Londonistan

by Melanie Phillips

  Armed with this doctrine, the English judiciary appears over and over again to have placed itself on the wrong side of the country’s battle against terror and extremism. When it comes to Islamism, its human rights mindset seems to render it quite unable to grasp just who needs to be protected from what. In March 2005, the Court of Appeal ruled that a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, Shabina Begum, should be allowed to wear a full-length jilbab, and that the decision of her school that she should wear school uniform instead—which already included shalwar kameez and an approved headscarf for the 80 percent of its girls who were Muslim—had denied her the right to manifest her religion in public under the Human Rights Convention.

  This was despite the fact that her headmistress warned that permitting her to wear the jilbab would leave other Muslim girls defense-less against targeting and intimidation by fundamentalists; despite the fact that the affair was clearly a political stunt, with the girl claiming that the school’s ban on the jilbab was a result of the “vilification” of Islam after 9/11; and despite the fact that she was backed by Hizb ut-Tahrir, the group that wants to see Sharia law in Britain and the restoration of the global Islamic caliphate, and which has been banned in countries around the world.

  It seems that the judges are so blinded by their obsession with minority rights and their belief in the morally unchallengeable logic of human rights law that they cannot grasp that it might be used to imperil members of a minority at the hands of its own extremists. As a result Dr. Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, chairman of the Muslim Institute, rebuked them when he said: “This may be a victory for human rights but it is also a victory for fundamentalism.”11

  Still worse was to come, however, when the law lords delivered a seminal ruling over the detention of foreign terrorism suspects without trial. Blocked by the courts from deporting such extremists, the government locked up the ones it considered most dangerous in Belmarsh prison pending their eventual deportation. But in 2004, the law lords struck down the provisions that allowed for the detention without trial of suspected foreign terrorists on the grounds that they were discriminatory and disproportionate under human rights law.

  Their reasoning was deeply flawed and illogical. They argued that locking up foreign Islamic terror suspects without trial was discriminatory, because there were also Muslim UK nationals who were terror suspects and who were not being locked up without trial. They compared foreign nationals and British nationals and decided that, as the former were not being treated the same as the latter, this was unlawful discrimination.

  But this was not to compare like with like. Foreign nationals do not have the rights or responsibilities of British citizens. Most pertinently, British nationals cannot be deported, nor once arrested are they free to move to another country. The foreign terror suspects in question were always free to leave prison at any time if another country would take them. They were only being held pending deportation. To say that it was discrimination to treat suspects being held pending deportation differently from suspects who cannot be deported and cannot freely leave the country once in custody amounted to the belief in “identicality” that is such a feature of human rights law, and which claims that only identical treatment is fair even if the circumstances are different. This produces in fact not fairness but gross injustice—and in the case of the terrorist threat to this country, a possibly lethal outcome.

  Yet the reaction of some of these judges to holding foreign terror suspects without trial in circumstances where they were actually free to leave was little short of hysterical. Lord Scott said this situation was “associated whether accurately or inaccurately with France before and during the Revolution, with Soviet Russia in the Stalinist era and now associated, as a result of section 23 of the 2001 Act, with the United Kingdom.”12

  Another of the judges, Lord Hoffmann, declared that Muslim extremism did not threaten the life of the British nation. He said: “The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.”13

  So the real danger was not a terrorist movement whose aim was to defeat Western democracy and reinstitute a seventh-century Islamic empire that stretched halfway across the globe, but the measures that a free society had devised to protect itself from such a threat.

  The Belmarsh judgment did not merely suggest that the highest judges in the land had been suborned by the moral bankruptcy of victim culture. It also illustrated how the English judiciary was now using human rights law to tear up the very definition of citizenship, the compact with the state that gives citizens different rights and duties from noncitizens. It was but the most striking example to date of a judiciary that, assuming the mantle of legal infallibility and universal authority, was now not only threatening the democratic process but undermining the security and integrity of the nation along with its values.

  At any time this would be disturbing enough; but in the present circumstances it is potentially lethal. For Britain, along with the rest of the free world, faces a threat to its security and values from without. A nation can fight to defend itself only if it knows what it is fighting for, if it is secure in its own identity and values. Yet these are being steadily undermined from within by the legal universalism of human rights doctrine, which, in weakening Britain’s physical security while hollowing out its values on the grounds that minority rights must take precedence, is inadvertently providing a legal battering ram for the Islamic jihad.

