Pride of Somalia

When the Sun ran a story saying that a council in London’s East End will investigate whether a Somali immigrant, Dahir Kadiye, scammed on his housing benefits, the point did not seem particularly newsworthy. That this was the same immigrant who had helped secure the release of Paul and Rachel Chandler after 388 days of being held hostage by pirates in Somalia — now that certainly strikes me as news.

Britain’s 300,000 or so Somalis are a particularly unpopular Muslim community. Somalis are often seen as a drain on the state. They form the hardest inner-city gangs. They mistreat their women. They chew the drug qat. Two of those who attempted to bomb London on 21 July 2005 were ethnic Somalis, and together with the Yemenis they are seen as shaping up to be a new generation of al-Qa’eda bombers. Only this month the Home Secretary, Theresa May, warned that British extremists ‘trained and hardened on the streets of Mogadishu’ might return to commit mass murder on London’s streets.