There is nothing in the law of unintended consequences that dictates such consequences must be unpleasant ones (though that’s the way to bet, as Damon Runyon remarked of Ecclesiastes 9:11). An unintended and beneficial consequence of the London bombings is the transformation of the debate in Britain over multiculturalism and “Britishness.” The discovery that the original four bombers were cricket-playing native sons of Yorkshire has alarmed people who had reasonably assumed that the children of Muslim immigrants would assimilate to “Britishness” as a natural result of growing up in the country.

The bombings on the London underground shocked everyone out of this complacency, at least temporarily. None of the usual explanations seemed to apply. The bombers were not poor; they were not “marginalized”; they were not from disturbed or broken homes; they were not living in a culturally separate world. Some fit the profile of a potential terrorist, others did not. One was the son of a successful small businessman; another had fallen into petty crime and gone briefly to prison. Outwardly, they were young Brits of “minority” appearance out on a jaunt; inwardly, they were jihadis avenging the West’s supposed crimes against Islam.

These unsettling facts inevitably raised questions of political identity and allegiance. What had transformed ordinary young Brits into jihadists and mass murderers? What were we to make of the polls that showed substantial minorities of British Muslims sympathizing with them? And did these polls suggest that Muslims had been diverted from developing