Focus: How liberal Britain let hate flourish
A clash of civilisations or a failure of moderates to stand firm? Richard Woods and David Leppard report on the rise of Islamic extremism
WHEN Rachid Salama, a young Algerian, found himself homeless in London, salvation lay in a large mosque dominating a street corner in north London.
“The mosque was huge, clean and warm. Apart from the heavies on the door glaring and flashing their Afghanistan scars, everybody was extremely friendly and welcoming,” he said last week.
“Then I discovered how my brothers passed the day. Many were on benefits or living off charity so they could hang about discussing jihad all day. Whenever we were not praying, we were taken to watch TV. There were endless videos of mujaheddin activity around the globe.
“Jihadist nasheeds (songs) were played in the background, with medieval-style voice harmonies and deeply stirring lyrics about how brave mujhads are suffering for Allah and dying in order to defend Muslim lands. They sometimes climaxed with a question — are you going to stand by and watch Muslim civilians killed? “The atmosphere was intense. Any slight dissent was stamped on so quickly and aggressively that I realised that the best thing to do was nod and say ‘Inshallah’ with the rest of my brothers.”
Salama had found sanctuary in the Finsbury Park mosque under the regime imposed by Abu Hamza, the one-eyed, hook-handed Egyptian who had seized control of the building from moderates and turned it into a centre for incitement to murder.
The Algerian was never gulled by the talk of jihad and left the mosque to find work. But he, like other moderates, had failed to counter the extremism.
When Hamza was convicted of inciting his followers to murder non-Muslims last week, it became clear that the British authorities had also failed to counter the extremism — although they were only too well aware of what was going on.
Is this how moderate Islam has ended up being overshadowed by fanatics in Britain? Has the politically correct Establishment made the fatal mistake of ignoring extremists?
THE poisonous progress of Hamza, and the authorities’ slow reaction to it, reflects the wider rise of Islamic extremism in Britain and the sidelining of moderates.
Like many Muslims, Hamza came to take advantage of opportunities in the UK that he could not find in his native country — in his case Egypt. In 1979, aged 21, he arrived in London to study engineering.
He worked as a hotel receptionist and nightclub bouncer, married an Englishwoman called Valerie Fleming and had a son. Favouring western dress, he exhibited no sign of radicalism.
Then, in the mid-1980s, his wife gave him an ultimatum about his flirting with women. “I told him things had gone too far and that I was leaving,” Fleming said last week. “He responded by saying that he would change and dedicate himself to Islam.”
They began to attend a mosque in north London. It was the time of the Afghan war when the mujaheddin — with western support — were fighting Russian invaders.
Not long after embracing the mosque, Hamza took his young son and disappeared off to the Middle East, ostensibly to visit relatives for six months. After that Fleming barely heard from her husband or son for 16 years.
While abroad Hamza lost his hands in an explosion (he says clearing landmines, other say handling grenades) before returning to Britain, this time as an activist for radical Islam.
Although western intelligence agencies were slow to realise it, a new form of fundamentalism was taking hold across much of the Middle East and Osama Bin Laden and other former mujaheddin had moved their sights from Russia to Saudi Arabia, the West and global jihad.
What gave Hamza his big break were the bitter divisions between moderate Muslim factions at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London. He took control in 1997. “He just dropped anchor and moved in,” one former trustee said last week.
Unlike previous preachers who had usually spoken Pakistani or Indian dialects, Hamza gave his sermons in Arabic and English. He electrified his audiences. In May 1998 after the mosque had not filed any accounts for five years, the Charity Commission was called in to investigate. Hamza and his thugs scared off people with threats of violence.
“When I challenged Hamza over this,” said the former trustee, “he told me, ‘If you want a fight, I’ll give you a fight’.” A member of another mosque who confronted Hamza was also threatened.
The British authorities were outplayed as well. By the end of the 1990s British intelligence services were well aware of what was happening inside the mosque because one of Hamza’s audience was their agent. From 1999 Reda Hassaine, an Algerian journalist, was paid £300 a month by MI5 to spy on Hamza. Over 15 months he reported how Hamza repeatedly called for the murder of westerners and for holy war against all those opposed to Islam. Hassaine was present when Hamza, who was often surrounded by bodyguards carrying knives, inculcated young Muslim men with his hatred of western society.
