...from Christopher Hitchens:

Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated along the main thoroughfare of Blackstock Road. This had had a good effect on the quality of the coffee and the spiciness of the grocery stores. But it felt odd, under the gray skies of London, to see women wearing the veil, and even swathed in the chador or the all-enveloping burka. Many of these Algerians, Bangladeshis, and others are also refugees from conflict in their own country. Indeed, they have often been the losers in battles against Middle Eastern and Asian regimes which they regard as insufficiently Islamic. Quite unlike the Irish and the Cypriots, they bring these far-off quarrels along with them. And they also bring a religion which is not ashamed to speak of conquest and violence.

Until he was jailed last year on charges of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, a man known to the police of several countries as Abu Hamza al-Masri was the imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque. He was a conspicuous figure because, having lost the use of an eye and both hands in an exchange of views in Afghanistan, he sported an opaque eye plus a hook to theatrical effect. Not as nice as he looked, Abu Hamza was nonetheless unfailingly generous with his hospitality. Overnight guests at his mosque's sleeping quarters have included Richard Reid, the man in whose honor we now all have to take off our shoes at the airport, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the missing team member of September 11, 2001. Other visitors included Ahmed Ressam, arrested for trying to blow up LAX for the millennium, and Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian who planned to don an explosive vest and penetrate the American Embassy in Paris. On July 7, 2005 ("7/7," as the British call it), a clutch of bombs exploded in London's transport system. It emerged that one of the suicide murderers had been influenced by the preachings of Abu Hamza, as had two of those attempting to replicate the mission two weeks later.

Thanks for the link to that: almost bought the dead-tree version of Vanity Fair soley for that article this morning. The follow-up Q&A linked to the article is is also good and ends with this chilling exchange:

"Is London going to have another attack?"
Of course. Everyone is. No city in the world is not going to have this. It's probably going to be the dominant fact of our future. They will be able to demonstrate with fairly convincing means that there is nowhere that's safe from them. It's coming.

This would be a classic example of why people back home have such high contempt for Hitchens.

People have been complaining about the Arab's in London for decades. You only have to watch sitcoms from the 1970s for similar remarks to the ones that Hitchen's has in his first quoted paragraph. He obviously managed to miss the lower end of the Edware Road nr Marble Arch completely.

Great place for Arabian and North African food though.