I don’t believe that the British terror suspects were just normal guys. With the amount of monitoring that was going on (from July of last year), they can’t all be innocent. Some of them might have been picked up that night because they were hanging out with the terrorists and so might be innocent but all of them can’t be innocent the police would not make that mistake:

“They’re just normal guys, they’re probably being painted as hateful monsters, but they were just normal guys,” Louis Melvin, 26, said Friday as he stood near the Masjid-E-Umer mosque in the Walthamstow neighborhood of London with other young men who said they were friends with some of the suspects. “If they were plotting this for the last year, they wouldn’t have been able to spend all that time talking to me about trivial things like soccer,” Melvin said.

[…]

“There is a perception that this is a trial by media,” said Jahangir Mohammed, director of the Center for Muslim Affairs, an independent research organization based in Manchester. “The general feeling is that people believe this has been concocted and it is very timely” as a diversion from the war between Israel and the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.

[…]

Several Muslims said they condemned any terrorist plot but were skeptical about the police investigation and evidence that tied so many seemingly normal, middle-class Muslims to the alleged plot.

Doing a story about how normal the terrorists are plays into their hands, they wanted everyone to think they are normal, that’s their intention. The 9/11 terrorists were said to be normal guys as well. When the neighbors of serial killers are interviewed they are always surprised by the fact that they were living next to a killer, he seemed so normal is the usual response.
And to say that the arrests were made to get the story of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict off the front pages is ridiculous and sounds like the Daily Kos, interesting that the Muslims are learning from the left in our country.
And then there’s this:

Police “need to be careful” about linking terrorism to the Muslim community “as a whole” and “demonizing the community,” Khalid Sofi, a senior member of the Muslim Council of Britain, told the BBC. He said that British police made sweeping arrests of Muslims based on ethnic and religious profiling and used unwarranted stop-and-search procedures, and that most of the Muslims were released without being charged.

I think the British have gone out of their way to be sensitive to the needs of the community but the Muslims are the ones who are committing terrorists acts so aren’t they the ones to be targeted. You guys aren’t helping your cause and playing the outraged victim isn’t going to get you anywhere because we are all on to your game (well, I hope the authorities are on to it).