An editorial in The Business makes some excellent points about the state of denial in Britain and the true nature of what we face:

‘In today's Britain you will find proof positive that those the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. The fact is that Britain is pockmarked by all manner of communities which feel alienated, marginalised and discriminated against, from East Glasgow to South London, but none become suicide bombers, bar those contaminated by a perversion of Islam. Nor were the London bombers particularly poor: some were university educated, most lived normal lower-middle class lives; the Egyptian biochemist suspected of being the bombmaster (and this weekend being interrogated in Cairo) had been granted £30,000 by the British taxpayer to continue his studies at Leeds University. So much for marginalisation or discrimination.

‘Then there is Iraq. In the most stupid intervention so far by a major British politician, Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy tried to link the country's vulnerability to terrorism to Britain's intervention in Iraq. Our memory might sometimes fail us but we seem to remember that the jihadists who inspired the London atrocity were bombing New York's Twin Towers and Paris subway stations a full decade before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Moreover, the brutal reality of today's Iraq is not that it is a crucible for terrorists out to bomb London but that it is under attack from the very same sort of terrorists who have bombed London. Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian jihadist, is currently slaughtering thousands of innocent Iraqis on the streets of Baghdad on a much grander scale than Londoners were slaughtered on 7/7 -- all because he would rather have civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims rather than peace and democracy.

‘Last week he had the head of the Egyptian ambassador to Iraq hacked off because he believes that all earthly governments are an affront to Allah. At the same time his bombers were killing and maiming scores of Iraqi children. Anybody who thinks that the beheading and the bombing (in London or Baghdad) will stop - and that video copies of the beheading will no longer be passed around outside London mosques, as they were this week - only when the last British soldier leaves Basra is an idiot. We will know Britain's Muslim leaders have come of age when they stop bellyaching about the invasion of Iraq, start realising that the people of London and Baghdad face a common jihadist enemy, condemn unreservedly killers like Mr Zarqawi and urge their young people to turn against him and his kind.’