KCRW PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release: August 20, 2004;
Media Contacts: Sarah Spitz (310) 450-5183

BRITISH JIHAD: INSIDE/OUT
New Documentary on KCRW, 8/24/04 2 pm

It is one of the pressing questions about contemporary British life: how did Britain become an important staging post in global Jihad? Richard Reid, the so-called "shoe-bomber," was from London; British Muslims committed a suicide attack in Israel last year and a radical Islamic preacher, Sheikh Abu Hamza, is in London fighting extradition to the US on a number of terrorism charges.

On Tuesday, August 24, from 2 to 3 pm, producer Michael Goldfarb, of Boston public radio station WBUR's "Inside Out" documentary unit, presents "British Jihad: Inside Out" on KCRW 89.9 and KCRW.com.

Goldfarb spent much of the last six months looking at this problem to create this new program and he takes us directly into London's mosques and into the living rooms and offices of Muslims and others who face the issues issues that confront them daily. He focuses on the radical preachers who extol the romance of martyrdom to a generation of immigrant youngsters unsure of their place in modern Britain, and he talks to a number of the young men who find the Sheik’s words appealing.

Goldfarb reports on why and how the UK in recent years has become a recruiting center for Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups. What aspects of Muslim life in the UK have prompted an affinity amongst the ranks of young Muslims with a more extreme version of their religion?

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