‘This is for Syria!”
Echoing the Paris terrorists, a terrorist screamed that ISIS threat as he attacked passengers at a London Tube station Saturday. Fortunately, while he cut the throats of two innocent victims, police Tasered the 29-year-old terrorist before he could fatally wound anyone. Still, British counterterrorism authorities are rightly treating this incident very seriously. The attacker’s knife-wielding neck attacks evoke memories of the 2013 Lee Rigby atrocity in which jihadists decapitated an unarmed British soldier who happened to be walking on a London street. Moreover, although unsuccessful, the attack on Saturday is probably a harbinger of things to come. Unfortunately the U.K. faces a greater counterterrorism challenge today than it did in 2013.
As I’ve outlined over the past two years, the jihadist threat to Britain has been steadily growing. But while ISIS has accelerated this threat, its roots run deeper. The key factor is Britain’s small minority of Muslim young men. “Since the 1990s, they have “turned to hardline Wahhabi and, later, Salafi imams,” I wrote last year at NRO. “These imams manipulated the social discontentment toward a ‘purposeful’ cause of religious fundamentalism.” These extremist Imams preach that the West is guilty for all the injustices of the Islamic world.