How Britain Encouraged Radicalism and Terrorism, Part 4
11 May, 2007
Britain has long had a policy of accepting "asylum seekers" onto its shores. A noble policy in principle, it has allowed Islamists who are too extreme for their own Islamic countries to arrive and thrive. Within Britain, these individuals have been allowed to continue preaching their extremism, with little or no interference from the authorities.
Individuals such as Omar Bakri Mohammed, Abu Qatada, Yasser al-Siri, Mohammed al-Massari arrived as refugees seeking sanctuary, and then proceeded to agitate among British Muslims. One famous arrival was Abu Hamza al-Masri (pictured), the fiery former cleric of the Finsbury Park Mosque. Hamza arrived on July 13, 1979, not as a refugee, but on a one-month visitor’s visa.
Egyptian Hamza, real
name Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, was not allowed to work according to
the visa terms, but he did. He renewed the visa for a month and
when this ran out, he did not renew it. On May 16, 1980 he married
a British woman, Valerie Traverso, and in summer, 1982, he was
allowed to live in Britain indefinitely. Traverso had left her
husband Michael Macias, to marry Hamza. It was not until
2003 that it was revealed her divorce from Macias
did not happen until July 1982. The marriage, which gave Hamza
legitimate right to remain, was itself illegitimate. In June 1984,
Hamza moved to divorce Valerie, and the decree was issued on
August 15, 1984. In October that year, Hamza married a young
Moroccan woman and he became a UK citizen in 1986.
By this time, Hamza
(still called Mostafa) had shown little Islamic "fervor", though
when Valerie found he was cheating with an alleged prostitute he
promised to become religious. Once his citizenship was secured,
Hamza went traveling. When he left Britain, he still had two eyes
and two hands.
In 1987, while on the
Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca he met Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, founder of
the Afghan "Muhajideen", the group originally formed to fight the
Soviets who had invaded in early 1979. Azzam and his sons were
assassinated in Peshawar, Pakistan in November 1989. According to
the BBC in
2004,
Hamza shortly afterward this meeting packed his bags and went to
Afghanistan, vowing "never to return". The BBC promotes the lie
which Hamza told, that he had gone to Jalalabad to engage in
reconstruction work, and here he had lost both hands and one eye
while clearing mines.
Hamza came back to
Britain in 1993 but by 1995 he had gone to Bosnia to provide
"support" to the Muslims. The tale of how he lost his hands was
doubted by British writer Farrukh Dhondy, who suggested in
2003 that his injury ensued from a "bomb-making
gone wrong". In
2006, "Omar Nasiri" revealed the truth. Nasiri was
a Moroccan, acting as an undercover agent for both French and UK
intelligence. He described how he attended an Al Qaeda training
camp in
Darunta, Afghanistan, which was blown up by a US
air strike on October 12, 2001.
In the late 1990s in
Darunta, Nasiri was told by his explosives "tutor" Assad Allah of
an event that had occurred when Allah was a student. One fellow
student had messed up his recipe for explosives, and "rushed
towards the door with the liquid time bomb in his hands. Just as
he got outside, the mixture exploded. It blew both his hands
straight off and destroyed one of his eyes." Nasiri asked if the
person survived, and was told: "Yes. He lives in London now, and
preaches in the mosques. His name is Abu Hamza."
Hamza arrived at the
Finsbury Park mosque in north London in 1997. By this time, he had
become a vocal exponent of radical Islam. With a group of henchmen
he began to bully the trustees until he finally gained power
there. Abdulkadir Barkatullah, one of the trustees, said that he
had reported the thuggish behavior of Hamza and his associates to
the police on no less than
seven occasions, but no action was taken. In the
mid-1980s, before he had gone to Afghanistan, various mosque
trustees had already reported Hamza to police for his bullying
behavior.
From 1997 onwards
there was a power struggle at the mosque. When Hamza was not
allowed to gain entry to the building, he and his followers would
hold prayer sessions in a road near Finsbury Park underground
station. The route of the 106 bus, which I used to take regularly
at that time, had to be diverted to accommodate Hamza and his
followers. Police would watch the street services, but no arrests
for "obstruction" were made.
