weak. They fear man the same way that the Jews feared the pharaoh, who they feared more than Allah and that’s why they were afraid to do anything against him, until Moses came and liberated them. The lack of leadership in the Muslim community is simply because they are too afraid to stand up against this so-called undefeatable giant of the United States.
Taseer: Coming back to the youth, are they angry?
Butt: Many are from quite wealthy families, as I am.
Taseer: So you don’t see this rise of extremism among British Muslims as rooted in economic disadvantage?
Butt: I think that’s a myth, pushed forward by so-called moderate Muslims. If you look at the 19 hijackers on 9/11, which one of them didn’t have a degree? Muhammad Atta was an engineer [he was actually an architect and town planner] at the highest level. His Hamburg lecturer said, “I didn’t have a student like him.†These people are not deprived or uneducated; they are the peak of society. They’ve seen everything there is to see and they are rejecting it outright because there is nothing for them. Most of the people I sit with are in fact university students, they come from wealthy families….
The above is why I have mooted the idea of a new historically contextualized view of the Koran as being an option for some “Muslims.” Right now this is a discounted view, and so you have to push the argument over to one of interpretation on the next level. If you read the interview above though, note how sly some of the redefinitions of terms of the radical are.
Note: Value added comments appreciated!