Islamikaze and Secular-Welfare States

Some interesting points of view about how British "asylum" seekers are part of the terrorist problem.

On Tuesday, the Times of London contained this intriguing tidbit about one of the thwarted suicide bombers of the July 21 tube attacks -- Yasin Hassan Omar, a Somali ''asylum seeker'':

''Omar, who was last seen vaulting a barrier at Warren Street station, has been the registered occupant of the flat since 1999. Ibrahim, who was last seen in Hackney Road, East London, after his failed attempt to blow up a No. 26 bus, shared it with him for the past two years. Omar, received £88 a week in housing benefit to pay for the council property and also received income support, immigration officials say.''

''Council property'' is Britspeak for public housing. So here's how things stand four years after 9/11: United Kingdom taxpayers are subsidizing the jihad.

There's a cheery thought for any Englishman the next time he's on a bus when some Islamakazi self-detonates: It's on his tax bill; pay as you blow.

This isn't some stunning shocking development, either. In a column on December 29, 2001, I noted the likes of Zac Moussaoui, the French citizen who became an Islamist radical while living on welfare in London, and wrote: "If you're looking for 'root causes' for terrorism, European-sized welfare programs are a good place to start . . . Tony Blair pays Islamic fundamentalists in London to stay at home, fester and plot.''

I did get a chortly out of the phrase "Islamakaze." Hadn't heard that one before.

I did hear this theory on taxpayer subsidized terrorism back when the first London bombing occurred. One of the Euro Programmers that we seem to have a lot of in this company told me that was one of the big differences between the US and Britain.

Niall Ferguson also has a piece that discusses the variance of religiousness in Europe and Great Britain.

According to the Gallup Millennium Survey of Religious Attitudes, barely 20 per cent of West Europeans attend church services at least once a week, compared with 47 per cent of North Americans and 82 per cent of West Africans. Less than half of western Europeans say God is a "very important" part of their lives, as against 83 per cent of Americans and virtually all West Africans. And fully 15 per cent of western Europeans deny that there is any kind of "spirit, God or life force" - seven times the American figure and 15 times the West African.

The exceptionally low level of British religiosity was perhaps the most striking revelation of a recent ICM poll. One in five Britons claims to "attend an organised religious service regularly", less than half the American figure. Little more than a quarter of us say that we pray regularly, compared with two thirds of Americans and 95 per cent of Nigerians. And barely one in 10 of us would be willing to die for our God or our beliefs, compared with 71 per cent of Americans.

Of course, these surveys make no distinctions between creeds, so they almost certainly understate the decline of British Christianity. Last year, do not forget, it was revealed that, in an average week, more Muslims attend a mosque than Anglicans go to church. Small wonder our talented but frustrated local minister has just announced that he is leaving the Church to become a lawyer: a true sign of the times.

Could there be links between the relative religiousness and what has brought about the terrorist attacks in Great Britain? I'm thinking there is.