Reactions: The Muslim Community of London

Dan Gillmor — a proponent of “citizen journalism” and tech expert — whose blog at Bayosphere is always worth visiting, posted this Friday:

My friend Milverton Wallace, a London resident who’s a journalist and educator, told me this morning of his day yesterday and gave me permission to post his e-mail:

I spent much of the day talking to Muslim friends. The consensus is that the bombers are home grown. If so, this is as much a failure of the education system as it is of security. How can anyone born, raised and educated in his country not know that this city cannot be cowed by bombs?


One day after, life goes on; the city’s back at work, the conference in Gleneagles continues.


I talked to many of the young Muslim lads I’ve known since they were babies, and I talked to their parents. And guess what? The parents are shocked, the youngsters gleeful. Go figure. The leaders of the Muslim Council of Britain can issue as many statements of solidarity and sympathy as they like; the facts are that many of their children rejoiced after the carnage in New York and they rejoiced after the slaughter in London yesterday. …


The challenge, writes Mr. Wallace, is “to find a way to integrate a sizable number of disaffected and alienated young people so they do not attack their own country or aid and abet those who would.” Below, the statistics:

Just to give you a sense of the scale of the problem: there are about a million Muslims in the country and they have the youngest age profile of all the ethnic/religious groups.

With white people we’re all brown, they look at us like that, we all look the same.”
– A youth in Lodi, Calif.

About a third (34 per cent) are under 16 years of age compared to 19 per cent for Anglos. (Figures taken from the 2001 census).


So there you have it; a human time-bomb, just waiting to be primed.


[Dan Gillmor adds this following note.]

See also: Mini Kahlon’s report from Lodi, California, where Muslim men have been charged with lying to the FBI in an unrelated matter.