Wearin' o' the green?

John Burns has an article in The New York Times about strangers in a strange land:

When two North African men under investigation in an alleged terrorist plot to kill a Swedish artist appeared in the gray pillared courthouse here this week, many native Waterford residents reacted as much with puzzlement as dismay, as if Islamic extremism had no conceivable place amid the tranquillity of this quiet old harbor town. “I think everybody is asking why should it come here; it’s something that doesn’t belong,” said one of the pinstriped lawyers who use the chilly courthouse lobby to caucus with clients. His face darkening with anxiety, he quickly asked that he not be named.
A fellow lawyer standing nearby saw it differently, saying it was precisely because Waterford is something of a backwater, one hundred miles south of Dublin, that it may have attracted people intent on developing a terrorist underground. “For people like that, the quieter the place, the better,” said Tom Walsh, a cheerful 54-year-old taking a break from a case involving a property dispute.
Like the rest of Ireland, Waterford has taken a severe blow with the recession that brought a crashing end to the 'Celtic Tiger' years, dating from the mid-1990s, when Ireland became a byword for rising prosperity. Unemployment has soared, and civic pride, as well as local pocketbooks, was bludgeoned when Waterford Crystal Ltd. closed its plant last year, and the company’s new American owners moved production to Germany and the Czech Republic.
But, if the loss of jobs has been a harsh reverse, the scenes at the courthouse struck many here as surreal. Although Waterford has had its share of Muslim migrants in the past fifteen years, many of them drawn here in pursuit of jobs during the boom, most were absorbed quickly into the local landscape, attracting little attention in a town whose busy port has always drawn its share of outsiders.
Not so Ali Charaf Damache, a 44-year-old Algerian, suspected of being the ringleader of seven Muslims arrested March 9 by the Irish counterterrorism police acting in concert with the FBI. The Americans identified the suspects here during their investigation of an alleged plot to murder a Swedish artist, Lars Vilks, who drew a cartoon published in Swedish newspapers that showed the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog. For his court appearance on Monday, Mr. Damache dressed in the traditional garb of the Touareg nomads of the North African desert, with a flowing black overgarment and a turban of black cotton wrapped so as to leave only a narrow slit for his eyes. For greater effect, the Algerian raised his manacled fists to photographers, in what seemed like a calculated gesture of defiance.

The first arrest in the case involved a Philadelphia-area woman, Colleen R. LaRose, a Muslim convert who called herself Jihad Jane on the Internet. On Thursday, Ms. LaRose, 46, pleaded not guilty in Philadelphia to multiple counts of conspiring with jihadist fighters and pledging to commit murder in the name of an Islamic holy war. Law enforcement officials said it was her arrest last fall, after stepping off a plane from Ireland, that led to the four men and three women arrested here.
In Waterford, five of the seven people arrested have been released, including a second American woman who is a Muslim convert, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 31, of Leadville, Colorado, who has been living with Mr. Damache in Waterford since last fall and is several months pregnant. She remains in Dublin, and FBI officials have been urging her to return to the United States for further questioning.
The police in Ireland say that their inquiry in the case is continuing, and that the relatively minor charges against Mr. Damache and a 32-year-old Libyan man, Abdul Salam al-Jahani, could be broadened later to include conspiracy to commit murder. On Friday, the Waterford court remanded Mr. Damache for another week on a charge of threatening another Irish Muslim by telephone. Mr. Jahani pleaded guilty to a charge of presenting false documents to Irish police officers who arrested him, and was sentenced to three months in prison.
Lawyers familiar with the case say that Irish investigators have hinted at a larger plot than just the threat to kill Mr. Vilks, the artist. “Al-Qaeda has been mentioned during the questioning,” one lawyer said, asking for his identity to be withheld because of the delicacy of the case. In court on Monday, prosecutors, urging that Mr. Damache be denied bail, said he had plans to visit Algeria and Afghanistan.
Dozens of al-Qaeda-linked plots have been investigated in Britain in recent years, especially since the suicide bombings on the London transit system in July 2005. But Ireland has mostly escaped the contagion. People familiar with the Muslim community here— numbering about 40,000 people, between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland— say one reason may be that the community is ethnically diffuse, unlike Britain, where more than two-thirds of the 1.5 million Muslims have family origins in Pakistan, which has served as a base for many of the plots discovered in Britain.
In Waterford, as elsewhere in Ireland, Muslims hail from wide parts of the Islamic world: South Asia, the Middle East, and North and East Africa. Most have arrived here since 1990, when a census put the number of Muslims in Ireland at 4,000, drawn by jobs or university education.
Others came as asylum seekers, attracted by the relative ease of crossing borders within the European Union, their paths eased by a generous system of state support for migrants. Prosecutors said Mr. Damache, after ten years in Ireland, was living off welfare benefits at the time of his arrest, as was Mr. Jahani.
But whatever may have helped to incubate Islamic militancy in Waterford, it seems not to have been difficult for Muslims to find a welcome here. While there have been frictions of a kind common across Europe, the government has usually stepped in at an early stage to resolve them.
After the government upheld the right of Muslim schoolgirls to wear the hijab, the traditional Muslim head covering, in the classroom, one commentator mocked those who sought to ban it, saying no one had ever objected to Catholic nuns wearing veils in the classroom. “After all, for generations the veil has played a central role in education here,” wrote the commentator, Emma O’Kelly, the education correspondent for RTE, the Irish state broadcaster. “Countless generations of Irish children have been educated in Irish schools by Irish women wearing veils. Some still are. The only difference now is that it’s pupils, not teachers, who are covering their heads, and they’re not Catholic, they’re Muslim.”

Rico says the Irish are right to be confused; Islamic terrorists trying to kill a Swede over some cartoons is outside their purview. (And the post title is a joke about the color of the Saudi flag.)