Fear Factor

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All over Europe, security forces were intensifying their campaign against terror. In Istanbul, police arrested 37 suspected members of the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front, a Marxist group on the U.S. and E.U. terror lists. Though it is not doctrinally close to al-Qaeda, experts think the group has been goaded into planning more grandiose attacks by al-Qaeda's success. Sixteen other alleged members were caught in coordinated raids in Italy, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. In Italy, police launched a nationwide "preventive" sweep late Friday, taking 90 mostly Moroccans into custody. And prosecutors talked publicly about a small but significant development in their anti-jihadist efforts: their first turncoat. Riadh Jelassi, 33, was sentenced to jail for 31/2 years, and wrote prosecutors last September saying he would sing to avoid deportation to his native Tunisia. In extensive interrogations, he has described plots to drive suicide truck bombs into the

	Even if my own family was killed [by a jihadist's bomb], I would say it's the will of Allah — SAYFUL ISLAM, Luton al-Muhajiroun leader

Milan headquarters of the carabinieri, as well as the Milan airport and train station. "It's a leak from inside that little by little can grow," says Milan antiterror prosecutor Elio Ramondini.

On Dunstable Road, the heart of the vibrant Pakistani community in Luton, an industrial town 48 km north of London, the perplexities of finding a terrorist needle in the haystack of a long-settled, law-abiding group of immigrants are manifest. Nearby are four houses the police searched as part of their raids. Muslim elders are disgusted by terror. "Our younger generation is going astray," says Anwar Khan, a retired university lecturer, "getting brainwashed" by the siren song of jihad. The causes are familiar: poor and segregated education, discrimination, youth unemployment (in Luton it stands at 22%, twice the national rate), teens' yearning for belonging and purpose — and a belief shared by many of their parents that Muslims are being persecuted in Kashmir, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Palestine and Iraq. "A lot of young people I talk to say: If Blair and Bush can forget about international law in Iraq, why should we care about British law?" says Yasin Rehman, information secretary for the Luton Council of Mosques. "A lot of young people don't have a sense that this is really their country."

A few hundred meters away, Sayful Islam proves Rehman's point. A year ago he was a government revenue officer; now, sporting a windbreaker with a "worldwide jihad" logo, he organizes full-time for al-Muhajiroun, a group that endorses the goals of Osama bin Laden. Well-spoken, highly intelligent, he says he doesn't know the people arrested last week: "Maybe they have the same ideas as us, but every Muslim would." He says it is contrary to the Koran for British Muslims to bomb in Britain, but foreigners may do so. "It's allowed in Islam. Even if my own family was killed, I would say it's the will of Allah."

His is a tiny movement with a gift for self-promotion, but it has material to work with: a recent ICM poll found that 13% of British Muslims surveyed said further terror attacks on the U.S. would be justified. More moderate Muslims realize they're in a fight for the soul of their religion, and whatever their frustrations with Blair and Bush, last week's arrests caused them to shift up a gear. In Luton, where a letter from the Muslim Council of Britain to imams calling for cooperation with police was being widely discussed, one conservative young Muslim said he and his friends were talking to potential al-Muhajiroun recruits, trying to show them its understanding of Islam was false. And Anwar Khan is working to start a center for Muslim parents and children to come together to talk through hard questions, "to actually educate them, to repay this country by organizing ourselves to be loving people according to Islam."

No doubt MI5 will have agents listening in at the meetings from time to time. But Khan is right that good intelligence is a stopgap, not a solution. "You can jail people who have already become terrorists, but there's always a new generation. If we can fix the whole environment, one extremist won't have any influence at all."