The lion challenged: why England mustn't sleep.

TWO minor items, hiding in the massive media coverage of the London bombings, illustrate the vast problems of social psychology facing the British. One is the report that the former home secretary (Britain's version of a homeland-security czar), David Blunkett, has left a wreath in memory of the bomb victims lamenting that he had not been able to do more to ensure their security. The other is a story--headlined "'Guardian' man revealed as Hardline Islamist"--about a trainee reporter hired under an ethnic-minority program who turned out to be a member of an Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, that advocates an Islamic world government. In a culture where mawkish self-regard and sentimentality meet religious fanaticism and terrorism--Osama bin Laden hits the Me Decade!--doubt must arise that any firm, sensible response to the Islamist bombers will be possible.

Some modest hope can be drawn from the fact that voices are being raised to question the official sponsorship of Grief and Sensitivity as the best answer to the bombers. London has been getting in touch with its emotions ever since the explosions. There was a national moment of silence and a vigil in Trafalgar Square. Bouquets and wreaths, like that from Blunkett, are piling up. And Londoners have been comparing themselves, understandably but perhaps a trifle complacently, to their forefathers who survived the Blitz. Like them, goes the refrain, we carry on with our lives, showing true British grit.

As an initial response, this may have been brave and healthy. As it continues into its third week, however, it reminds one less of the Blitz and more of the self-regarding sensitivity of the Princess Diana Festival of Grief a few years ago. After all, as Rod Liddle of the London Spectator pointed out, there was no very obvious alternative to carrying on as usual. Should Londoners stay at home in bed? If there was no alternative, there was no great virtue in carrying on. Blogger Helen Szamuely added the point that the Londoners of the Blitz did not hold minutes of silence after every V1 landed on a house. Being stoical meant getting on with things, not breaking off every now and then to consult a grief counselor. There was one minute of silence every year, on Remembrance Day, to mark all the allied dead in the Great War. And one of the two famous poems most associated with Remembrance Day--"In Flanders Fields"--pointed out that mourning alone was an insufficient response. In the final stanza of Lt. Col. John McCrae's poem, the dead call on the living to avenge them: "Take up our quarrel with the foe: / To you from failing hands we throw / The torch; be yours to hold it high. / If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields."

KNOW THE ENEMY

This note has hardly been heard in the grieving ceremonies of the past fortnight. Indeed, there has been much more stress on who our enemy is not than on how to find and crush him. And the refrain has been that the enemy is not Islam, not Muslims, not immigrants, and--at the Guardian--not even Hizb ut-Tahrir. "There was a feeling that we genuinely wanted more diversity," a Guardian source explained to an Independent reporter, "and like all national newspapers we were a bit 'pale and male,' so we were keen to recruit from different backgrounds." Admittedly, given the Guardian's general polytechnic-sociology-lecturer-Left outlook, its hiring of a radical Islamist is pretty much a dog-bites-man story. Even its grizzled old lefties, however, might have looked askance at what Dilpazier Aslam actually wrote-and when. On the day after the London bombers were found to be British, he suggested that second- and third-generation British Muslims were prepared to "rock the boat," and that their agitation against British foreign policy would continue. In a jokey touch he signed himself as being, like three of the bombers, "a Yorkshire lad, born and bred."

If these mocking words are to be taken at all seriously, Aslam is an enemy of Britain who wants to subject his native Yorkshire to a politico-religious dictatorship and who seeks to alter British foreign policy by--well, not by democratic vote. Yet at the time of writing, he remains an employee of the Guardian, which argues that Hizb ut-Tahrir is "legal in this country." And it must be said that the same ethnic-diversity rationale for hiring him currently determines the hiring and promotion practices of virtually every organization in America as well as in Britain. We are training ourselves to ignore or downplay any signs that someone may be hostile to our way of life and our very safety. As long as that continues, grieving may be an all too appropriate policy.

Even so, Blunkett's apology to the victims understates the problem. In addition to not doing enough to save them, he and other ministers did a great deal to smooth the path of those who killed them. It was under home secretaries of both parties that the terrorist central known as "Londonistan" was established and spread. A blind eye was turned to illegal immigration--an official report suggests that at least 500,000 illegal immigrants live in Britain. (This figure is probably an underestimate.) Legal immigration procedures were quietly relaxed--and lies to conceal the fact were told to Parliament. Organizations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, banned in most other countries, were allowed to operate freely. Among those admitted into Britain were vocal supporters of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, and Islamist terrorism in general. Over time a "jihad railway," bringing together radical Islamic organizations, Pakistani madrassas, terrorist training camps, and disaffected young British Muslims gradually came into being. And the four young British Muslims who planted bombs in London were passengers on it--we know, for instance, that three of them visited Pakistan in the past twelve months.

