The U.K. has mistakenly subcontracted the management of its Muslim population to community brokers, Gilles Kepel tells Haaretz, rebutting rival scholar Olivier Roy.  British law enforcement struggling to cope with a burgeoning wave of terrorism? It’s the ghost of the Raj, British rule in India, that has come back to haunt Britain, says Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on fundamentalist Islam and the author of “Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West.”

“The British state has made the mistake of subcontracting the management of its Muslim population to the local community brokers, an attitude rooted in the Raj system in India,” Kepel told Haaretz. “In places like Manchester and Birmingham they relied on Salafi community leaders while cutting back the highly fragmented police force.”

Kepel claims that in London, or Londonistan as he calls it, “they gave shelter to radical Islamist leaders from around the world as a sort of insurance policy against jihadi terrorism. But you know, when you go for dinner with the devil ….”

According to Kepel, the terrorists who struck Britain in the run-up to Thursday’s general election are part of a “third-generation of jihadists” following in the footsteps of the first mujahideens who resisted the Soviets in Afghanistan and then “generation Al-Qaida.” Al-Qaida was characterized by a structured, hierarchical model with Osama bin Laden at the top, while the new terrorists are only loosely and horizontally affiliated with one another.

Kepel considers Syrian-Spanish jihadi Abu Musab al-Suri a key figure for this third-generation, or 3G, jihadism. In 2005 al-Suri penned “The Global Islamic Resistance Call,” a guide to the new bottom-up terror strategy. Borrowing a phrase from the jihadi, Kepel says the new approach forms “an organization but not a system” (nizam, la tanzim).

source: Haaretz