  · CHAPTER THREE ·

  THE SECURITY DEBACLE

  “The terrorists have come home,” said a senior intelligence official based in Europe who often works with British officials. “It is payback time for a policy that was, in my opinion, an irresponsible policy of the British government to allow these networks to flourish inside Britain.”1

  The London bombings in July 2005 provoked a certain amount of grim schadenfreude among security officials in countries that for years had been watching the relentless development of “Londonistan” with incredulity and exasperation. They could not understand why successive British governments had allowed so many extremists and terrorist godfathers to enter Britain, take up residence and be left undisturbed to organize, recruit for, fund and disseminate the jihad against the West, often being paid generous welfare benefits to do so—and in a country that was always likely to be on the target list for such activities. So how could Britain, America’s principal ally in the defense of the West, apparently have been asleep on its watch?

  The July bombings were said to have caught the British security establishment unawares. It simply never saw them coming. In the United States, 9/11 had taken the authorities by surprise but only insofar as the details of the actual plot were concerned; they had been uncomfortably aware that an attack was an imminent possibility. But the British appeared not to have had a clue that the threat about which they had been issuing warnings ever since 9/11 was now imminent. Indeed, the threat assessment by the government’s own Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre, finished just a month before the bombings, was actually taken down a notch, declaring that “there was no group with current intent and the capability” of mounting terrorist strikes in the UK of the kind that would shortly occur. To the extent that there was terrorist-related activity in the UK, it said, this was the direct result of events in Iraq.2

  What also shook the security establishment was that the bombings revealed all too starkly just how little it knew about the radicalization of British Muslim boys. Apparently it had absolutely no idea of the extent to which religious fanaticism had taken hold of a segment of the British Muslim community. If it suspected so, it certainly wasn’t on top of it. Even after the famous “wake-up call” of 9/11, the British still had enormous gaps in essential intelligence.

  Government ministers were appalled by how little the security service knew. According to a senior Whitehall source present at meetings of COBRA, the government’s crisis command group convened
to react to the London bombings, there was general shock at the absence of information coming from the intelligence community about who was behind the bombings. He said: “We were all waiting for some answers. We lived in hope that the security service would provide a thread, or a sliver, but no. That was a shock to the system.” The official said there was a question whether MI5 had “ever really engaged with the possibility that terrorists would be home-grown, British, English-speakers.” “There was a real understanding,” he said, “that this was our 9/11, but at least in the US reports had come in about concerns over the hijackers. Here there was nothing.”3

  Subsequently, there were unconfirmed reports that Britain’s counterterrorism officials had missed several chances over a four-year period to identify as an Islamist terrorist Mohammed Sidique Khan, the Briton who was thought to have masterminded the July 7 attack. The al-Qaeda expert Rohan Gunaratna told the BBC that Khan was reported to have been associating with people identified as terrorist suspects by Western security services prior to the attacks on Britain, and even had links to an al-Qaeda fixer. It was also alleged that Khan was caught on film and recorded by the security services meeting a British-based terrorism suspect.4

  We don’t know whether this is true. But what is clear is that after 9/11, at least some British officials understood that Britain was also a target. Shortly after the American atrocities, the Prime Minister’s Office published an analysis that said:Al Qaeda retains the capability and the will to make further attacks on the US and its allies, including the United Kingdom. . . . There is a continuing threat. Based on our experience of the way the network has operated in the past, other cells, like those that carried out the terrorist attacks on 11 September, must be assumed to exist. . . . Al Qaeda functions both on its own and through a network of other terrorist organizations. These include Egyptian Islamic Jihad and other north African Islamic extremist terrorist groups, and a number of other jihadi groups in other countries including the Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and India. Al Qaeda also maintains cells and personnel in a number of other countries to facilitate its activities. . . .5

  The British clearly knew, therefore, that al-Qaeda was a many-headed hydra consisting of extensive and complex global networks of apparently disparate groups all connected by a particular overarching ideology. Yet even after 9/11, they still took no action against the Islamist extremists embedded in London. Moreover, they had also known since at least the late 1990s that British Muslims were becoming radicalized and recruited for the jihad—with British targets included in their sights.

