The fundamentalist question: “Three young British Muslim men from Luton and Crawley were reportedly killed fighting with the Taliban; a man from Bromley in London tried to blow up an aeroplane mid-Atlantic; an American youth crashed a plane into a Florida skyscraper in the name of Osama bin Laden; a man from California was picked up with the Taliban; two men from Tipton, West Midlands, and one man from Croydon, south London, are being held as al-Qaeda suspects in Camp X-Ray.

To lose one citizen may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose at least nine looks like carelessness. Why is it that these men, born and brought up in Britain and the USA, are gripped to fight for an irrational, religious dogma – and seemingly possessed with an absolutist hatred for the infidel West? Why does their experience of living in the West not imbue them with a respect for the virtues of democracy, rational debate and secularism? Why don’t they feel like they belong?” sp!ked