Successive British governments did little or nothing about "Londonistan" for four reasons. First, because they wanted to increase immigration on economic grounds--mistaken ones, as it happens--they permitted the corruption of the asylum system to admit larger numbers. These turned out to include actual and potential terrorists. Second, they nursed a reasonable desire to avoid a "clash of civilizations" through any appearance of hostility to Islam. Third, they were hobbled by a guilt-ridden multiculturalism that prevented them from imposing even the most obvious "British values" on immigrant cultures; thus the police often turned a blind eye to the "honor killings" of young Muslim women who had strayed sexually from fundamentalist Muslim standards. And fourth, they cherished a shameful desire that if they allowed Islamist terrorists to plot and plan in London undisturbed, the terrorists would strike at Britain last--and perhaps never.

That last calculation has proved to be false as well as shameful: The terrorists have struck at Britain and are expected to do so again.

The terrorist network that grew up while governments were turning a blind eye is officially estimated to number 1,600 terrorists. It is almost certainly higher. The second-most-quoted comment from the security services is, "We got off lightly." (The most-quoted remark is, "It had to happen.") The policy of glancing away when terrorists set up shop next door has been abandoned. And a thorough re-examination of all aspects of British policy--including immigration, multiculturalism, and the official attitude to Islam--has been launched. Where is it likely to lead us?

SOFTNESS ON THE HOME FRONT

Those American conservatives who worry that the Brits will go soft on terrorism and Iraq misunderstand the real areas of weakness. Whatever Aslam writes in the Guardian, British foreign policy is not going to alter significantly. Whitehall is already planning, as is the Pentagon, to withdraw British troops from Iraq.

More terrorism will, if anything, delay that withdrawal. Nor will the Brits gradually shuffle away from the War on Terror. However paradoxically, Blair has been strengthened politically by the bombings and will remain in Downing Street for the foreseeable future. The main opposition party, the Tories, supports his policy. Barring accidents, their new leader, likely to be elected in October, will continue that support. And if there are future terrorist attacks--as most experts expect--British public support for the War on Terror is likely to harden.

But even if the Brits wanted to go soft, it is not at all clear how they could do so. What would they offer the terrorists to persuade them to stop bombing London? Al-Qaeda's demands amount to a wholesale reconstruction of Britain and Europe as part of a worldwide Islamic polity administered under sharia law. That would be a hard sell even to a very frightened British public. Also, the terrorists seem to be a collection of loosely cooperating groups rather than a single body. Negotiating with one group would not necessarily persuade another to halt hostilities; it might conceivably encourage it to step up violence. The inescapable reality is that, Iraq or no Iraq, the Brits, the Americans, and most of the other Europeans are in a battle with Islamist terrorism whether they realize it or not. As terrorism increases, they are likely to realize it. And the only possible results are either radical Islamization or the survival of Western democracy.

The more intractable problems lie in domestic policy. If there are almost 2 million Muslims in Britain, if large percentages of them feel deep antipathy to Britain (as polls suggest they do), and if four young Muslim men could pass laughing and joking through London to bomb their countrymen, then many more potential terrorists are hiding in plain sight in urban Britain. It is a horrendous problem--though not much worse perhaps than America's, and much less frightening than the problem posed by the larger and seemingly more disaffected Muslim diaspora in France.

To ameliorate and eventually solve such a global problem means dealing simultaneously with several deeply rooted component problems: getting better intelligence on the terrorist networks in order to disrupt them; deporting known Muslim extremists; controlling and ultimately reducing immigration; replacing a failed multiculturalism with a common British culture and identity that encompasses immigrant identities as the American identity once did; and above all encouraging British Muslims to embrace Britishness as their principal political identity and thus to reject the Islamist vision of a worldwide caliphate. To achieve even one of these aims will be difficult. For instance, deporting known extremists would probably require either withdrawing Britain from international conventions on asylum (extremely difficult) or getting the international community to rewrite them (impossible). To achieve all of them will be a heroic task. It will have to dispel persistent illusions such as multiculturalism. And it will have to overcome new obstacles that have emerged in the aftermath of the bombing; the first of those being, curiously, a sort of fatalism: Many proposals for dealing with terrorism run up against the objection either that they are politically impossible or would simply not work. Thus, in an otherwise splendid article in the Sunday Telegraph, historian Niall Ferguson argues that it is simply impossible to withstand the demographic pressures that push immigrants from overpopulated Pakistan to medium-birth-rate Britain. This seems to be based on an interpretation of the U.N. population statistics that the U.N.'s own demographers disavow--namely, the idea that "replacement immigration" is economically essential for Europe. But Britain is an island, and reasonably easy to protect against even civil invasions. It has a much smaller Muslim population than, say, France precisely because immigration was reasonably well controlled until the early 1990s. And the scandals of lax immigration--such as the case of the terrorist Kamel Bourgass, who illegally entered Britain and eventually killed a policeman--are almost all cases of criminally lax administration. If London wishes to reduce the terrorism threat by reducing immigration, it can certainly do so.