The precise moment
that Hamza became radical is not known - it seems to have happened
before he met Abdullah Azzam in 1987. At Finsbury Park Mosque, he
had his own arena from which he would preach hatred for the West
and also draw recruits for his jihadist cause. His followers fell
into two camps - people from Arabic origin and those of Pakistani
origin.
In
the late 1990s, Hamza
tried to buy a 54-room building in East Sussex to
use as a jihad school. When this failed, he turned his attention
to locations in Wales and Lancashire before selecting Dog Cry
Ranch in Bly, Oregon, which he hoped to use as a terror training
camp. The East Sussex building became the
Jameah Islamiyah Islamic school. Hamza and a group
of followers later visited this school on at least five occasions,
camping in the 54 acre grounds.
Despite Hamza’s
inflammatory sermons and his use of force against mosque trustees,
the British intelligence services appear not to have shown any
interest in Hamza until 1998. It was in this year, as Sean O’Neill
and Daniel McGrory
relate
in their book "The Suicide Factory", that Hamza became involved
with the leader of a gang who carried out a kidnapping operation
in Yemen on
28
December 1998. 16 tourists, including 12 Britons, 2
Australians, 2 Americans, along with their 4 Yemeni drivers had
been taken hostage. Within two days, 3 Britons and one Australian
were dead.
Intelligence agencies
from France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands
had warned that Hamza was heading a terrorist organization, but
their calls were ignored. Hamza bought a satellite phone and
communicated directly with the leader of the kidnappers,
Abu al-Hassan.
Hassan was head of the "Islamic Army of Aden-Abyan". He told
al-Wasat magazine on January 11 that when he told Hamza of
the kidnapping, Hamza had warned against harming them. The
hostages who died were killed in a rescue attempt by Yemeni
authorities.
Hamza’s phone
conversations with al-Hassan were intercepted and recorded at
Britain’s listening center, GCHQ in Cheltenham. Police had sent a
file to the Crown Prosecution Service, urging his arrest, but the
call was rejected for "insufficient evidence". Phone tap evidence
is not admissible in a UK court of law. The FBI, state O’Neill and
McGrory, stated they would use the phone evidence if Hamza were to
be prosecuted in the US.
In March 1999, Hamza
was arrested, and his home was subjected to a thorough search.
Among items taken away for examination was an 11-volume terror
manual, entitled "The Encyclopedia of Afghani Jihad", which listed
bomb-making and poison manufacture. It also advised potential
bombing targets, such as Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower, and tips on
assassination techniques. Three tapes of Hamza’s sermons were also
taken away by police. Amazingly, the police later returned the
Jihad manual to Hamza. He was released after a few days.
When Hamza was
finally charged and convicted of inciting murder on
February 7, 2006, he was additionally sentenced to
three years’ jail for possessing "The Encyclopedia of Afghani
Jihad".
From
July 1999 to November 2000 an informant was placed in the Finsbury
Park Mosque.
Reda Hassaine (pictured) was an Algerian-born
journalist who had first visited the mosque in 1998. He had become
upset by what he had found and contacted police Special Branch .
Originally Hassaine was in the service of Algerian authorities,
who were trying to suppress the terrorist group GIA (Groupe Islam
Armée). The GIA had members in Britain and France. Both the French
authorities and British authorities waved promises of asylum for
Hassaine as an inducement to get him to provide information. He
posed as a GIA member at the mosque and faithfully delivered
reports to MI5 and the French DRG. But neither the French nor the
British granted him the asylum he sought.
Hassaine provided
information on Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza. He later
claimed that he had felt betrayed. He was astounded
that no action was taken against Hamza and the mosque. He
said
of the Finsbury Park Mosque: "There were people there who would
sell passports and credit cards and it was like having one foot in
a mosque and one foot in the mafia."
