Sheikh Abu Hamza, Britain’s best known religious extremist and former imam of the Finsbury Park mosque, was jailed on Feb. 7 at the Old Bailey for seven years for inciting murder and racial hatred. His recent career makes an almost unbelievable story and highlights fundamental mistakes that have been made for years by the authorities in Whitehall.
I see I last wrote about him in 1999 under the title of “The Finsbury Fanatic”. I described him as “a major disaster for Britain’s moderate Muslims — the vast majority...”
The moderate Muslims in Finsbury who claimed “the mosque is supposed to be for the whole community but he uses it for his own political purposes” drifted away to other mosques. He described them as “monkeys in three-piece suits who can’t do anything — stupid people, a joke.”
His “chilling aspect” results from the loss of both forearms and an eye in Afghanistan while he was trying to defuse a Soviet mine. No photo of this angry preacher and former fighter against communism in the newspapers was complete that did not include his prosthetic hooked hand. What really excited the popular press for nearly a decade was that he lived off British disability benefit, while supporting extremists in London and abroad who certainly did not have British interests at heart. He has stated: “We are not at war with you people here, but I am in a verbal war with regimes in the Yemen and Saudi Arabia.”
Abu Hamza, who was born in Egypt in 1958 and emigrated to Britain in 1979, arranged for his son and stepson to be sent with eight others for jihad training in Yemen in 1998. The following year he was arrested over a serious incident in Yemen but was released without charge. In 2001 he described the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks on America as martyrs who acted in self-defense.
Like most people I find it amazing that it was not until 2003 that the Finsbury Park mosque was raided and shut down. The commissioner of police in London at the time, Sir John Stevens, described the raid as carrying “very high risks” and he deployed 1000 police officers. It is said the police, who regularly met Abu Hamza, were surprised by what they discovered. There was a cache of military equipment that included chemical protection suits, gas masks, knives and blank-firing guns and a stun gun. The police were convinced the equipment was used for training exercises in jihad training camps in the Brecon Beacons in Wales and Dorset. They also discovered hundreds of stolen and forged identity documents, including driving licenses, ID cards and passports, and forging equipment.
In the 1990s I was working at the Arab-British Center in London, and regularly received complaints from the Arab ambassadors that the United Kingdom had become a haven for religious extremists, be they from North Africa or other parts of the Arab world. The French authorities regularly expressed similar complaints. In turn I spoke to Malcolm Rifkind, then foreign secretary, on this subject and I found him well briefed and fully alert to the damage this issue could do to our relations with such friendly countries as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Yemen.
How did the capital earn the sobriquet of “Londonistan”? I think I know some of the answers although the subject is not without its complications. It is now public knowledge that the Metropolitan Police wanted to charge Abu Hamza many years ago but were not supported by the Crown Prosecution Service, who feared that the phone tap evidence gathered by British Intelligence would be deemed “inadmissible” by the courts.
At the time the Home Office was constantly in trouble with the courts, and feared that the courts in the United Kingdom and the European Court of Human Rights, might severely criticize it if it was thought that certain asylum-seekers had received less than justice from too zealous officials.
For decades the IRA had been a frightening security threat and the police were far too slow to turn their attention to religious extremism in Britain. Senior police officers were well aware that some way-out preachers advocated violence but were anxious that they should not be forced underground. There was also a fear that highlighting such extremism would play into the hands of the far right and damage the community in general.
The bombing of London on July 7 produced a sea change in the attitude of the government and within the 1.5 million strong British Muslim community.
