[Beerinkol]

Mohammed Bouyeri, meanwhile, on trial in Amsterdam this week, had been a model student and youth organiser before he cut the throat of the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh. The son of a non-devout Moroccan gastarbeider (immigrant worker), Bouyeri seemed to be a perfect example of successful integration, friendly and full of ambition to do good, for himself and his community. Quite what turned him into a jihadi is still unclear, but his struggle to bridge the gap between the over-worked, unassimilated, ignored generation of his parents, and the complicated, bureaucratic, not always hospitable country of his birth, was harder than people thought. It made him, and many others like him, vulnerable to the sort of communitarian, revolutionary, utopian dreams that have seduced many young people through the ages. The promise of escape, of a new collective identity, of heroic martyrdom, the ideal of dispensing with all rational thought in the name of a great cause, the thought of reaching for Heaven - these things will continue to attract second and third generation immigrants who feel rejected by a society that consequently fills them with such hatred that they dream of blowing it up.

In this respect, the home-grown jihadis are no different from feverish young men and women who joined revolutionary sects in the 1970s: the Red Army Faction in West Germany, the Japanese Red Army, the Red Brigade in Italy. They were fighting the phantoms of nazism and fascism which their parents failed to resist. But the real romance for these fanatics lay in the brutality of revolution. Like the modern jihadis, they were often misfits who wished to lose themselves in a purist cause and purge the world of corruption by engaging in acts of extreme violence. And although they saw themselves as Marxists (though not representative, naturally), they had links to some of the same organisations that still engage in terrorism today. Cash flowed from Iran, Libya and Syria, and training was provided by Hizbollah, among others.

One can draw other parallels too. In 1995, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult murdered 12 Japanese commuters and injured more than 2,000 by gassing them in the Tokyo subway. Led by a half-blind guru who spouted a mixed bag of quasi-Buddhist, Shinto and Christian mumbo-jumbo, they too were purists who believed that the world was so corrupted by greed and degradation that only Armageddon would bring forth an unsullied utopia for the chosen ones. Mass murder was the purists' way to bring on the end of the world. Far from representing the downtrodden, most Aum followers were highly educated, usually in the sciences - engineers, chemists and the like. The same was true of some of the men who brought down the twin towers in New York.

There is an important difference, however, between these revolutionary desperados and our contemporary jihadis. They, too, were the enemies within, but they sprang from the mainstream of settled societies. More than that, they were the sons and daughters of a prosperous bourgeoisie. Their aim was the destruction of the world of their parents, the world that produced and nurtured them. The Mohammed Bouyeris - and the suspected London bombers - are members of vulnerable minorities, outsiders who can be easily singled out as aliens in our midst. If the links between western or Japanese revolutionaries and the Middle East were largely opportunistic, the ties between Muslim immigrants in Europe and the Islamist jihad are existential; in the extremists' fantasy world, the holy war, preached by religious zealots, funded by Saudi and other Middle Eastern sources and carried out by true believers, is the core of their identity. And even if only a tiny proportion will take to direct action, many thousands of confused young Muslims are fed daily, through internet chatrooms and other media, with anti- western, anti-Semitic propaganda.

The murders in London are unlikely to be the last of their kind. Even worse may still be to come. Containing this is going to be hard enough. It will have to be done with due consideration for the very freedoms that extremists can exploit. But it is a conflict that can only be won if law-abiding Muslim citizens in Britain and elsewhere are made to feel that these freedoms also benefit them, and for that reason are worth defending. Distrust of the outsider, especially if he or she dresses like a follower of Islam, is bound to grow with every step of the holy war. That is part of its purpose. If the violence of a tiny minority should provoke mainstream violence against a much larger minority, the holy war will not be won, but our societies will be recked in the process.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c7366f6c-f5...00e2511c8.html