What it means to be neighborly

I’LL BET YOU KNOW MANY PEOPLE eager to escape the follies and cruelties of our current US administration. Couples and singletons so appalled by what the Trumpians are doing  —  especially to immigrants of all kinds — that they now want to live somewhere that the red-white-and-blue does not fly.

What a reversal this is of our country’s bold clarion call to immigrants issued a century-and-one-half ago:

“Give me your tired, your poor, 

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

The country from which I emigrated to become an American also took great pride once upon a time in accepting incomers. The UK was still quite recently described, before the rush to madness under Boris Johnson and other jingoists, as owing its success as a nation to immigration. The idealist still in office in 2014 who made that claim was Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative. To quote him exactly and fully, Cameron said:

“We are ‘Great’ Britain because of immigration, not in spite of it. We should celebrate it. We should never allow anyone to demonize it.  Yes, Britain will always be open to the best and brightest from around the world — and those fleeing persecution.”

Can you imagine any “Conservative” leader now, on either side of the Atlantic, saying such a thing?

I’d like to hail a remarkable new book in the “social studies” category that addresses this issue and others – a really good book for all its somewhat dry field or genre. And I’ll make no secret, indeed I will in the interests of full disclosure say openly, that its publisher is my publisher, EnvelopeBooks in London. Because of that you might expect some bias from me, but I promise you my appreciation of the book is as wholly objective as can be.

THE BOOK CONCENTRATES ON A NORTHWEST LONDON suburb, Wembley, headed by a simple title: WEMBLEY SPEAKS. It’s a district which has unfortunately been the target for snobbish and Monty Pythonesque jibes for a long time. One plain and simple fact about it, though, is that its population contains a vast mixture of minorities.

The preponderance of Pakistani-born, Indian, Caribbean, Black African, and Eastern European residents makes Wembley far more diverse than most English towns or cities — and more diverse than even those major centers of population, Birmingham, Leicester and Manchester which are generally noted for their social heterogeneity.

Perhaps curiously, I came to do some of my own reporting on Wembley back in 2013 — because of extremist Islamist bombs far away in Boston, Massachusetts, those bombs that so violently disrupted the Boston Marathon with three people killed and hundreds badly injured. My report was for PBS, and my American editors at the network wanted to know how well or otherwise British authorities were doing in countering “home-grown” or domestic terrorists (which Boston’s killers were, too - American-born though they of Chechen parentage. They had gained what was labeled "derivative asylum status". It’s a status they were awarded because both parents and an uncle had earned their US entry through fears of persecution in Chechnya.

My reporting suggested that British police and anti-terrorist intelligence agencies had a better handle than many governments on domestic terrorists. Domestic, as pposed to so-called incomers like the 19 infamous and mainly Saudi perpetrators of the 9/11 hijackings and killings that claimed at least 3,000 victims.

The importance of gaining intelligence about in-country jihadist cells was obvious and my UK reporting concentrated on the contentious British intelligence-gathering approach known as Prevent. (In the picture above I’m holding an official copy of the government’s Prevent Strategy while we filmed outside the London Central Mosque.) A quasi-governmental source, Prof. Michael Clarke, Director of the Royal United Services Institute, England’s oldest military and national security think-tank, reprimanded the United States on camera for lagging behind the UK. “The US has for too long regarded jihadist terrorism as something that comes from the outside, but it doesn’t. You’ve got to swallow a bit of pride and say, yes, we have a homegrown problem.”

Clarke sounded convincing when he also told me that the Prevent intelligence efforts had, for some credible reasons, switched from closely monitoring traditional targets like mosques with a supposedly radical reputation. The “locus,” of radical operations, as he put it, had changed. Instead of radicalization in the mosques, more and more intelligence now suggested that militants were instead radicalizing in bookshops and sports-clubs: “that’s where the threat lies more seriously now,” said Clarke.

That’s how I ended up in Wembley, with my video-crew stepping across the humdrum doorstep of a radical bookstore run by the Islamic Human Rights Commission. It’s at 202 Preston Road, Wembley, one of many simple storefronts on that sizable main road, like the Mouskan nails salon, the Food for Less grocery store, and the St Luke’s Hospice charity store. In charge of the IHRC’s bookstore, and indeed all its other activities, like the hanging-space for Islamic art of varied kinds, is Massoud Shadjareh — and he provided me with many examples of deep irony evident in Muslim life today, in Wembley and elsewhere. There’s Irony, for instance, in the way young Muslims are encouraged to “get engaged,” to join in community life fully, but when they want to critique matters of special interest to Muslims, like for instance the state of Syria after Bashar el-Assad’s overthrow, they are told “look, don’t have grievances, don’t raise issues regarding the region, Iraq and Afghanistan and so forth. If you do [said Shadjareh] you’re moving towards becoming extremists. In a modern democracy, it really is outrage to limit people’s free speech like this”.

I DON’T BELIEVE MUCH WILL HAVE CHANGED in the twelve years since that report. WEMBLEY SPEAKS brings us an innovative attempt to gauge the mood of a significant and very mixed neighborhood. To do that it turns, inevitably for our times, to a smartphone app. It’s very apt, at least in name. It’s called NEXTDOOR and it enables near-neighbors to share information, comments, and advice on matters of mutual interest. These range, fascinatingly for an outsider, from steps to get rid of a scammer conning an elderly woman on her doorstep … to a petition about a proposed Ismaili school in the area … to circulating throughout the neighborhood the license number of a car allegedly involved in a hit-and-run.

And just in case you think the quotidian concerns of 2025 Wembley fall well below your concerns … I should point out for those who don’t know it that Wembley can boast of some substantial social gathering-places. Notably there’s Wembey Stadium, the majestic soccer venue that should really in my view be called The National Stadium. And it also hosts the gorgeous glory of Neasden Temple, reputedly the world’s largest Hindu temple outside of India. WEMBLEY SPEAKS is a book well worth reading carefully - about a population well worth studying.

WEMBLEY SPEAKS: What the NEXTDOOR Neighbors are Saying

Games, Stephen (Editor)  Published 2025 in US and UK by EnvelopeBooks, London

(406pp; $25-00)