h/t to LGF for this Times Online extract from an upcoming book called The Islamist by Ed Hussain. This book looks like it’s going to be very interesting. Ed Hussain grew up in the west, but still promoted radical Islam… at least until he lived in Saudi Arabia and learned what it is like in practice, not as preached in western countries where you can do as you like after you leave the mosque. He wrote:

I had never expected to see such naked poverty in Saudi Arabia.

At that moment it dawned on me that Britain, my home, had given refuge to thousands of black Africans from Somalia and Sudan: I had seen them in their droves in Whitechapel. They prayed, had their own mosques, were free and were given government housing.

Many Muslims enjoyed a better lifestyle in non-Muslim Britain than they did in Muslim Saudi Arabia. At that moment I longed to be home again.

All my talk of ummah seemed so juvenile now. It was only in the comfort of Britain that Islamists could come out with such radical utopian slogans as one government, one ever expanding country, for one Muslim nation. The racist reality of the Arab psyche would never accept black and white people as equal.

…Racism was an integral part of Saudi society. My students often used the word “nigger” to describe black people. Even dark-skinned Arabs were considered inferior to their lighter-skinned cousins. I was living in the world’s most avowedly Muslim country, yet I found it anything but. I was appalled by the imposition of Wahhabism in the public realm, something I had implicitly sought as an Islamist.

…In my class the following Sunday [after the 7/7 bombings], the beginning of the Saudi working week, were nearly 60 Saudis. Only one mentioned the London bombings.

“Was your family harmed?” he asked.

“My sister missed an explosion by four minutes but otherwise they’re all fine, thank you.”

The student, before a full class, sighed and said: “There are no benefits in terrorism. Why do people kill innocents?”

Two others quickly gave him his answer in Arabic: “There are benefits. They will feel how we feel.”

I was livid. “Excuse me?” I said. “Who will know how it feels?”

“We don’t mean you, teacher,” said one. “We are talking about people in England. You are here. They need to know how Iraqis and Palestinians feel.”

“The British people have been bombed by the IRA for years,” I retorted. “Londoners were bombed by Hitler during the blitz. The largest demonstrations against the war in Iraq were in London. People in Britain don’t need to be taught what it feels like to be bombed.”

Several students nodded in agreement. The argumentative ones became quiet. Were they convinced by what I had said? It was difficult to tell.

Two weeks after the terrorist attacks in London another Saudi student raised his hand and asked: “Teacher, how can I go to London?”

“Much depends on your reason for going to Britain. Do you want to study or just be a tourist?”

“Teacher, I want to go London next month. I want bomb, big bomb in London, again. I want make jihad!”

“What?” I exclaimed. Another student raised both hands and shouted: “Me too! Me too!”

Other students applauded those who had just articulated what many of them were thinking. I was incandescent. In protest I walked out of the classroom to a chorus of jeering and catcalls.

My time in Saudi Arabia bolstered my conviction that an austere form of Islam (Wahhabism) married to a politicised Islam (Islamism) is wreaking havoc in the world. This anger-ridden ideology, an ideology I once advocated, is not only a threat to Islam and Muslims, but to the entire civilised world.

He describes a threat we must take seriously. To those who say that if we leave Iraq, the terrorists will leave us alone, I would remind them that, as Joe Lieberman pointed out, the facts do not support that theory. Where we have left Iraqi cities undefended, terrorists have taken control and wreaked havoc, enforcing Shariah on an unwilling populace. London hosted the largest anti-war rallies, as Hussain pointed out. It provides a comprehensive welfare system that supports many of the Imams who preach radicalism in London mosques, yet was rewarded with a terrorist attack.

I’ve written before about how the “tiny percentage” is a substantial threat:
June 19, 2006: “The problem is that even though only a small percentage of people who declare themselves Muslim actively want to fight us because they say their faith compels it, the numbers involved are huge. For example, after the London bombings last summer, a survey of UK Muslims was taken. Only 5% thought that more attacks were justified. This sounds like great news until you do the math. Unfortunately 5% of Muslims in the UK means 80,000 people thought more attacks were justified. If only 5% of the 5% were actually willing to act on that feeling of justification, that’s still 4,000 jihadis in the UK alone. Considering how few managed to successfully attacks us on 9/11, I’d say that’s cause for concern.”

