A Journey to the Source of the Nile

They all agree so they must be right.

Apparently, all the papers in America agree that London's a hotbed of extremism and a danger to the free world. The word they are using is Londonistan:

Over the past three days, articles on front pages of newspapers across the country, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal, describe the UK as a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism that threatens global security.

I wonder who briefed them.

For those of you who didn't follow that, co-ordinated op-ed (Opinion & Editorial) pieces across different publications are always the result of a press briefing, usually part of the 'lobby' process by a government department. Occasionally they arise from an expensive news-management exercise by a company and its PR agency, but this is almost certainly an administration briefing.

So which neanderthal in the State Department, the National Security Advisor's office, or on the Presidential Staff, has decided to undermine the USA's most pliable ally in the 'War on Terror'?

It's not the Pentagon or the CIA: nowadays they show no ability - nor inclination - to run around like fluffers for political 'correspondents'. More to the point, they are fairly literate and are well aware that London is the capital of Arabic democracy - all the moderate opposition groups, all the liberal opinion, all the open debate and discussion happens here in London, in the cafés and salons of Bayswater and the Edgeware Road.

The World capital of extremism is the Wahhabite Kingdom, and well they know it, closely followed by Algeria: hence the dire security problems of France, especially Paris, which has a large Algerian community kept radicalised by near-total social and economic exclusion and a truly horrible police force. A lesson well-known in Whitehall and Downing Street, albeit less so in Bradford and, say, Wolverhampton.

But London? This is the world's largest population of educated middle-class Arabs in an open society. As a consequence of our tolerance, all shades of opinion are expressed here, from Hamza and the exterminationists to governments-in-waiting, to exiled monarchs and all manner of opposition newspapers that are banned and smuggled into the 'home' country by travellers and relatives. Small cabals of nutcases in bedsits with bombing videos and extremist tracts, attending Arabic-speaking private mosques? Yes, we've got them, too. What's Arabic for Unabomber? Madmen have existed here since the Anarchists came to London a century ago, with their futile factional extremism and their bombs, but it never amounted to anything much. London's politically lively - raw and strident, if you know where to look - but it's no hotbed of violence: politics, not warfare.

It is also well worth pointing out that the suppression of moderate Arabic opinion has been condoned by successive Washington administrations, who do not grant political asylum to embarrassing critics of strategically-useful despots. That's why the moderates are here, not in New York's great melting-pot. But in American eyes, there are no 'moderates' - all critics of a friendly regime are enemies alike, equally a threat to stability; whether fundamentalists, democrats, bolsheviks or just rival dictators-in-waiting. Maybe London is as dangerous as their newspapers have been instructed to say in unison today. Dangerous to someone in Washington, anyway.

Again, I wonder who?

Thanks,

cavalorn for pointing me to the article.