Shocked -- shocked! -- to discover a jihadist in the family. From the Evening Standard (thanks to all who sent this in):

They spent yesterday being questioned at at a high-security police station after they were dramatically arrested on the M6 at the weekend.

Junior doctor Mohammed Asha, 26, and his university-graduate wife Marwah were held because he is suspected of playing a key role in the car bomb plot.

But yesterday their families expressed bewilderment at the suggestion that they could be terrorists. Dr Asha's family said he loved Britain, while his wife's tearful parents said their daughter was innocent.

Saudi-born Dr Asha, who grew up in Jordan, was training to be a neurosurgeon at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire in Stoke-on-Trent, while his 27-year-old wife looked after their twoyear- old son Anaf at their suburban home in Newcastle- under-Lyme.

Hospital colleagues said they were 'astonished' that the well-respected, quiet doctor could be accused of plotting mass murder.

"My son is incapable of such acts," said Dr Asha's father Jamil Abdelkader Asha from his modest home in Amman, Jordan.

"My son was happy in Britain, he was always telling us. He didn't feel he was the brunt of any negative sentiment as an Arab or a Muslim, on the contrary.

"And he is not the type to get involved in political issues – at university he wasn't even a member of any student unions. He is a devout Muslim like the rest of us, but he is not extremely religious. He didn't have time for religion because he was always studying."

How interesting that Asha père equates the intensity of one's Islamic religious commitment with the possibility that he might become a jihad terrorist. This is an equation that no Western public figure would dare to make. Has Old Man Asha been hauled before the "Islamophobia" tribunal yet?

Crossposted from Jihad Watch.