Is Terror Britain’s Newest Export?

But in the days after the hostages ran free and the attacker was killed by police, the case gained a global dimension with the news that the attacker, Malik Faisal Akram, was of British Pakistani descent.

Akram, 44, from Blackburn in England’s northwest, had traveled to the United States two weeks before the attack, staying at homeless shelters in the area of the Reform temple. He bought a handgun on the street, and railed against Jewish power during the 11-hour long siege, as well as demanding the release of an al-Qaeda operative held at a Texas prison.

Seventeen years after the London bus bombings, the attacker’s origins have drawn attention to the state of Britain’s own fight against terror.

According to Dr. Rakib Ehsan, a research fellow at the the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank, the attack is only the latest alarm to sound for the country’s anti-terror policies. And as a patron of the interfaith charity Muslims Against Anti-Semitism, Ehsan says that heightened anti-Jewish bias within Britain’s Muslim community constitutes a danger — one that elites seem determined to ignore.