And, for all this incitement, the British taxpayer was paying through the nose. Sheikh Bakri acknowledged to the press that he had been living on social benefits of nearly £300 a week in handouts from the British government for himself, his wife and their several children. “Islam allows me to take the benefit the system offers,” he explained. “I’m fully eligible. It is very difficult for me to get a job. Anyway, most of the leadership of the Islamic movement is on [state] benefit.”34 Omar Bakri Mohammed continued to foment Islamist insurrection until the government suggested after the July bombings that it might finally take action against such extremists, when he left the country and was promptly barred from returning.
But perhaps most astonishing of all was the history of the institution at the very heart of the British jihad, the Finsbury Park mosque.
The North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park owed its existence to the Prince of Wales, who persuaded King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to donate well over £1.3 million to construct a new building in the heart of the largely Bangladeshi community in north London. This worthy enterprise, however, was rapidly hijacked in the early 1990s by violent extremists who attacked the mosque’s original trustees and others who attempted to resist them. At this stage a mediator appeared in the unlikely form of one Abu Hamza, an Egyptian-born former engineering student and nightclub bouncer, who had lost an eye and an arm in Afghanistan and sported a hook instead of a hand, and who was henceforth allowed to preach in the mosque.35
Abu Hamza, however, turned out to be one of the most dangerous men in Britain. In April 2002, the United States listed him as having alleged links to terrorism, accusing him of membership of the Islamic Army of Aden, the group that claimed responsibility for the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. By his own admission he had “a long association with the Taliban government.” During the 1990s, he and his “Supporters of Sharia” were considered to be the propagandists of the Algerian GIA in Europe. At a meeting at the Finsbury Park mosque on June 29, 2001, according to La Repubblica, Abu Hamza proposed an ambitious but unlikely plot, “which involved attacks carried out by planes,” to kill President Bush at the G8 summit in Genoa. The Italian report concluded: “The belief that Osama bin Laden is plotting an attack is spreading among the radical Islamic groups.”36
Attempts by the mosque’s trustees to evict Abu Hamza were met with violence. In October 1998, the trustees appealed unsuccessfully to the High Court to stop him from preaching. Worshippers then began noticing groups of young men staying overnight at the mosque. These included Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”; a Tunisian, Nizar Trabelsi, who was told to drive a truck loaded with explosives into the U.S. embassy in Paris; Zacarias Moussaoui, the 9/11 planner; Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested attempting to bomb the Los Angeles airport at the millennium; Anas al-Liby, now on the FBI’s most-wanted list and in whose Manchester flat police found al-Qaeda’s terror manual in 1998; Abu Doha, wanted in the United States and France for plotting bombings; and others.37
Yet Abu Hamza was allowed to preach jihad until police stormed the Finsbury Park mosque in 2003 during an investigation into a suspected plot involving ricin poisoning. The raid involved 150 police officers wearing full body armor with some carrying guns (still unusual in Britain), smashing a battering ram through the front door. Despite this show of lethal force, officers who had sought the advice of Muslim colleagues on “how to behave respectfully” covered their shoes and focused their search on offices, avoiding prayer spaces.38
In April 2003, the Home Office finally moved to strip Abu Hamza of his citizenship with a view to deporting him. But although he was banned from preaching inside the Finsbury Park mosque, he held prayers outside the building every Friday until he was eventually put on trial—after some seven years of incitement, and then only after America had applied for his extradition. Hundreds of worshippers filled the street to hear Abu Hamza describe Israel as a criminal state, attack the media as Zionist and denounce Western politicians as corrupt homosexuals—for which the British taxpayers had to fork out yet further hundreds of thousands of pounds, since at least twelve officers had to be on duty outside the mosque when these events took place. The offense of obstructing the public highway was ignored and, in surreal scenes, Hamza sat in an armchair on the pavement after prayers as his followers queued to embrace him and have private conversations.39
This astounding standoff by the British authorities produced an even more farcical sequel. After the Abu Hamza debacle, a new board of trustees was appointed to give the mosque a fresh start. But one of these trustees was Mohammed Kassem Sawalha, president of the Muslim Association of Britain. According to U.S. court documents, in the early 1990s Sawalha was a leading militant “in charge of Hamas terrorist operations within the West Bank.” Sawalha maintained that he was committed to peace in Britain. Both Muslims and non-Muslims in the British establishment simply looked the other way. Another trustee, Mohammed Sarwar, MP for Glasgow Govan, said he would remain despite being told of Sawalha’s links to Hamas, and proclaimed himself happy with the way the mosque was being run. And Barry Norman, the Metropolitan Police chief superintendent who was working closely with the trustees, said: “I am aware of the background, but if I took the view that I’m not working with this or that person I’d end up spending my whole life in my office.”40
Despite the lethal nature of the activities of Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri Mohammed, Britain persisted in regarding them as little more than pantomime villains. It just did not take them seriously; indeed, until the London bombings in 2005, it paid virtually no attention to the extraordinary network of terrorism and extremist incitement that had developed under its nose. Nor was it taking any notice of those who were warning that British Muslims had become dangerously radicalized. Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, the bishop of Rochester who had been watching this process with alarm throughout much of this period, says that when he started saying as much to Labour government ministers in the late 1990s he was met with incomprehension. “They would say to me: ‘But these are my constituents, they are perfectly nice people.’ They just didn’t believe me when I told them the kind of things that were being taught in places like the center at Leicester run by the Jamaat al-Islami.”41
So why were such people allowed to carry out activities in Britain that posed such a threat to the West? Why didn’t the British authorities arrest or deport the foreign radicals, shut off their funds and suppress their terrorist infrastructure? Why, indeed, were they allowed into the country in the first place? And why did the authorities allow the growth of a hostile separatism among British Muslims? The answer is as complex as it is troubling. It requires understanding a society that even now is in denial about the threat that it faces, and whose institutions have all been captured by a mindset that poses a lethal danger to the British state by weakening its defenses from within against the threat from without.
