In February, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, delivered a speech on Islamist extremism to the delegates of the forty-seventh Munich Security Conference. In Cameron’s view, the “process of radicalization” that prompted someone like primary-school teaching assistant Mohammad Sidique Khan to blow up a train was a crisis of identity, precipitated by the erosion of the British character. Repudiating multiculturalism has lately become obligatory among European leaders. According to a survey commissioned by the German Marshall Fund of the U.S., anxiety about immigration is more acute in Britain than in any other European country surveyed.

And, as in the rest of Europe, in Britain—where the Muslim population has increased by seventy-four per cent, from 1.6 million to an estimated 2.8 million since 2001—concern about immigration is often a euphemism for concern about Islam. Fifty-two per cent of respondents to a poll of five thousand believed that Muslims create problems in their country. In an unseemly coincidence, as Cameron spoke thousands of Britons were preparing to take to the streets in Luton, thirty miles north of London. The occasion was the latest in a series of marches organized by a two-year-old group called the English Defence League. The E.D.L. bills itself as “a human rights organization that exists to protect the inalienable rights of all people to protest against radical Islam’s encroachment into the lives of non-Muslims.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/04/110704fa_fact_collins#ixzz1QmOZ8vWe