Just 10 years ago, one could never have imagined the greatest threat to American security coming from Britain. Today, however, Britain is so overwhelmed with Islamic extremism that 40 percent of the cia’s effort to prevent an attack on U.S. soil is aimed at plots being hatched in Britain.

Because of the freedom with which they can operate in Britain, numerous jihadist groups have set up bases of operations there. These bases have produced dozens of international terrorist attacks in recent years. As Melanie Phillips documents in her book Londonistan, “UK-based terrorists have carried out operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Russia, Spain and the United States.”

In 2002, for example, London-born Omar Sheikh beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. In 2003, two British students blew themselves up inside a Tel Aviv bar. Shoe-bomber Richard Reid, one of the masterminds behind the Bali attack, and the man who rammed a truck bomb into police barracks in Kashmir all came from Britain.

When it comes to international terrorism, Tim Shipman recently wrote, Britain is no longer part of the solution, but rather a primary cause of the problem. There are currently 2,000 British citizens who are suspected of being involved in some kind of terrorist activity. British security officials believe approximately 4,000 more are susceptible to recruitment. And while Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5 has thwarted a number of attacks, including the 2006 plot to blow up seven transatlantic airliners, it simply lacks the resources to investigate every threat.

“We don’t have anything approaching comprehensive coverage,” the director general of MI5, Jonathan Evans, said earlier this year. According to Shipman, British security services can adequately monitor just two live plots at a time.

Thus, in hopes of preventing a British-born, 9/11-style attack on American soil, the cia has massively expanded its spying capabilities in the UK.

It’s the British Pakistani community, now numbering over 800,000, that concerns the United States most. About half of these “Brit-Paks,” as they’re called, travel to and from Pakistan—now one of the world’s most dangerous nations. It’s not at all inconceivable for some of these travelers to disappear into Pakistani terror camps, resurface months later in London as trained terrorists, and then hop on transatlantic flights for America—only needing a British passport, due to the visa waiver agreement between the U.S. and Britain.

No wonder the United States has intensified its effort to spy on Britain. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last month, fbi Director Robert Mueller said the primary terrorist threat America faces comes from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Besides these terrorist hubs, Mueller added, “[W]e must consider extremists from visa-waiver countries, who are merely an e-ticket away from the United States.”

In the case of America’s ally in the war on terror, that means 2,000 British terrorists are only an e-ticket away from American cities. This threat, Tim Shipman wrote in January,

has led to friction between British and American spies, with some U.S. intelligence officers irritated that resources are being diverted to gather intelligence on suspects in their closest ally’s backyard. British intelligence officers do not know the identity of all the cia informers and are uneasy about some of the uses to which the intelligence has been put.

Imagine what would happen to the Anglo-American alliance if a successful Brit-Pak attack landed on American soil? As we noted last week, this is an alliance that is already under considerable strain.

How did we get into this mess? Britain now has the shameful reputation of being one of the biggest exporters of Islamic terror. And to prevent another 9/11 from happening on American soil, the United States now devotes 40 percent of its espionage operations to spy on its friend.

In his book The United States and Britain in Prophecy (print version is also free upon request), Herbert W. Armstrong explains how the U.S. and Britain (as well as other nations that used to be in the British Commonwealth), comprise the peoples of biblical Israel.

This is important because of the many dire warnings God gave to the end-time descendants of Israel, one of which is found in Deuteronomy 28:43, where it says, “The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low.” Verse 44 adds, “[H]e shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.”

The “stranger” is now rising up in the midst of our nations—pouring through our ports of entry. Soon they will completely overwhelm the latter-day descendants of Israel.

This is prophetic fulfillment!