Khafeel Ahmed - Douchebag
When President George Bush visited this country of 150 million Muslims last year, he introduced his wife to the prime minister with a fact surely intended to amaze: “Not one Indian Muslim has joined Al Qaeda,” he said.
At a time when Muslim nations from Algeria to Indonesia have emerged as incubators for anti-Western extremists, India - by some estimates the world’s second-most-populous Muslim nation - has remained a unique case.
Yet reports from Britain suggest that, for the first time, an Indian Muslim is likely to be implicated in an act of international terrorism. Khafeel Ahmed, the man who police say crashed a Jeep into Glasgow’s airport on June 30, is an engineer from Bangalore, a city previously known only as the high-tech capital of the new India.
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Thanks a lot douchebag!
on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007, 5:32 pm in Brown › 
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This is a fascinating article. It also blames the attack more on Ahmed’s Brit side than his Indian side:
Yup, this is terrible news. There are tons of complications that lie ahead: increased scrutiny of travellers from India, of business deals, of Indian doctors, students, tourists. And there is the backlash against India in general from a world that is not sensitive to many of the nuances that would distinguish the Indian Muslim (or just Indians) from the Terrible Terrorist Hordes. Incidentally, its worth noting that some of the Indian Muslims involved in this plot also spent a lot of time in Saudi Arabia. If you are interested, you might want to poke into a small, but growning Islamist movement in Karnataka (they were the ones implicated in the attack on the Indian Institute of Science).
Not only is he an Indian, the dude is a PhD.
I read an article in one of the major Brit newspapers that had a profile of Khafeel Ahmed based on an interview with one of his buddies. The quote that stood out was, “He wasn’t an introvert and would participate in discussions, except when it came to politics. He didn’t know much about that.” Sort of fits, I guess. Like that entire village in India which named all their male kids “Saddam Hussein” to protest his execution.
Douchebag, indeed!
This sucks, but let’s not forget the number of Brits (e.g. Omar Sheikh) and Americans (e.g.John Walker Lindh) who committed acts of terror in India (Sheikh) or were planning to (Lindh was training to be inserted into Kashmir when he was captured). The US & UK intelligence agencies overlooked the activities of the Pakistanis and their own citizens as long as it was only Indians on the receiving side
Even worse, the U.S. restrained India from destroying terrorist camps in the Pakistan-controlled parts of Kashmir when India’s own parliament was attacked. Was inconvenient for the Afghanistan campaign. Bad foreign policy.
Khafeel is so technologically advanced, though, that he had his cellphone burnt into him. The MIT media lab will be proud.
Great. That’s all we need, more ‘discriminating’ looks from our peers in the U.S. because finally some twit from back home (India) couldn’t find the appropriate channel for venting, or a decent shrink. I hope they give him the rest of his life in a small, damp cell with no windows to think about how ridiculously stupid his goal was.
It has always been my theory that the birth-place for modern Islamic radicalism is in UK and Pakistan assisted by Saudi money. If you look at Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, the madrassa culture is rather weak (or was rather weak).
The Saudi royal family does not want to do anything with radicals, because these guys want to rip Saudi’s of the control over the Holy mosque in Mecca, it would be ruin of the Saudi royal family, so they have spread their good work outside their boundaries. Radicalism in Pakistan was engendered by American policies/Saudi money, and the UK radicalism was engendered by instances of overt racism against Pakistani settlers. Now, it has morphed into a powerful force that attracts Indians, Africans, Pakistani, and anyone else.