An NYT feature looks at why young British Muslim men are killing themselves and others in reaction to conflicts thousands of miles away from them.

An excerpt:

Many here see answers in the sense of injustice at events both at home and abroad that is far more widespread among Muslims than many Westerners recognize; in the rigid and deeply political form of Islam that increasing numbers of educated European Muslims are gravitating to; in the difficulty some second-generation immigrants in Europe have had in finding their place or direction.

Theirs is a broader narrative being played out by such immigrants across Britain, and Western Europe. The young men have grown up brown-skinned in white Britain, in a blighted pocket of Leeds straddling their parents' traditional values and the working-class culture around them. They have been reared shoulder to shoulder with old stone churches and young hooligans, and face to face with attitudes toward family and morality different from those taught by their parents.

"They don't know whether they're Muslim or British or both," said Martin McDaid, a former antiterrorist operative who converted to Islam, taking the name Abdullah, and worked in the neighborhood.

They are alienated from their parents' rural South Asian culture, which they see as backward. Reared in an often racist milieu, they feel excluded from mainstream British society, which has so far not yielded to hyphenated immigrant identities as America has. They have come of age in an era marked by conflicts between Muslims and better armed powers - India, Serbia, Russia, Israel, America and Britain - and the rise of an ideology that sanctifies terrorist attacks against the West in response.

So some young men have solved the "don't know" riddle by discovering a new assertive and transnational identity as Muslims. The change has played out within families in the small, brick "back-to-back" terraced houses of little Beeston's lattice of down-at-the-heels streets.

I found this to be a chilling quote. It's from Ejaz Hussain, a 54-year-old Pakistani immigrant in Leeds and a moderate Muslim:

Passions have been raised, among the bombers most radically, but among many others here and across Europe. Mr. Hussain, who helped organize two peace marches in the bombings' wake, rejects the notion that an outsider from Al Qaeda recruited the men, although others disagree.

He pointed to his head and said in reference to the bombers, and other young Muslims, "Al Qaeda is inside."