The case of multiculturalism is similar. In another otherwise strong article in the Sunday Telegraph, Matthew d'Ancona approvingly quotes John Gray to the effect that for Britain multiculturalism is "a historical fate," nothing less. In the course of explaining how multiculturalism must work in future, however, d'Ancona explains that Muslims will have to accept limits on the expression of their cultural and religious values-limits set by the wider society. For instance, they have a right to their own schools, but they must give Muslim girls in those schools the same treatment and opportunities as boys receive and other schools provide. But that is not multiculturalism as the Muslims understand it, as government has heretofore interpreted it, and as the word is generally used: i.e., a synonym for cultural separatism. Yet both Ferguson and d'Ancona subtly (and surely against their wishes) obstruct the shaping of this broad and tolerant identity when they assert that we are simply fated to have high immigration and multiculturalism--Ferguson because continuing high immigration obstructs assimilation, and d'Ancona because his espousal of the mere word "multiculturalism" is likely to prop up its actual ugly sister.

PERSONNEL MEANS POLICY

One might be less concerned about such intellectual misdirections if the reshaping of a new and wider British identity were not in the hands of officials who until yesterday were firm multiculturalists and/or naive enthusiasts for the trivial attempt to "rebrand" Britain as Cool Britannia. Labor's Left is well represented by the prime minister's wife, Cherie Booth; I am reminded by Mark Steyn that she was the very lawyer who won for a young Muslim girl the "right" to wear the full jilbab to school, against the ruling of a sensible Muslim headmistress who had imposed a modest dress code that met reasonable religious standards. This was a truly retrograde ruling: Steyn points out that whether or not it reflected the girl's own wishes--as opposed to those of her family--it separated her from her companions in modern Britain, in order to put her in a dress that reflects not the traditional culture of her family's Bangladesh but the recent Arabization of that culture under Islamist pressure. It was a multicultural attack on a brave and sensitive attempt by the headmistress to reconcile Muslim standards to a common British identity.

If Blair is less of a multiculturalist than his wife, he has shown little sympathy for any traditional aspects of British identity. His principal concern about Britain is that it should be "modernized." In practice that has meant slapdash "reforms" of virtually every British institution. Neither Blair fills one with the confidence that they have the cultural and historical imagination to be able to shape an inspiring synthesis of British and Muslim civilizations. (I would prefer to see such a delicate task in the hands of, say, a retired soldier who had commanded Muslim troops under the Raj and who understood how different peoples are brought together by pride in common accomplishments.)

That said, Blair has in recent days grasped at least half the nettle of Muslim accommodation. He has plainly stated that the terrorist threat arises principally from an "evil ideology" that is a "perversion" of Islam. This frankness is a real advance on the outpouring of statements, from both government officials and religious leaders, exonerating Islam from any responsibility for the acts of terrorists who proclaim Islam as their inspiration. This avoidance of assigning any degree of blame to Islam was prompted by decent motives--fear of anti-Muslim reprisals, desire not to drive Muslims to extremism, etc. But it was a profound mistake. It conveyed the message that the British felt guilty in some way and would not demand that the Muslims join them in defeating terrorism. It enabled Muslim leaders and the Muslim community to deny any connection with the London bombings, even to deny that the terrorists were or could be Muslims. It encouraged them to treat any criticism as "Islamophobia"--one of those medical conditions, like homophobia, of which the symptom is being accused of it. And while they were in this state of convenient denial, Muslim leaders could argue that they had no duty either to restrain their extremists or to push their community towards developing common British standards. Now that Blair has started to ask for these things, progress towards shaping a new British common cultural identity can begin.

It will be a long and difficult process. It will go against the multiculturalist grain of Blair's own party and against his own shallow modernizing instincts. It will mean learning and applying essentially Tory truths about nation-building, loyalty, and allegiance--truths that the Tories themselves have largely forgotten. And the Blair government will be continually tempted to go in for displacement activity--such as introducing identity cards that the London bombers would have been entitled to--rather than carry through measures that they themselves dislike. But the terrorists will encourage them with fresh attacks and more murders.

Orwell ended an essay by saying that he sometimes thought that the British would continue in their agreeable complacency until they were shaken out of it by the roar of bombs. Well, they have now been shaken out of it. And, unfortunately, they will be shaken out of it again. And next time will be the time when the grieving has to stop.