The alleged – and we should remember that word – terrorists arrested in the UK were all, it seems, ‘home-grown’. And that’s something, reasonably enough, that has caught Andrew Sullivan’s attention:

“The small towns they lived in in southern, suburban and rural England are exactly where I grew up, which sends a shudder down my spine. Evil has come to the Shire! What this amounts to, I think, is theological, ideological terrorism that requires no state sponsor as such and no actual network like al Qaeda. And this is surely the trend. It certainly looks as if Madrid was a similarly loosely-connected operation. I’m not saying it means we should ignore state sponsors, like Iran. Au contraire. But I am saying that a policy that focuses entirely on state sponsors is going to miss an important part of the problem.”

He’s right to be worried, and in the point he is making. It will, to say the least, be very interesting to find out more about these individuals. If they (ethnic Pakistanis, apparently) were indeed brought up in the UK in, we should assume, reasonably mainstream families, where did the hatred come from? The usual ‘acceptable’ causes (racism, a sense of exclusion, economic deprivation and so on) will doubtless be blamed regardless of their actual relevance to the facts, but I wonder if there’s something else. Over the last twenty or thirty years, British universities, the schools and the media have relentlessly focussed on the supposed evils of western civilization. Have some people actually been paying attention?