· CHAPTER TWO ·
THE HUMAN RIGHTS JIHAD
For Islamist terrorists and jihadi ideologues, London during the 1980s and 1990s was the place to be. Kicked out of or repressed within their own countries, they streamed in their thousands to the British capital because they found it to be more hospitable and tolerant than any other place on the globe.
A more brutal way of putting it, however, is that British entry procedures were the most lax and sloppy in the developed world—a system which asked no questions, required no identity papers and instead showered newcomers with a galaxy of welfare benefits, free education and free health care regardless of their behavior, beliefs or circumstances. To state it more brutally still, during the 1990s Britain simply lost control of its borders altogether because of the gross abuse and total breakdown of its asylum system. Of the thousands of asylum-seekers who arrive every year, most have no legal entitlement to remain in Britain. Yet only a very small minority are sent home, and the remainder melt into British society. The reason so many are attracted is largely because illegal immigrants can simply disappear with no questions asked.
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br /> It was hardly surprising, therefore, that so many Islamist terrorists and extremists found Britain to be such a delightful and agreeable destination. As the counterterrorism analyst Robert Leiken has pointed out, al-Qaeda and its affiliates depend on immigration to get into the West to carry out their terrorist plots, and to that end they use—or abuse—every immigration category to infiltrate Western countries.1 According to Imam Abu Baseer, one of the leading religious supporters of al-Qaeda:One of the goals of immigration is the revival of the duty of jihad and enforcement of their power over the infidels. Immigration and jihad go together. One is the consequence of the other and dependent upon it. The continuance of the one is dependent upon the continuance of the other.2
The asylum shambles thus provided cover for the influx of large numbers of people into Britain who posed a direct threat to the state from without. But the reason why the shambles occurred in the first place is itself intimately related to a threat to the state that had developed from within.
Britain lost control of its borders because it was overwhelmed by a huge increase in the numbers claiming asylum. As Europe played host to a vast migration of peoples from south to north, Britain’s lax asylum rules made it a soft touch for those who were not fleeing persecution at all but simply wanted a better life. Ministers and officials in charge of the asylum system, moreover, were among the least likely to possess either the intellectual or the political clout to tackle this problem. This was because, as members of a lowly and disregarded department, they tended to be at the bottom of the political pecking order.
The reason for this, in turn, was that the whole subject of immigration had been absolutely taboo ever since the Conservative politician Enoch Powell made a notorious speech in 1968 when, warning of the consequences of continued unchecked immigration from the Commonwealth, he alluded to a prophecy from Virgil that the river Tiber would “foam with much blood.” That speech turned immigration into the topic that dared not speak its name, and racial prejudice became the most neuralgic issue in British politics. So when the asylum system collapsed under the twin strains of multiplying abuses and official incompetence, no one did anything about it for years—until the public started to protest.
When politicians finally did try to tackle the problem, they failed dismally because they refused to address the fundamental reason for the chaos. This was at root an ideology of “human rights” that was nothing less than an assault on the integrity of the nation, along with an obsession with preventing any self-designated “victim groups” from being harmed anywhere in the world. And the topic couldn’t even be talked about openly and honestly for fear of accusations of racism. Remarkably, these absurd and dangerous attitudes—the governing creed of the progressive intelligentsia—had become the orthodoxy in the very heart of the British establishment, the judiciary, whose rulings not only reduced the asylum system to a shambles but thwarted all subsequent attempts to restore order.
In 1989, the European Court of Human Rights extended the scope of the provision in the European Convention on Human Rights that prohibits torture or degrading treatment. This ruling made it impossible to deport illegal immigrants—including suspected terrorists—to any place where the judges thought such abuses might be practiced. Although the ruling applied to all signatories to the Convention, the English courts applied it far more zealously than anyone else. At the same time, English judges began to interpret the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees much more broadly than other countries, so that the definition of a refugee was expanded from its original meaning of someone persecuted by the state to anyone threatened with harm by any group.