As had been the case
with Omar Bakri Mohammed, MI5 did not take Hamza seriously. Reda
Hassaine
claimed: "I told them Abu Hamza was brainwashing
people and sending them to 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. The MI5 officer told me Abu Hamza was
harmless and that MI5 thought he was a clown." When Hassaine
offered to carry a hidden camera, "They told me not to bother,
that they weren’t interested."
After 9/11, it became
clear that militants had graduated from Hamza’s mosque to engage
in international terrorism.
Zacarias Moussaoui, the "20th hijacker" who was
arrested in Michigan on August 16, 2001, had worshipped at the
mosque, as had Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who tried to blow up
a Miami-bound plane on December 22, 2001. Reid’s associate Sajjid
Badat, who also planned to be a shoe-bomber, had similarly
worshipped at the mosque.
The publicity that
Hamza was bringing to himself and the mosque did not serve to stem
his extremism. It was claimed by Russian authorities that a man
who had worshipped at Hamza’s mosque and left to fight in Chechnya
in 2001 had been an associate of Islamic terrorist Shamil Besayev.
This individual,
Kamel Rabat Bouralha, as well as two others, had
not only been worshippers at the mosque, but would later be among
the 33 Islamists who carried out the Beslan school massacre of
September 1, 2004. 300 people had been killed in the attack, more
than half of them children.
Three of the 7/7
bombers - Mohamed Siddique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, and Jermaine
Lindsay - had gone to the Finsbury Park Mosque to listen to
Hamza’s sermons. WIlly Brigitte was a French national who had been
deported from Australia in
2003
after being suspected of plotting to blow up the nuclear reactor
at Lucas Heights, Sydney. He was jailed in Paris on
March 15 this year for nine years for "criminal
association with a terrorist enterprise." Brigitte had worshipped
at the Finsbury Park Mosque. James Ujaama had stayed inside the
mosque in 1999.
Even though Hamza and
the mosque appeared to act as a conduit for jihadists to go abroad
and commit acts of terror, the UK authorities only took action
when it appeared that his associates were ready to commit acts of
terror at home. Following a tip-off that was received from
Algerian intelligence on
January 3, 2003, UK intelligence became aware that
an illegal Algerian immigrant with links to the mosque was
plotting to create the deadly toxin, ricin. This man,
Kamel Bourgass, lived in Wood Green, a short bus
ride from the mosque.
When
traced to an apartment in Manchester, Bourgass stabbed and killed
a police detective. Bourgass frequently stayed at the Finsbury
Park Mosque, and it was here that he had photocopied recipes for
toxins. In his Wood Green apartment, police had found chemical
equipment and documentation on poison production. On
January
20 the mosque was raided (pictured) in connection
with Kamel Bourgass’ links to the building. 7 people were
arrested, and items were found in the building. The full inventory
of recovered items was not to be revealed until February 7, 2006.
Abu Hamza himself was
arrested on May 27, 2004, in connection with an American
extradition order, which had been filed on nine counts in relation
to his attempts to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon with
James Ujaama and others in 1999. While Hamza was being detained at
Belmarsh prison in relation to the US order, he was arrested on
August 26.
Hamza was not
officially charged with any terrorist offenses until
October 19, 2004. He was charged on 16 counts under
the Terrorism Act 2000 and also the Public Order Act. The trial
began in the summer of 2005 but was adjourned.
Hamza was convicted
on
February 7, 2006. He was found guilty of incitement
to murder and given a jail sentence of 7 years. The jury
unanimously found him guilty on six out of nine charges of
soliciting murder under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act,
and on three charges of inciting racial hatred under the Public
Order Act. Mr. Justice Hughes
said that Hamza had "created a real danger to the
lives of innocent people in different parts of the world".
The judge
additionally
stated: "You used your authority to legitimize
anger and to encourage your audiences to believe that it gave rise
to a duty to murder. You commended suicide bombing, you encouraged
them to kill in the cause you set out for them."
He was convicted
under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 of possessing
information "of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing
or preparing an act of terrorism". This was the terror manual,
though in court he was accused of possessing only 10 of the 11
volumes of the "Encyclopedia of Afghani Jihad". Volume Six, which
dealt with "Bombs and Landmines" had gone
missing. The judge said he was satisfied that this
volume had been "loaned out". A volume detailing in specific terms
how to create bombs is therefore still circulating somewhere.
