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ABU HAMZA, aka “the Hook”, has been sent down at the Old Bailey on 11 out of 15 counts of inciting murder and race hate — and not before time. Yes, Britain’s best-known Islamist radical has lost the battle to remain at large. But are he and his kind still on course to win the war of ideas? Will not the poisonous concepts that he helped to inject into the Muslim bloodstream in this country prove far, far harder to contain?
The most amazing revelation from the Hook’s trial is that MI5 and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch effectively acquiesced in his years of largely untrammelled hate-mongering at the Finsbury Park mosque. His defending counsel, Edward Fitzgerald, QC, recalled the following exchange: “My sermon, is it a problem?” asked the one-eyed cleric. Came the reply from the Met: “You have freedom of speech. You don’t have anything to worry about so long as we don ‘t see blood on the streets.”
Even if these were not the exact words used, they nonetheless quite authentically reflect the spirit of the authorities’ approach. For years, the authorities have pursued a policy of geopolitical Nimbyism. The point was reiterated this week on Newsnight by Anjem Choudary, spokesman for the extremist group al-Ghurabba, who defended the London demonstrators holding placards that called for the beheading anyone who insults Islam in wake of the cartoon controversy.
Choudary stated that there is a “covenant of security” between Muslims living here and the British Government. The essence of this is: leave us alone and we will cause no trouble on your doorstep. After all, Choudary cooed reassuringly, the placards were not directed at anyone in the United Kingdom! No wonder the Egyptians, French, and Moroccans despair of Whitehall’s laissez-faire attitude, which rightly earned the capital the sobriquet of “Londonistan ”.
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How have we got here? First, because the intelligence services wanted to know who the radicals were. So they let the Hook preach and snooped on the worshippers. As such, Finsbury Park mosque became a useful theological honeytrap. Secondly, few careers are made in the post-Macpherson Met by coming down like a ton of bricks on ethnic minorities, even if they are spewing out anti-Semitism, homophobia or multiple other forms of sectarianism. Thirdly, there is the belief in sections of the Association of Chief Police Officers that radicalism is not the problem — only violent radicalism. According to this view, some kinds of hate speech are safety valves that enable young men to let off steam.
Fourthly, and most depressing, there is the imperial legacy of working with clerical reactionaries in the colonies in the name of “stability”. There are echoes here of Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic — the belief of a certain kind of guilt-ridden white that the only “authentic” blacks are the ones that express hatred for “whitey” and white institutions — and those that don’t are little more than “Uncle Toms” .
Britain desperately needs a rethink of this approach. It is right and inevitable that spooks and policemen put the bureaucratic needs of their trade first, namely monitoring threats to the State. But their needs, though important, need to be set in a much wider context. The gains that accrue from such surveillance have to be weighed much more carefully against the costs of envenoming society — which, in turn, results in even greater threats to public safety over the long run.
What signal does it send to radical Muslim men that Abu Hamza and his sort were able to operate with impunity for most of a decade? How many of them have to fight for enemies of Britain in Afghanistan and Iraq, or blow themselves up in nightclubs in Tel Aviv before we wake up to the price of blowback on the Tube?
Tony Blair stated after 7/7 that the rules have changed — and that what had been reluctantly endured before then would now no longer be tolerated. Certainly, the most aesthetically repugnant radical Islamist loudmouths such as the Hook are starting to get it in the neck. As invididuals they are no longer seen as forces for stability. But the essence of the strategy has not changed. It is slightly the case of “the mullah is dead, long live the mullah”.
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Even now, senior officers aver that Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the viciously anti- Semitic group, plays a “stabilising” role in certain areas. Members of the Met’s Muslim Contact Unit, one of the weirder parts of the force, extol the work of the Muslim Association of Britain and George Galloway in the East End — and have been known to rebuke a young woman of Muslim origin who dared to question the British State’s chosen Islamist partners.
The result is a kind of ideological “Stockholm syndrome”, the psychological state whereby hostages start viewing the world through the eyes of their captors. Like all unselfconfident authority figures, the modern British State has great difficulties setting its own standards: it has to bring in dodgy Islamist outsiders to do its dirty work — and then only in Islamist terms. And, inevitably, that carries a very high price.
There is an opportunity here for the Conservatives as they seek to reach out to new constituencies. It is their task to tease out the contradictions of the modern PC state — why sauce for the Islamist goose isn’t sauce for the white gander. In so doing, they would not only speak up for those groups that are directly threatened by radical Islamism — gays, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs and women. Above all, they would tap into a well of genuine Muslim mainstream sentiment that has been demoralised by the Government’s danse macabre with Islamic radicalism.
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Dean Godson is research director of Policy Exchange
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