As a result, asylum policy descended into farce. Thanks to its courts, Britain was now obliged to grant asylum to potentially billions of people who could claim to be harmed by any group; and if such immigrants turned out to be themselves harmful to Britain, they could not be thrown out if they claimed that they faced further harm where they were being sent—which many promptly did. This impasse was then deepened by a series of judgments under human rights law—such as the ruling that halting welfare payments to asylum-seekers denied them a right to family life—in which the judges thwarted all government attempts to end the abuse.
The consequence was that human rights doctrine was used to uphold patently false claims against the British state, with ruinous consequences. Those who were refused asylum simply disappeared into Britain; all they had to do to stop being deported was to claim that they would be ill-treated in their country of origin. As a result, they were not even sent back to the last country of transit, such as France, on the basis that France might in turn deport them to a country that would ill-treat them.
The absolute prohibition of torture is one thing. But to interpret this so that a country is forced to accept people who pose a potential danger to the state, on the grounds that sending them back to a country where torture is practiced is tantamount to practicing torture oneself, is demonstrably absurd. It has stood all notions of justice, logic and elementary prudence on their heads. Thus a Taliban soldier who fought the British and Americans in Afghanistan was granted asylum because he said he feared persecution—from the Western-backed government in Kabul. On the other hand, a group of Afghan hijackers, who diverted a flight to Stansted and then claimed asylum on the grounds that they were fleeing the Taliban, still remain in Britain despite the fact that they had committed a crime, despite the defeat of the Taliban and despite the best efforts of the government to remove them.
The resulting chaos in immigration procedures produced a catastrophic breakdown in British security. According to Home Office figures slipped out quietly just as MPs were departing for their Christmas vacation in December 2005, almost a quarter of all terrorist suspects arrested in Britain since 9/11 have been asylum-seekers.3 At least two of the men accused of involvement in the failed July 21 attacks on London are alleged to have obtained asylum using bogus passports, names and nationalities.
What’s more, the courts refused to extradite terrorist suspects if the countries requesting extradition were themselves suspected of ill-treatment. Case after case was mired for years in legal challenges and court rulings that overturned the government’s decision to extradite these extremists. The Algerian Rachid Ramda, for example, was accused by the French government of having financed an attack on Saint-Michel station in Paris in 1995, in which eight people died and 150 were wounded. Britain had granted Ramda asylum in 1992. The French government requested his extradition in 1995, 1996 and 2001. Ten years after the first request, and after two home secretaries had ordered his extradition, he was finally sent back to France.
In 1995, the home secretary tried to extradite the Saudi extremist Mohammed al-Massari to Yemen after Saudi Arabia, with whom Britain has lucrative and extensive trade dealings, vehemently requested his extradition. When the courts blocked this, a deal was done with the Caribbean island of Dominica, which agreed to take him in exchange for help from Britain with its trade negotiations with the European Union over the export of bananas. The courts blocked this too. As a result, al-Massari has lived for years in north London, posting on his website videos of civilian contractors being beheaded in Iraq—an activity he briefly suspended after the 2005 bombings but then resumed, inciting Muslims to join the global jihad, advocating the beheading of homosexuals and describing 9/11 as the “blessed conquest in New York and Washington.”4
Why has the judiciary behaved in this way? Britain’s judges are independent of political control. Over recent years, however, they have come to see themselves, rather than the democratically elected politicians, as the true guardians of the country’s values. In addition, the judges have redefined those values to be in opposition to many British traditional beliefs. For the judiciary and the so-called progressive intelligentsia, human rights law is an article of faith, the legal progenitor of a brave new world in which prejudice, discrimination and oppression are consigned to history. In fact, it has undermined Western society, eviscerated it
s values and helped create the conditions breeding Islamist extremism and terror in the UK and its export around the world. It lies at the very heart of the hollowing out of British society, which has all but destroyed Britain’s internal defenses against the external threat it faces from Islamist aggression.
The rise of judicial activism and human rights culture came from two important developments that changed the way English judges saw themselves. The first was the increasing ambit of European human rights law, with the judges in the European Court at Strasbourg progressively widening their scope as part of the growing ideological belief in universal legal principles that trumped the law of individual countries. Although the Strasbourg court has nothing to do with the European Union, this ideology fitted the accelerating movement towards political union in Europe and the idea of a supranational political entity.
This gave English judges the opportunity to flex their muscles in new directions. During much of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, the Labour party appeared near to its demise and provided little effective opposition. This encouraged the judges to take upon themselves an opposition role. They saw themselves as the last redoubt of democracy fighting an over-mighty executive. They began to challenge government policy more and more—especially over asylum and immigration cases.
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