“He would sit down with boys as young as 10 in small groups and preach jihad to them,” said Hassaine. “He would talk to them about death, the war and going to paradise. He would tell them they had a duty to fight for Allah and that they had to use a sword and they had to kill in the name of Allah and they had to die.”
At the same time Hassaine was regularly reporting back to his MI5 handler, whom he knew as “Steve”.
“I told them Hamza was brainwashing people and sending them to Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, that he was preaching jihad and murder and that he was involved in the provision of false passports. I told them he was a chief terrorist.”
His MI5 handler did not appear unduly worried: he told Hassaine that MI5 thought Hamza was a harmless “clown”. Yet there was hard evidence that Hamza was far from a clown: in December 1998 British intelligence intercepted telephone calls between terrorists who kidnapped 16 western tourists in Yemen and a satellite phone linked to Hamza. Three British tourists were killed during an attempt to rescue them.
Yesterday Laurence Whitehouse, whose wife Margaret died in the Yemen kidnapping, demanded to be told how much British officials had known about Hamza’s involvement and why they had not acted against him earlier. He said the view that “as long as we have got him (Hamza) under our surveillance he will be okay” now seems to have been “naive at best”.
Was there an unwillingness to confront Hamza and other fanatics for fear of offending the wider Muslim community? The idea that it was preferable to have radical groups such as Al-Muhajiroun based here rather than plotting elsewhere had been widespread in Whitehall since the 1980s.
It had led to some commentators dubbing the capital “Londonistan” and to complaints from other governments, particularly France.
Certainly the British government was not outspoken.
When one MP raised concerns in parliament in May 2000 that UK nationals were being trained for jihad, Jack Straw, then home secretary, simply replied that it was a “matter for the police”.
Last week David Blunkett, who succeeded Straw as home secretary, blamed the police, MI5 and other officials for being reluctant to take on Hamza. “There was deep reluctance to act on the information coming out of Abu Hamza’s own mouth,” wrote Blunkett in a newspaper column. “Some in the police and security services did not want to believe how serious it all was.”
The remarks astonished senior police officers. On Friday they said they could not recall Blunkett ever saying that the police were not taking it seriously enough.
“I don’t know where he is getting it from, quite frankly. It’s absolute :wub:,” said one senior officer who was involved at the time. “I think Eliza (Manningham-Buller, head of MI5) would vouch for that.”
Blunkett made little mention of Hamza in the Commons and did not condemn him outright.
Instead, Islamic radicalism was quietly building just as political correctness over ethnic and religious minorities was marching ahead.
The authorities were wary of offending Muslim sensibilities, even in the case of Hamza. When police did finally raid the Finsbury Park mosque they treated the hotbed of terrorism with utmost respect.
“Every precaution was taken to avoid hurting Muslim sensibilities,” Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, wrote in his autobiography. “All police officers who were to enter the mosque wore overshoes and headgear, and the raiding party included Muslim officers to handle copies of the Koran.”
Hamza had shown no such courtesy in his public rants. Instead he had described Britain as a “toilet” and urged his followers to turn it into an Islamic state. He had urged them to “bleed the enemies of Allah” and to “stab them here and there”.
BY an accident of history, Hamza was convicted just as the furore over the cartoons of Muhammad was erupting across the Middle East. The worst face of Islamic extremism in Britain glared malevolently out of British newspaper front pages as reports came in of attacks on Europeans and their embassies in Muslim countries.
In Afghanistan five people died in demonstrations. The Taliban offered kilograms of gold to anyone who killed a Danish cartoonist and/or one of the Danish, Norwegian or German soldiers serving in Afghanistan.
In Kenya police had to fire tear gas to disperse demonstrators marching on the Danish embassy. In Turkey a Catholic priest was shot dead, apparently as a result of the cartoons. Meanwhile, the country’s current hit film tells of an Islamic Rambo tracking down US soldiers in Iraq who are depicted as random killers who use prisoners as organ donors. In the film a Jewish prison doctor scolds soldiers for not bringing back enough Iraqis alive. “I need them intact for their organs,” he says.
By another accident of timing, Hamza’s conviction and the “cartoon war” came as Tony Blair and his government prepared to confront rebel MPs over plans for ID cards and new laws against terrorism that some see as threatening civil liberties.
Terrorists living off subsidies?
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Guderian