July 16, 2006: “A July 4, 2006 Times Online article revealed that “13% of British Muslims think that the four men who carried out the London Tube and bus bombings of July 7, 2005, should be regarded as “martyrs”.” Believing that more attacks are justified, and believing that those who carry out attacks are martyrs are roughly equivalent. (If you are a martyr, it follows that your cause was just; otherwise you are referred to as a terrorist or a criminal.) From 5% to 13% in a year. 13% of 1.6 million Muslims is 208,000. Again, holding to the idea that only a tiny minority of 5% would act on those beliefs, 5% of 208,000 is 10,400.”

February 19, 2007: “Now we have this article at Jihad Watch [emphasis added]:

Again, guesstimating that of the 12% who approve, only 5% might be willing to actually act on it, that gives you 4,200 Muslim Canadian jihadists.

What if we figure that only a tiny percentage of those willing to act could actually be effective? Of those estimated who are willing to act, let’s guess that 5% are smart enough, have the connections and the ability to come up with an effective plan and carry it out.

That would mean in England, there are 520 effective jihadis. In Canada, 210.

Nineteen people took down the World Trade Centers.”

Raymond Ibrahim also did some math on this topic and writes:

Thus, even if we were to agree with Ramadan that the vast majority of Muslims are “moderates” and that, say, only a mere 20 percent of Muslims are “literalists,” that simply means that some 200 million Muslims in the world today are dedicated enemies of the infidel West. At any rate, when it comes to instilling terror, numbers are of no significance. It took only 19 to wreak great havoc and destruction on American soil on 9/11. It won’t take much more to duplicate that horrific day. This is precisely why, to use Ramadan’s own words, “we are obsessed by the few [radical Muslims] and not seeing the many [moderate Muslims].” That most Muslims are good, law-abiding citizens and that only a mere minority of the umma, say, 200 million, are hell-bent on destroying the West — how is that supposed to be any comfort to us?

It is in this environment that top Democratic Presidential contenders bobbed and weaved when asked the following very clear question:

“If, God forbid, a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight, we learned that two American cities had been hit simultaneously by terrorists,” Williams said, “and we further learned beyond the shadow of a doubt it had been the work of al Qaeda, how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result?”

If we learned beyond a shadow of a doubt… yet Obama and Edwards still answered the question by questioning the intelligence in this theoretical situation. It reminds me of Reid simply refusing to believe General Petraeus. Edwards went even further, promising investigations of our security apparatus to find out how the attacks were successful. (Hmmm… what does Edwards think about the Patriot Act, so called domestic warrantless wiretapping, and the financial tracking program exposed by the NY Times?) Hillary says “if there were nations that supported or gave material aid to those who attacked us, I believe we should quickly respond.” IF… and respond to whom? Saudi Arabia? Iran? Bill Richardson said he’d respond aggressively, while getting international support (heh – good luck with that!), improve intelligence (goody, more investigations, or does he mean we can go back to using the programs Democrats have been griping about for years?) and he’d respond with surgical strikes. How would he know where to strike surgically? Biden, at least, had a somewhat realistic response:

Still later, Sen. Joseph Biden dispensed with the limits of a “surgical” response and gave the Democrats’ only full-scale endorsement of military force. “Let’s stop all this happy talk here [that] the use of force doesn’t make sense,” Biden said. “The use of force in Afghanistan is justified and necessary; in Darfur, justified and necessary; in the Balkans, justified and necessary. You guys can have your happy talk, there’s real life.”

He’s deliberately overlooking an important point. If force is justified in the Balkans and Darfur, it is even more justified and necessary in Iraq. That’s real life. None of them except Biden can even formulate a response to hypothetical terror attacks that doesn’t involve navel-gazing investigations, and he seems unaware of the strategic necessity of our presence in Iraq or the real nature of terrorism.

One jihadi saw the light, not from enjoying the freedoms of the west, but from suffering the restrictions of what he advocated. Perhaps we ought to be encouraging the Democrats to take even more, and longer, trips over to terror-sponsoring countries. At this point, I don’t see how it could hurt.