The Boys Next Door

Staff writers Joshua Partlow and John Ward Anderson of The Washington Post have written the article that I've been waiting for -- the one that attempts to cast doubt on whether the men allegedly involved in the terror plot are being unjustly accused.

They were lunchtime companions, worshipers kneeling on the same mosque floor, friends praying to the same God. One was the medical student cramming for exams at the next table. Another was the sprinting player jostling for the ball down the soccer field.

And so to some friends and acquaintances -- those who gathered outside the mosques of northeast London and in the quiet suburbs to the west of the city -- the possibility that the young British Muslims also might be involved in an audacious plot to explode airplanes over the Atlantic Ocean was almost impossible to reconcile or believe.

"They're just normal guys, they're probably being painted as hateful monsters, but they were just normal guys," Louis Melvin, 26, said Friday as he stood near the Masjid-E-Umer mosque in the Walthamstow neighborhood of London with other young men who said they were friends with some of the suspects. "If they were plotting this for the last year, they wouldn't have been able to spend all that time talking to me about trivial things like soccer," Melvin said.

Melvin obviously underestimates his "normal guy" buddies.

Imagine. They may be capable of talking about soccer while at the same time working on a plot to murder thousands of people. Very talented.

Although the identities of all the accused have yet to be disclosed, the Bank of England on Friday froze the assets of 19 of the 24 suspects arrested the day before, in the process releasing their names and ages to the public. All 19 had Muslim names, most were in their twenties -- they ranged in age from 17 to 35 -- and 13 of them lived in London, according to the list.

The bank's actions came at the order of British Chancellor Gordon Brown, citing concern over financing terrorists. But Muslim leaders in Britain condemned the release of the names, saying that it was unusual for suspects to be identified before they were formally charged and that it could impede a fair trial.

"There is a perception that this is a trial by media," said Jahangir Mohammed, director of the Center for Muslim Affairs, an independent research organization based in Manchester. "The general feeling is that people believe this has been concocted and it is very timely" as a diversion from the war between Israel and the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.

Calling Kevin Barrett...

Here's another conspiracy.

Whose side are the Muslim leaders in Britain on?

It sounds like they are more concerned with protecting alleged terrorists than sparing the lives of thousands of innocents.

Several Muslims said they condemned any terrorist plot but were skeptical about the police investigation and evidence that tied so many seemingly normal, middle-class Muslims to the alleged plot.

Police "need to be careful" about linking terrorism to the Muslim community "as a whole" and "demonizing the community," Khalid Sofi, a senior member of the Muslim Council of Britain, told the BBC. He said that British police made sweeping arrests of Muslims based on ethnic and religious profiling and used unwarranted stop-and-search procedures, and that most of the Muslims were released without being charged.

There aren't reports of "sweeping arrests," not in terms of hauling in Muslims en masse. How are police linking terrorism to the Muslim community as a whole?

What specifically have the police done to demonize the community?

Sofi makes it sound like entire Muslim neighborhoods are being rounded up and put into internment camps.

Not so.

Moreover, let's stop pretending that the alleged terrorists are blonde Swedes or eighty-year-old grandmothers. Also, to my knowledge, none of the terrorist plots or suicide bombing plans have been hatched at Christian Bible camps.


If there is in fact any demonization going on, then Sofi and others like him need to acknowledge that factions within the Muslim community actually serve to demonize it.

..."Of those we have arrested, some will be released without charge -- that is the nature of an investigation. Some will interpret that as meaning the evidence is not there, but there is a good reason for us to have acted as we have," said Rob Beckley, a senior police officer who heads community and counterterrorism programs for the Association of Chief Police Officers.

He said he had heard the suggestion among some Muslims that this was a "smoke screen" to knock the war in the Middle East off front pages. "Frankly, any idea that this was manipulated is nonsense," he said.

How long will it take before American politicians start saying the same thing?

Maybe they already have and I missed it.

If no one has made the charge yet, I'm sure it won't be long. Harry Reid and Dick Durbin are probably preparing their "wag the dog" statements right now.

