Terror Arrests in London

The arrest today of two men at a suspected bomb-making factory in East London is a chilling reminder of the continuing threat to Britain from Islamic extremists. The security services have said that these arrests were not in relation to last summer’s attacks but to a new set of plots thought to involve the use of chemicals.

The nature of the terrorist threat in Britain is very different from what America faces. The primary threat against the United States comes from foreign terrorists. It seems reasonable to speculate that part of the reason there has been no attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 is that al Qaeda are determined to go further than their previous effort. In Britain, by contrast, the principal threat comes from home-grown terrorists like the 7/7 bombers waging low-scale bombing campaigns. (There is no suggestion that the two men of Bengali/Pakistani descent detained today are foreigners.) Britain’s predicament makes getting the balance between civil liberties and security much more difficult, as the measures have to take place inside the country rather than at points of entry.

The nature of the problem also raises all sorts of issues about community cohesion, integration, and how to stop the surging far-right from exploiting the situation. On that front, the decision of 20 local Asian men to protest the police’s use of force was far from helpful.

The two things I’m most interested to find out about this raid are how large the planned attacks were—the setting up of an air exclusion zone over the area suggests that the analysis above might be off-base—and the size of the network. These two factors will likely determine the public’s response to today’s raid.