During the trial,
passages from the Koran were
quoted by his defense lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald QC.
Chapter 2, verse 216 and Chapter 9 verse 111 were cited as
purported proof that Hamza’s calls for warfare against non-Muslims
were religiously "justifiable".
The
items, which had been seized from the mosque in
January 2003, were disclosed, confirming leaked reports made by
the Times shortly after the raid. The items included
three starting pistols, which could easily be reassigned to firing
live rounds, a stun gun, knives, CS gas and chemical and nuclear
warfare protective suits. Also, hidden behind ceiling tiles,
dozens of forged documents were discovered, including driving
licenses and passports.
How much Hamza
directly contributed to global jihad is not known, but it is
obvious that he inspired many people who went on to commit acts of
terror. What is unforgivable is that the UK authorities only
wanted to stop the pipelines of terror when their own citizens
were affected. As Daniel Pipes
explained at a conference in London in January:
"British-based terrorists have carried out operations in at least
15 countries, going from East to West ... Pakistan, Afghanistan,
Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Israel,
Algeria, Morocco, Russia, France, Spain and the United States." If
one adds the handiwork of Al-Muhajiroun member Mohammed Bilal, who
killed nine people in Srinigar, India, on Christmas Day, 2000,
that figure amounts to at least 16 countries.
On
August 1, 2005, the BBC broadcast a report by
journalist Richard Watson. Former members of Al Muhajiroun spoke.
Abu Uzair (aka Sajid Sharif, who has
preached at Hamza’s Finsbury Park Mosque) said: "We
don’t live in peace with you any more, which means the covenant of
security is no longer, doesn’t no longer (sic) exist... That’s
why, those four bombers, um, er, that attacked, er, London - they
believed that there was no covenant of security, and for them,
their belief was, it was allowed, to attack the UK.... For them,
it was allowed. For them it was particularly allowed. Because me,
myself, my belief hasn’t been attacked personally myself. For
them, the banner has been risen (sic) for Jihad in the UK, which
means, for them, it’s allowed for them to attack, and they’ve
probably got many other cells inside the UK... You could call them
terrorist cells. I would call them Muslim cells in the UK."
Abu Izzadeen,
who is now
in custody, suspected of supporting terrorism
operations abroad, claimed democracy was not Islamic. He said: "If
the British public don’t like Shariah, it’s going to be over their
noses, whether they like it or not. It’s going to be over Tony
Blair’s nose and George Bush’s nose as well - and for your
information - the British government knows that." Later he said to
the interviewer: "You don’t want to live in a Shariah? Well, when
it comes, I’m sure you’ll change your mind!"
Izzadeen and Uzair
were leading figures in groups called Al Ghurabaa (the strangers),
and the Saviour Sect, both derivatives of Al Muhajiroun and with
the same core membership. The Saviour Sect soon changed its name
to the Saved Sect. The groups were officially banned in
July 2006. Despite this, the same people still
operate under another name - Ahlus Sunnah wal Jammah. This group
was formed in Tottenham, north London in
November 2005.
It organized the notorious anti-cartoon
demonstration of February 3, 2006 where protesters
called for the beheading of those that insult Islam, but has not
been outlawed. Changing of names to escape detection and
legislation is a
tactic shared by former Al Muhajiroun members and
also Hizb ut-Tahrir.
The recent
revelations of the
Operation Crevice trial, showed how members of Al
Muhajiroun were actively conspiring with the same figures who
carried out the atrocities of 7/7. MI5 has been exposed as less
than adequately prepared to cope with homegrown extremism. The
Crevice revelations have laid to rest the myth that members of the
Al Muhajiroun group, and their guru Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed,
were harmless.
Omar Bakri Mohammed,
founder of Al Muhajiroun, fled Britain in August 2005, and was
banned from re-entering the country. Other extremist preachers
remain, including Abu Qatada, Abdullah el-Faisal, Mohammed al-Masri
and Yasser al-Siri. The terms of Labour’s 1998 Human Rights Act
have created a situation where deporting these promoters of jihad
to their home countries is nigh impossible.