Several of the suspects lived in Walthamstow, a working-class northeast London neighborhood that is home to many Pakistanis, African Muslims and Polish immigrants. Residents live in brick homes and townhouses, along streets spotted with pubs, market stalls and fast-food restaurants.

For the Friday afternoon prayer service, dozens of Muslim men came to the Darul Uloom Qadria Jilania mosque in the area, around the corner from where police stood sentry outside the home of one of the suspects. The worshipers, some wearing white dishdashas , the traditional Muslim robe, and others wearing blue jeans and backward baseball caps, knelt to pray on a white sheet spread out on the sidewalk in front of the mosque.

After the prayers, several young men denounced the United States, Israel and the British police for what one man called a "war on Islam." Some of the men accused the police of fabricating the terrorist plot and wrongfully arresting their friends.

The sick thing is there is a fringe Leftist wing in America willing to assume that the government is behind this. They are probably using the information in this article as proof that Dick Cheney concocted the plot.

Yeah, that's the ticket!

..."This plot never existed!" Abid Aslam, 28, shouted about the most recent arrests to the gathering television cameras.

"It's absolute propaganda, it's all about the Jews and oil," said another man.

The men began chanting, "God is great. God is great."

I bet Aslam would like Michael Moore's website.

Cindy Sheehan must be Aslam's hero. She believes everything that Bush and his neocon brigade do is about Jews and oil.

Allahu Akbar!

Ishtiaq Hussain, 25, who grew up in the neighborhood, said he was friends with two of the suspects, Ibrahim Savant and Waheed Zaman. Savant, 25, is a soccer-loving half-British, half-Iranian Muslim convert formerly named Oliver, Hussain said. Zaman, 22, took biochemistry classes and led prayer groups at London Metropolitan University, where he was friends with a diverse group of people, Hussain said.

"He's humble, he's got a big heart. He would never hurt a fly. I mean, he's a nice geezer, he's not an extremist," Hussain said of Zaman. "If evidence does come out that they were plotting something, it would be very hard to digest. Very, very hard."

So often it's the case that friends and neighbors, even family members, are shocked by the actions of someone they know and love.

...At least four of the suspects lived to the west of the city in a suburb called High Wycombe, according to the Bank of England list. One of the suspects, Assad Sarwar, was a Pakistani man who lived in a two-story brick duplex along Walton Drive with his brother and the rest of his family, neighbors said. Some neighbors, watching from across the street as police in hazard suits walked in and out of the house, said they were befuddled and dismayed by the situation.

John Arnold, 28, who knew the Sarwars, echoed the sentiments of several others trying to understand the arrests: "They were just normal kids."

Do "normal kids" have ties to terrorist organizations?

Do "normal kids" plan to board a plane carrying hundreds of people, assemble a bomb in mid-flight, and then blow themselves and everyone else up?

Is that the "new normal" that I keep hearing about?

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Here's a list of the "normal kids," the boys next door:

These are the names of 19 suspects reportedly being held by the police after the foiled plot and whose assets the Treasury has sought to have frozen.


Umir Hussain, 24, London E14

Muhammed Usman Saddique, 24, London E17

Waheed Zaman, 22, London E17

Assan Abdullah Khan, 22, London E17

Waseem Kayani, 28, High Wycombe

Waheed Arafat Khan, 24, London E17

Cossor Ali, 24, London E17

Tayib Rauf, 21, Birmingham

Ibrahim Savant, 26, London E17

Osman Adam Khatib, 20, London E17

Shamin Mohammed Uddin, 36, Stoke Newington

Amin Asmin Tariq, 23, London E17

Shazad Khuram Ali, 27, High Wycombe

Tanvir Hussain, 24, London E10

Umar Islam, 28, (born Brian Young) High Wycombe

Assad Sarwar, 25, High Wycombe

Abdullah Ali, 26, London E17

Abdul Muneem Patel, 17, London E5

Nabeel Hussain, 21, Waltham Forest