Glory in the Name of Briton

05/03/2003

The two suicide bombers in the most recent terrorist incident in Israel, at an American-style tourist bar, turn out to be UK citizens, traveling on British passports. They are referred to in press reports as "Britons".

As you might expect, they're actually of Pakistani origin, rather than descendants of Hereward the Wake, or even William the Conqueror.

One of the bombers, Asif Mohammed Hanif, was employed in a duty-free shop at Heathrow Airport. That means that at any time he could have placed a bomb on a plane, since the job of a duty-free shop worker is nothing but making up packages to put on airplanes all day.

A British Airports Authority spokesman said that Hanif "would have been searched before going air side," just as if he were a tall, leggy blonde, a babe in arms, or a Medal of Honor winner carrying a suspiciously pointy object.

But of course the danger of having a mad bomber in your duty free shop is those packages, which can’t all be searched. (Of course, you can’t keep Muslims out of sensitive jobs, can you?)

Omar Sharif, the other bomber, was actually born in Derby, England. He was educated at a private school in the Derbyshire countryside.

Both bombers seemed to be westernized teenagers for years. But in spite of all that Western acculturation could do, they converted to militant Islamism when they grew up.

This massive failure of assimilation seems to be a combination of three factors:

Mass immigration, which causes enclaves of foreign cultures to form in the West,

the cheapness of modern air travel, which means that young "British" Muslims can go back to Pakistan and be trained in Islamic fanaticism, and

Western multiculturalism, which looks on all cultures as equal, although some of them are very bad.

I have long been fascinated when these guys are referred to as British, or Britons — or for that matter, when Zacarias Moussaoui is referred to as a Frenchman.

When King George The Third, the son of a Hanoverian immigrant, ascended the throne of England, he made a speech in which he said "Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Briton."

That’s assimilation for you.

I don’t think the young man who blew himself to bits in the doorway of Mike’s Place in Tel Aviv would have gloried in the name of Briton.

I think he would have said that. despite being born in Derby, he had a higher loyalty to the Islamic world.

That higher loyalty is the dilemma of Muslim immigration -and Mexican immigration, too.

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