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habit of ruling so-called communities, which are as complex as any other, through self-nominated chiefs—in this case the Muslim Council of Britain—was self-defeating because these people often reflected a highly conservative Deobandist Islam, akin to Wahhabism, which was part of the problem rather than the solution. The former MCB leader Sir Iqbal Sacranie has never retracted his comment that ‘death would be too easy for Salman Rushdie’, while the current leader, Dr Abdul Bari, has a history of involvement with the Jamaat-e-Islami movement. The French Muslim umbrella organisation has similar problems. Because of lucrative arms contracts, no efforts have gone into stemming the flow of Gulf money into propagating Wahhabism, whether through mosques or the venal universities and their Islamic Studies programmes. In other words, government policy lags behind what reformed radicals themselves have been proposing.

II ‘THE END OF THE BECINNING?’: EPISODES FROM THE JIHAD 2007-2008

As the principal target for global jihadist terrorism, the US has sophisticated and various ways of dealing with it. The key difference between the US and Europe is that the former is fighting something ‘out there’, largely by front-loading military power, while Europeans already have ‘it’ in their midst in the shape of North African, Bangladeshi and Pakistani second- or third-generation citizens, as well as those to whom they have sometimes been foolish enough to grant asylum. In reality things are not so straightforward. For Europe is likely to be the main source of clean-skin terrorist attacks within the US, a process FBI director Robert Muller has graciously decided not to stymie by rescinding the visa-waiver programme for short-term visitors. The US has multi-layered defences which begin with investment in securing nuclear materials in faraway Georgia and Kazakhstan, the screening of containers in ports, and the close monitoring of foreign visitors that commences when they purchase their air ticket. The INS and other agencies are keepers of the gates when they disembark, carrying out their task firmly but with courtesy and sensitivity.

The US also plans for nightmare scenarios, including terrorist access to micro-bacteriological labs or nuclear weapons. In April 2008, for example, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security heard authoritative evidence about the effects of a nuclear strike on the US capital. The chairman, senator Joe Lieberman, said: ‘The scenarios we discuss today are very hard for us to contemplate, and so emotionally traumatic and unsettling that it is tempting to push them aside.’ His Committee heard that a ten-kiloton bomb left in a truck near the White House would erase a two-mile radius of downtown federal buildings, killing about 100,000 people, the majority African-Americans in clerical positions. More people would die of burns, for at present the national capacity to treat such cases is restricted to fifteen hundred people. A radioactive plume would drift, with the winds, from the west to the south-east, affecting predominantly African-American neighbourhoods where there is a single major hospital. As Lieberman said: ‘Now is the time to have this difficult conversation, to ask the tough questions, and then to get answers as best we can.’ That this is not some alarmist fantasy on the part of hysterical Americans can be gauged from the fact that in July 2007 the Canada Border Services Agency rescinded a visa granted to a recently arrived Anglo-Pakistani man by the High Commission in London on the grounds that ‘he is a suspected terrorist implicated in Al Qaeda’s mass destruction weapons program’. After a night in a Toronto jail he was deported to Manchester, although his current whereabouts are unknown.24

Al Qaeda has mutated since 9/11, exchanging a military-style hierarchy for a loose franchised network, although it is currently rebuilding both the hierarchy and the training camps in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and North-West Frontier Provinces of Pakistan. This reflects the success of a NATO coalition and