This guy has got to be "neutralized".
Posted on 01/26/2003 4:44:11 AM PST by knighthawk
Jason Burke investigates the network of Islamic radicals who found a haven in England and turned its capital city into Londonistan, the world HQ for jihad atrocities
Mohammed was surfing the internet when he heard the shouting. He ran down the stairs from his cheap flat overlooking north London's Seven Sisters Road and out into the street. It was bitterly cold. Two friends were outside. 'The police are in the mosque,' they told him. From overhead a helicopter sent a powerful beam of light against Finsbury Park mosque - a modern brick building with dark windows and a minaret above. A few minutes earlier more than 100 police officers had smashed their way in and, after donning special overboots in respect, fanned out through the building. 'They can't do that to a place of worship,' Mohammed, 19, said to his friend. 'They are doing it,' came the reply.
The raid last Monday was the most radical move by British authorities against suspected Islamic militants in the UK. For those who worship there the mosque is the only one where, as one young Muslim man told The Observer last week, 'you can hear the truth'. Critics, and senior police sources, say that Finsbury Park mosque is a hotbed of violent fanaticism where combat training and recruitment for 'international jihad' has been going on for years.
In fact, the history of Finsbury Park mosque, from its origins as a community project sponsored by the Prince of Wales to the chains on its gates yesterday morning, is the history of British Islamic militancy, of how the UK came to be in the front line of the war on terror.
This weekend almost every counter-terrorist specialist across Europe is watching Britain. The past two months have seen a spate of arrests in the UK, and it now seems that London is the focus of European Islamic militancy.
On Friday, Spanish police arrested 16 suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in apartments in Barcelona. According to Spanish officials, those arrested were connected to recent moves against terrorist targets in Britain and France, though they did not directly tie them to the British police's alleged discovery of ricin, a home-made poison that is one of the most lethal known to man, in a flat not far from Finsbury Park earlier this month.
On Thursday, police in Italy raided a rundown farmhouse near Venice, where a gang of Moroccans was found with plastic explosives, a map of the London Underground and letters from British militants. The British police and intelligence services are working flat out to 'roll up' militant networks before they strike. The Italian and Spanish operations gave British investigators many new leads. 'The names just keep coming,' commented one British detective last week. Investigators on the continent have always accused Britain of failing to deal with Islamic militants. Last week events have provided them with more evidence.
There is an unprecedented state of alarm in the UK. Tony Blair told MPs that a terrorist attack in the UK was 'inevitable'. One of Britain's most senior police officers said that there was a grave threat from suicide bombers. There is also the most sweeping crackdown on terrorism for decades. Since 11 September hundreds of arrests have been made. The first significant trial for 'membership of al-Qaeda' is under way. Fifteen foreign nationals are detained without charge in Belmarsh under the new terrorism laws introduced after the attacks in America. But when Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said that his officers were 'on top' of the problem, his statement did little to reassure a worried public or European security services. Was Stevens right? Have those charged with our security genuinely got the problem under control? Or are they putting a brave face on a very bad situation? The police tell us we should be 'alert, not alarmed'. Are they right? The answer lies in the roots of Islamic militancy in Britain, back in the early 1990s.
It was rainy, cold day and London's Richmond Park was empty. By a toilet block two men, one slight and balding, the other tall and heavily bearded, stopped, spoke quickly, exchanged heavy packages and walked away. The bearded man was an Algerian militant who is still living in west London. He had arrived a year earlier, fleeing, he said, from persecution by the government there. Since then he had been busy disseminating the propaganda faxed him by his former comrades in the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armée (GIA), hardline Muslim fanatics who were waging a bitter war against the secular regime in Algiers.
The news of the latest strikes by GIA 'mujahideen' had proved popular among the growing Islamic militant community in Britain. Now he was meeting a fellow militant, 'Ahmed', who was bringing him a new fax machine. The old one was broken. Ahmed was to sell it to raise some money for the cause.
Except Ahmed was an Algerian government spy and the only place the old fax machine was going was Algiers. There all the phone numbers stored in its memory could be traced.
The incident, in 1993, has never been revealed before. It marks the start of the real influx of Islamic radicals into Britain. After the war against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan finished in 1989, many of the radical Arab volunteers who had fought alongside the Afghans had returned to their home countries and carried on the battle - against their own governments. In Algiers, Cairo and elsewhere, security forces reacted with ferocious crackdowns. Soon the militants realised they needed a safe haven. With a long tradition of welcoming dissidents, Britain, to the disgust of many foreign governments, was prepared to provide one.
