The four young British suicide terrorists of Pakistani origin who committed last week’s London bombings appear to have become Islamic extremists at a government-funded youth centre in Leeds: the Hamara Youth Access Point. The Canadian Globe and Mail reported yesterday that apart from the British government the European Union, too, funded the centre. People working at the centre described it as a hub of radical Muslim politics and a hotbed of Islamic organizing, routinely hosting mysterious figures to speak about extremist politics. "It had become so radical and so hateful that I asked if I could stop working there," said one of the employees. Considering these testimonies one wonders why the British and EU authorities never inquired about what was going on in the centre. Is it standard policy just to pour European taxpayers’ money into projects without assessing what is being done with the money?

Philip Claeys, a Flemish Member of the European Parliament, has asked the European Commission for an inventory of all similar youth centres subsidised by the EU. He wants the Commission to investigate whether European subsidies are being used to sponsor Islamic fundamentalists.

On Tuesday, Daniel Pipes wrote in The New York Sun that, contrary to what most people think, the British are “appeasing and weak” in the war against terrorism and radical Islam while the French are “resolute and strong.” British-based terrorists have carried out operations worldwide while many governments have protested London’s refusal to shut down its Islamic terrorist infrastructure or extradite wanted operatives. Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak has even denounced Britain for “protecting killers.”

Counterterrorism specialists call London “the most important jihadist hub in Western Europe.” One intelligence official even said of last week’s attacks: “The terrorists have come home. It is payback time for… an irresponsible policy.”

France, on the other hand, appears to be a loyal ally of the Americans in the war against terrorism. “The British may have a ‘special relationship’ with Washington on Iraq, but the French have one with it in the war on terror,” says Pipes. His article was translated into French and published in today’s Parisian conservative newspaper Le Figaro.

Pipes applauds the French government’s 2004 decision to outlaw the hijab, the Muslim headscarf, from public educational institutions. When Iraqi terrorists kidnapped two French journalists, threatening to execute them unless the hijab ban was revoked, Paris stood firm. “The British,” says Pipes, “have seemingly lost interest in their heritage while the French hold on to theirs: As the British ban fox hunting, the French ban hijabs.” While we all tend to think that the British are the most forceful defenders of their national identity against the Brussels moloch, Pipes points out that it is France that has retained a pride in its historic culture while Britain has embraced multiculturalism. “This contrast in matters of identity makes Britain the Western country most vulnerable to the ravages of radical Islam whereas France, for all its political failings, has held onto a sense of self that may yet see it through.”