Britain should have
acted against its preachers of hate during the 1990s. A decade
later, a whole generation of young Muslims in Britain has become
radicalized. A
survey for the right-wing Policy Exchange Group,
published in January of this year found that nearly a third of
British Muslims aged 16-24 believed that anyone who left Islam
should be killed.
The right wing in
Britain has slowly started to wake up to the mess that Blair’s
policies of forced multiculturalism have produced. The
Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), like its US
counterpart CAIR, purports to be "moderate". In truth extremists
such as Iqbal Sacranie and Inayat Bunglawala who have openly
supported Osama bin Laden in the past dominate the MCB. Bunglawala
has called him a "freedom fighter". Bunglawala has previously
praised jailed terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman as
"courageous". Though they now repudiate their earlier statements,
the brand of Islam peddled by the MCB luminaries is one of
conformity to rigid 7th century values. The MCB has
campaigned to have Holocaust Memorial day banned,
and has consistently
boycotted the event.
David Cameron, leader
of the Tory party, in
February this year, endorsed a report by his party,
entitled Uniting the Country. This report claimed that
the MCB, which approves the anti-Semitic and terrorist-endorsing
cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, had created a climate in which
"hard line members... dominate policy and crowd out more moderate
voices."
In August 2005, Tony
Blair suggested that he wanted to ban the extremist group Hizb
ut-Tahrir, which had spawned the terrorist-supporting group Al
Muhajiroun. Hizb ut-Tahrir
threatened mass riots across the country, and the
MCB refused to endorse a ban on the anti-democratic group unless
Blair also banned the ultra-right party the BNP. Blair bowed down
to MCB pressure, and shelved plans to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Blair is soon to
resign from the Labour Party and he will, in all likelihood, be
replaced by Gordon Brown, the current chancellor. In
November 2006, Brown approved the spending of $910
million over four years. This funding to Pakistan is mainly to be
spent on subsidizing madrassas, the seminaries that are notorious
for their uncompromising interpretations on Islam and their
contempt for the West. Despite this "generosity", Brown has
allowed
massive cutbacks on national defense. Brown also
wants to have more
control over the activities of MI5.
The Labour Party has
helped to force its culture of leftism and appeasement onto an
unwilling populace. When the party was elected in 1997, there was
still time to root out the godfathers of radicalism. Now it is too
late. The radical preachers’ poison has infected a whole
generation, and rather than standing up for inclusive national
values, the leftist Labour party has farmed out its policies on
Islam to unelected bodies such as the MCB. Worse than that, for
the past four years the government has decided to "engage" with
radical Islam rather than counter it. The Foreign and Commonwealth
Office has a branch called the "Engaging
with the Islamic World Group", which in 2006 paid
for Yusuf al-Qaradawi to attend a conference in Turkey. Qaradawi,
the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, has issued a fatwa
supporting killing of Israeli civilians. Such a man should not be
courted and subsidized by British tax-payers.
The fate that Britain
has brought upon itself has so far been avoided by the United
States. But the voices of the left are clamoring to be heard.
Should a Nancy Pelosi-style strategy (or lack of one) be followed,
the US could precisely reproduce Britain’s poor template for
tackling Islamic radicalism. Innocent Muslims suffer as much as
anyone else from Islamist extremists, yet their voices are never
heard. Pressure groups such as the MCB and CAIR do not represent
ordinary, law-abiding Muslim citizens. These bodies have a
specific agenda which, though not outwardly supporting terrorism,
shares exactly the same ultimate goals as those of the most
bloodthirsty Islamist. As Omar Ahmed, co-founder of CAIR,
said: "Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any
other faiths, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book
of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and
Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."
People who try to change a democracy not by the ballot, but by the backdoor, are the ones whose voices should never be legitimized by government patronage.
Adrian Morgan is a
British based writer and artist who regularly contributes in
Family Security Matters. His essays also appear in
Western Resistance,
Spero News and
Faithfreedom.org.