Over the next five years more and more Islamic activists moved to the UK. Many had been sentenced to death for terrorist crimes in their native lands. Soon videos began circulating featuring footage of attacks on government officials or soldiers in Algeria or elsewhere. Fundraising was openly carried out at mosques and newsletters of radical groups circulated. It was in one of these that a fatwa from a little-known Jordanian-Palestinian cleric, known as Abu Qutada, appeared in 1994. It said that the massacring of women, old people and children was justified in the name of jihad. Though Abu Qutada came top of the list of terrorist suspects given to Home Secretary David Blunkett in the weeks after the 11 September attacks, back in the mid-1990s few in the British security establishment knew who he was. Even fewer cared.
It was the same with many others. As Algerian militants set off bombs in Paris, the French investigators traced their finances back to 'Londonistan', as they dubbed it. 'They would do nothing,' a French judicial source said last week. 'We told them what was going on but they didn't care.'
On one occasion two activists deported from France to Burkina Faso turned up in the UK shortly afterwards. A wanted alleged terrorist, Rachid Ramda, is still in prison in the UK despite a French extradition request going back more than six years. The British were preoccupied with Irish terrorism. The Islamic radicals were of minor interest.
'There was a deal with these guys,' one former Special Branch officer told The Observer. 'We told them if you don't cause us any problems, then we won't bother you.'
For the most part, both sides stuck to the bargain. Then, after several years of relative peace, things began to change. And the real problems began.
In the late 1990s a new wave of militants began coming to Britain. They had learnt their creed in the training camps of Afghanistan, fighting alongside the Taliban, or in wars in Bosnia or Chechnya. They were younger, more angry, less well versed in the Koran and less picky in their enemies. Their targets were not the 'hypocritical' Middle Eastern regimes which had rejected Islam but 'the global alliance of Crusaders and Zionists', the Americans, the Israelis and their allies. Their leader was not the 'emir' of some Algerian splinter group, but Osama bin Laden himself.
But the man who really came to prominence was the Egyptian-born prayer leader of Finsbury Park mosque, Mustafa Kemal, better known as Abu Hamza. With his blind eye and hook hand, he has become a caricature of the Islamic activist. Critics claim that the ex-nightclub bouncer forced his way into Finsbury Park mosque and took it over.
The Observer has reported that combat training took place at the mosque involving a deactivated AK47, that battlefield first aid training took place in its basement, that horrific videos featuring graphic footage of soldiers being killed by Islamic militants circulated among worshippers. There is also strong evidence that the mosque was a hub of recruitment for radicals.
Hundreds of young Britons are believed to have been indoctrinated there. They included Richard Reid, the petty convict who tried to blow himself up on a transatlantic passenger jet in December 2001. A number of individuals linked to 11 September also worshipped at Finsbury Park.
The raid was intended to send a clear message that any hint of militancy will be strongly and swiftly dealt with. But intelligence officers have told The Observer that they are still hunting many more militants in the UK and more raids are likely. As each network is uprooted, new ones emerge. The greatest fear is of suicide bombers.
'The current threat is unpredictable. That's the biggest problem,' said one British security source. 'Terrorists no longer respect borders.'
Mohammed, the 19-year-old man who had run into the street when the mosque was raided, grew up in France and came to Britain four years ago. He has no previous involvement with any militant group but his views are clear. For him, bin Laden is a hero. 'The old men can say what they want. It is the Crusaders and the Zionists who are behind all this evil doing,' he told The Observer. 'They must be fought wherever they are. It is a duty for all Muslims to struggle.'
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There are (or at least were) Turks in Egypt. Is Abu Hamza Turkish? Does he come from a secularist family?
I'd love to know what the special overboots were like and I'm glad that the British are actively going after the terrorists.
Isn't diversity and multi-culturalism grand...?
This guy has got to be "neutralized".
This is great metaphor for the polticially-correct, pansy-a$$ way the West is facing islam.
HOOO-AHHH!!!!!
Not much different from the U.S. attitude towards Islamicists in this country before 9/11, shored up by statements such as the following:
”if we are outside this country we can say O Allah, destroy America, but once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it…There is no way for Muslims to be violent in America, no way. We have other means…to do it. You can be violent anywhere else but in America.”
--- Abdulrahman Alamoudi, former Executive Director of the American Muslim Council, Annual Conference of the Islamic Association for Palestine, Chicago, December 29, 1996.
I guess the question now is: are they losing the battle to "change" America?
Oh boy, that war on terrorism sure is gruesome.
I hope the Satanic religion from Hell, bent on killing every man woman and child they can via wmd, wasn't too OFFENDED!
Well, there wasn't any guns and there weren't any gas canisters or NBC suits....just a Church....and it was left a mess and nato NEVER compensated the Church for damages either.
muslims are such a "tender, believable and protected" bunch of fanatics.
Bump.
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