Homegrown

The portrait of the London bombers is a frightening one: it has become more and more clear that all of the bombers were young male British Muslims, disenfranchised for different reasons, but put into violent action, either through sponsorship of a higher terror network, or as sympathizers to both the concept and the methodology of al Queda.

This is the frightening fact: that as open society exists, cultural identies do not neccesarily shift over time. Indeed, London has been a haven for extreme versions of Islam to be preached- and it's not a new problem. The shock comes not from knowing that this is here, in your backyard- the shock is from the realization that this identity is close to you, it is, in a sense, a part of you. It is a duality, the reverse side of the same coin that you and I occupy. We may have touched one another- this kind of fanatic and myself. We may have crossed paths- because we, in fact, occupy the same world. That's the surprise in this situation.

"You see Palestinian kids getting killed on the street in your living room, maybe you're going to flip," said a young man who identified himself only as Shakur, 27. It is not a matter of Al Qaeda carrying out attacks, he said. "The people are doing it themselves."

The attack caught British anti-terrorism officials off guard, but the profile and provenance of the suspects did not.

In recent years, British security services have grown increasingly worried about a unique homegrown threat, anti-terrorism officials say: second- and third-generation youths from the Pakistani immigrant communities that dominate Britain's Muslim population. Besides keeping tabs on the Arab ideologues and jihadists who for years have made London their headquarters, British intelligence also has stepped up efforts to monitor the cities of Yorkshire and other northern areas where they have seen virulent extremism taking root more quietly but steadily.

"The security services pointed to something that was not imagined before, that there is an indigenous problem," a British anti-terrorism official said Tuesday. "And that above all it is British-Pakistani. And, almost inevitably, the linkages have been maintained to Pakistan, whether operational or ideological."

Nonetheless, the suspected bombers slipped past the defenses because they incarnated a variation on a theme recurring from Paris to Milan to Amsterdam: youthful, inexperienced extremists from seemingly well-integrated families who radicalize fast and seem to strike out of nowhere.

"It's the worst-case scenario," a British law enforcement official said.

Even in America, the terror threat may not be foriegn agents breaking through border patrol posts in the South or the North.

Blair calls for the voice of Moderate Islam to speak out in order to ascend above this tendency to slip into fanaticism in London.

And this call, for the Moderate Voice to be raised, perhaps has percussive effects in unexpected places. Perhaps, had that Moderate American voice been raised even more loudly in the buildup to the war in Iraq, we would have succeeded in stopping this war, we could have prevented the kindling of the Iraq war from catching alight as a reason for fanaticism to take hold.

It is a necessary perspective. Cultural conflict in the western open societies will always persist. It is a psychologic, economic, geographic puzzle that does not fit together so smoothly. It can't be prevented. But the perspective of the fanatic must be curtailed, every way possible. That's the only way to deal with this problem. And while the bombs in London were carried by second and third generation British-Pakistanis, the bombs of the Fanatic have also been carried by christian anti-abortionists in America, cultural separatists like ETA, and, when given a certain perspective, political ideologues in power of nations.

All of this fits into Blair's call for moderation- but it's not just moderate Islam in demand to ease the conflict of the world.