The Insider's Warning

On April 30, 2003, Asif Hanif, 21, achieved the notorious feat of becoming Britain's first suicide bomber, killing Ran Baron, Dominique Hass and Yanai Weiss and wounding 60 others when he detonated his explosives to murderously shatter the mellow peace of Mike's Place, the Tel Aviv beachfront blues bar.

Ed Husain knew Hanif, and remembers him as "a teddy bear of a character: generous, kind, selfless and committed."

Both men had been studying Arabic in Damascus not long before the bombing. But while Husain was in the process of reeducating himself and rejecting Islamic extremism, Hanif was plunging ever deeper into violent radicalism.

"The Asif I knew did not believe in killing innocent civilians in Britain or any other country, but Islamist rhetoric had convinced him that Israelis, without exception, were not innocent but occupiers of the Palestinian homeland," Husain writes in his frankly horrifying book The Islamist. "Asif's recruitment to suicide bombing came about against a backdrop of increasingly radicalized young Muslims in communities across Britain," the author notes. "The qualities that made Asif a great Muslim host - selflessness and commitment - were the same traits that, when corrupted, transformed him into a suicide bomber."

Had Husain not so starkly changed course, he might have wound up as murderously transformed as Hanif. For Husain had traveled along the same route to indoctrination. He too had been well on the way to persuasion, over years of deepening immersion in the prevalent victim-aggressor culture of perverted Islam, that it was God's will, Allah's will, for his soldiers to kill the infidels - Jews, Christians, even nonextreme Muslims - to establish an all-powerful Islamist state.

Husain's book, recently published in the UK and yet to appear in the US, is horrifying precisely because it documents so candidly the smoothness with which Husain was recruited to such misguided ruthlessness. He was gradually drawn into ever more intolerant circles, and became prominent within them - helping to galvanize the process by which the racist, misogynist and thuggish ideology came to dominate various colleges in East London a decade or so ago....

It is being facilitated in the UK, as he makes clear, by a staggering naivety on the part of the government, law enforcement and the educational authorities, who are shown to be hesitant and closed-minded as to the terrifying scale of the threat despite the series of Islamist attacks Britain is enduring, and insistently invoking free speech as an absolute value even as it is being abused to fuel vicious hatred for the very society that upholds it.