London terror follow up: More Muslim writers like Fawaz Turki are needed

Found this in the latest edition of Saudi Arabia based Arab News, the author is Fawaz Turki. I couldn't find a whole lot about him in a Yahoo! search, but I did come across this biography on Amazon.com.

The title of the Arab News article is, What Have These Criminals Wrought. An excerpt:

With its long-entrenched traditions of civil liberties, tolerance for political dissent and respect for human rights, Britain has acted, over the last four decades or so, as a magnet for political refugees, asylum-seekers and militant activists escaping repression in their own countries.

There are roughly two million Muslims living in Britain — around four percent of the population — a diverse community in terms of its ethnic, cultural, linguistic, national, ideological and class origins. Most of its members come from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, with around 30 percent hailing from North Africa and the Middle East. It is estimated that those amongst them who support extremist causes are a minority, around 15,000.

Still, that’s 15,000 extremists too many, extremists who take advantage of Britain’s liberal laws of free speech to sow hatred among young Muslims, feeding on their sense of alienation and discontent.

Leaders of these folks, often self-styled sheikhs, have used mosques to preach what in effect is un-Islamic rhetoric to their followers.

Take one such cleric, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who in his sermons has called for a jihad against Britain and last December warned that the country, along with others in Western Europe, should expect a “9-11, day after day after day.” And he did that brazenly, from the pulpit of his mosque in the London neighborhood of Finsbury Park, where Zacariah Mousaoui, the only man charged in the US in the Sept.11 attacks, and Richard Reid, the convicted shoe-bomber, “prayed.”

And how ironic it is when you consider that Omar is a political refugee who pleaded for and was given asylum 19 years by the very country whose demise he is calling for and who currently lives off its welfare system. Abu Hamza Al-Masri, the former leader of the mosque, who is now in custody, had openly preached violence, and that it was allowed for Muslims to attack non-Muslims and “wring their necks.”