Walid Phares: "Jihad Leads to Leeds"

By Andrew Cochran

Walid Phares asked me to post the following:

"Back in November of 1999, I was on a trip to meet leading members of the House of Lords in London to discuss the �Jihad threat to minorities in the Middle East� and make few presentations on the subject in different locations in England. My travel across the country was very informative, and I was able to compare the findings with my previous trips in the 1980s. My observations that year found them very troubling: The Salafi Jihadi presence in Britain was on the rise, six years before the London bombings, four years before the Iraq war, and two years before September 11. Here are some of my most intriguing coincidences:

In London, I used the services of Internet Cafes (in locations which I won�t disclose so far). The �offices� were managed by Islamist Salafists. Easy to track: On a table next to the entrance were displayed Jihadi literature; lots of them. Some printed, others photocopied papers. All praising Jihadism, inciting against the Kuffars (infidels), and some even projecting the �demise of Great Britain,� which they labeled �sharrira�(evil in Arabic). Not only the Jihadi literature was omnipresent and available to the customers, but all PCs in the shop led you to web sites featuring Salafis, Ansar, Jihadis, etc. Moreover, as I tried to accomplish search engines, I was able to read previous searches: The whole plethora of al Qaida like concepts, words, names, battles, and more have been sought by users. Not that these searches took me to Bin Laden�s headquarters in Taliban controlled Afghanistan at the time, but it put me in the middle of a Jihad world, in both Arabic and English: A web space educating, inciting, mobilizing, recruiting and guiding the shabab (youth) to violence. My British interlocutors at the time, both in Government and advocacy groups knew less than what they should have learned about the Jihadi surge in their own country.

My first instincts projected the ballistics of these cyber-caves: The Jihadists will strike within less than a decade.

This ideological lava cannot stop anywhere short of an explosion. Besides, the web recruiting centers for Chechniya, Palestine, Cashemire and even Sudan were obvious, open and playing the mainstream game. They weren�t displaying a sense of underground. In short, the London based Jihadis-online didn�t seem to fear British authorities. A year later, I watched an interesting chat online in a seemingly benign cyber- spot based in the British isles. Few months before al Qaida attacks the USS Cole in Yemen, the "brothers" were discussing the dar al harb notion. Although the �room� was not claimed by the now-infamous al Muhajirun and their Syrian-born Omar Bakri, it had all the fingerprints of this organization. The �mentor,� answering a question by interested souls unequivocally stated in Arabic: �Britania aduw kafir, walakin nahnu naeeshu fiha.� Which literally means: �Britain is an infidel enemy, but we live in it for now.� The debate was enlightening: Even though the West wasn�t spared as part of dar al harb (War zone by Jihadi doctrine), the emirs were to decide upon the re-launching of the operations against the country of their choice. There were questions about the 1993 Ghazwa (raid) against the Twin Towers in New York. The answers were amazingly in line with Jihadi thinking: �al darura (necessity) will decide where and when.�

Luton

On a train to Luton, where I was invited to deliver a lecture, a man approached me (probably because of my Middle Eastern looks) and engaged me ideologically. His insistence to know about my views, religion, and professional affiliations stunned me. Speaking perfect British English, he said he belonged to the �Sunna wal ansar� group, and mainly interested in gathering support to the �brothers� in the battlefields around the world. He invited me to a meeting of the shabab in Brighton and moved to another person. It wasn�t the substance of his talk that impressed me, but how assured he was psychologically. He had no concerns about any sort of authority. He was as comfortable as the Mormons evangelists, possibly freer.

Leeds

The final leg of my trip took me to Leeds. Hundreds of miles to the north of the capital, I didn�t expect to encounter �their� presence that far from London. I was wrong: I met the Salafi Jihadi phenomenon in a small sandwich shop. Books, newsletters and fliers were on the counter. Regardless of who dropped them there, the owners or workers, these reading material were destined to be absorbed by Arabic-speaking minds. Papers do not walk into these cities by themselves. They are brought in for a purpose by carriers who intend to spread an ideology, calls for holy wars and addresses were to go to.

Allah�s justice

This sociological field trip in 1999 England was revealing: The Jihadists have penetrated the country since the end of the cold war. Any expert in the field would have understood as of the mid 1990s that the systematic spread of the Salafi ideology and its activists in the UK was to end up in Terrorism. It was ineluctable that the British dar al Harb had to be attacked at some point; especially when many among its elites �inside academia or its political establishment- were confirming what the Islamists were convinced of: That the country was indeed evil, and it needed justice. An Allah administered justice. But while British elite-apologists aimed, such as MP George Galloway, at changes in Foreign policy, their Jihadi sympathizers aimed at the British people while attending their daily lives on July 7."

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