Hoffmann continues:
The University of Haifa has long had the highest proportion of Arab students of any Israeli university. The nearby Matza restaurant, owned by Jews but run by an Israeli Arab family from Galilee, seemed to embody the unusually cordial relations that exist among the city's diverse communities. Matza was popular with Jews and Arabs alike, and the presence of its Arab staff and patrons provided a feeling of safety from attack. That feeling was shattered at two-thirty on a quiet Sunday afternoon, when a suicide bomber killed fifteen people and wounded nearly fifty.

Revelations from the latter will not tell us anything we didn't know already: that Rove is slimy, that Joe Wilson is equally slimy (though a lot less clever), that our CIA is a corrupt and dilapidated house of incompetents that should be razed to the ground, the sooner the better.

But those of us who believe that the Beltway is not the center of the galaxy have had our eyes on the London bombings. Today it was revealed that the UK investigators have identified four West Yorkshire-based middle-class British muslims of Pakistani descent as the likely culprits in what appears to have been a series of suicide bombings. Note the "firsts":
-- the first suicide bombing on British soil;
-- the first successful bombing by British-born muslims on British soil;
-- the first of what British authorities believe will be many similar attempts by British-born and -bred muslims upon their fellow UK citizens.

The implications are huge. Without question, Blair will now seek and likely receive far greater powers to detain, disrupt and deport suspected terrorists. Equally likely are stepped-up efforts by the BNP and other racists on the right, not to mention efforts by the likes of the SWP, Galloway and other opportunistic racists on the left, to polarize the UK political climate so as to siphon votes away from the mainstream UK parties.

As in France, and Holland, so now in Britain are we seeing the ramping up of a Europe-wide struggle between forces of tolerance and forces of hatred that will surely be marked by much greater representation for anti-immigrant rightist and anti-jewish leftist parties, both of which agree on one thing: anti-Americanism. 

Finally, it seems obvious that we are now dealing with a homegrown terror bacillus that has nothing to do with Osama, or Zarqawi, or Iraq, or Palestine, and everything to do with a social pathology that no one has really bothered to comprehend. These were middle-class British muslims from what neighbors say were "good families." It appears that they did not attend Jihadist Boot Camp in Afghanistan, had no links to AQ, no connection to Palestine or Iraq or the House of Saud. The only logic to their actions is that they were converts to a messianic, apocalyptic creed of hatred.

In sum, their background and behavior do not fit any of the neat, convenient explanations of terror, be they of the leftist terror-as-response-to-desperation or rightist terror-as-fruit-of-state-sponsorship explanations.

Why is no one at TPMCafe paying any attention to this?

Is it any wonder that our party is not taken seriously by the public on matters of national security?

After all, if your aim is to sow terror in London and disrupt the city's operations, then surely you'd target the City, where the money guys operate, or-- if this is too tough to pull off-- the softer target of the tonier West End neighborhoods, home to the luxe retailers and theatres, other tourist establishments and most of the wealthy Londoners, including most of the expat American managers and bankers.

But certainly not Edgware Road! This is where the UK's first Islamic Bank just opened its main branch. It's where you go to get any kind of arabic reading material, to organize a muslim demonstration, or to recruit muslims to any cause or mosque or mission. Bombing Edgware to send a message to Blair would be like the IRA bombing Irish workers' pubs in Hammersmith to send a message during the 1980s to Thatcher. The "anti-Iraq War" explanation makes utterly no sense.

The only theses that do explain why muslims would bomb their own are either:

a) these bombers are completely irrational and have no greater goal than to reprise the 1930s Spanish Fascists' memorable cry, Viva El Muerte! or

b) the bombers wished to send a very specific message, along with the general message about their ability to create chaos, to the secular and moderate UK muslims who oppose them and reject "Captain Hook" Hamza and the insanity of the whole Islamist death cult.

My vote's for b). As many others have pointed out, this is now a civil war within the muslim world. Iraq was the first front in the struggle of muslim democrats vs muslim fascists and death cultists. If my theory re the Edgware bombings is correct, Europe is now officially the second front in the worldwide Muslim Civil War.