  In December 1998, eight young British Muslims from Birmingham, London and Luton were arrested and eventually convicted in the Yemeni capital Aden of plotting terrorist attacks against British targets in Yemen and abducting a group of tourists. Subsequently, security officials confessed they had no idea the youths had been recruited from mosques around England and were being trained at special “terrorist camps” sponsored by Osama bin Laden. “It was a complete shock to us, and it was a shock that chilled us to the bone,” the source said.6

  British security officials seem to specialize in being “shocked” time and again by such developments—but then doing nothing about them. What made this attitude even more astounding was that according to the prosecution, Abu Hamza had been the linchpin of the conspiracy, masterminding the terror from the mosque in Finsbury Park. Although he denied being thus involved, he admitted that one of the British terrorists was his son and another his godson, and that he had been phoned by one of them just after he had abducted the tourists.7 Yet, despite being urged by the Yemenis to do something about Abu Hamza, the British did nothing.

  The following year, a newspaper reported that every year some two thousand British Muslims were attending clandestine terrorist training camps around Britain to learn about holy war. The camps were run by al-Muhajiroun, a group based in London that advocated replacing Western governments with Islamic rule. The camps were being held most weekends in Birmingham and London and trained recruits in hand-to-hand combat and survival skills, telling them they should seek real military instruction in countries such as Yemen and Afghanistan.8 Yet the British authorities seemed to regard such camps with indifference.

  If by some chance the security service had been struck by a fit of absent-mindedness over the Yemen plot, a string of subsequent events would have reminded them that British Muslims were turning into jihadis. In December 2001, Richard Reid, an al-Qaeda sympathizer, tried to carry out a suicide attack by detonating a bomb in his shoe on a Paris-to-Miami airliner. In 2002, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh masterminded the kidnap and murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. And in 2003, two more British boys, Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, helped carry out the suicide bomb attack on the Mike’s Place beachfront bar in Tel Aviv.

  Given the inescapable fact that British Muslim boys were indeed being recruited as suicide bombers, why therefore were the British authorities apparently so unprepared for the prospect of such British boys blowing up Britain?

  The foiled millennium plots of 1999 and 2000, when al-Qaeda planned a series of attacks in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, all led back to London. From these, say intelligence analysts, it became clear at that time that, although Hamburg, Milan and other cities were all important terrorist hubs, London represented a kind of headquarters on both a political and a strategic level. From October 2001, it was known that Abu Qatada was leading the Spanish, Milan and German al-Qaeda cells from his base in London. And the Mike’s Place bombers had been indoctrinated by Omar Bakri Mohammed, known to be the ideologue who preached attack on the West and the Islamization of the United Kingdom.9

  If British security officials didn’t make the connection between such activities and the extremists promulgating the jihad from London, there was no shortage of foreign governments trying to enlighten them. Over the years, the governments of India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, France, Algeria, Peru, Yemen and Russia, among others, lodged formal or informal protests about the presence in Britain of terrorist organizations or their sympathizers.10 The French were passing information about Algerian radicals to the British but were mortified by their failure to act on it. They were particularly furious that Abu Qatada—later described by a British judge as being at the center of terrorist activities associated with al-Qaeda in the UK—was at one time allowed to “disappear” from London for a period.11 After Abu Hamza welcomed the massacre of fifty-eight European tourists at Luxor in October 1997, Egypt denounced Britain as a hotbed for radicals. The Egyptian State Information Service posted a “Call to Combat Terrorism” on its official website. Of its fourteen most-wanted terrorists, seven were based in Britain, among them Yasser al-Siri, sentenced to death in absentia for plotting the failed assassination of an Egyptian prime minister, and in charge of the Islamic Observation Centre in London, a mouthpiece for Egyptian rebels.12

  Many countries asked Britain to extradite radicals back to the countries they were threatening but were turned down, often by the courts. Morocco was reported to have sought the extradition of one man who they said planned the May 2003 attacks in Casablanca which killed forty-five people. He was identified as a founder of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, cited by the United Nations as a terrorist network connected to al-Qaeda and said to have had sleeper cells prepared to mount synchronized bombings in Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and Canada. The British refused. Baltasar Garzón, a Spanish investigating magistrate, requested the extradition of Abu Qatada. Britain refused. For ten years, France fought for the extradition of Rachid Ramda over his suspected role in a bombing in Paris in 1995 staged by Algeria’s militant Armed Islamic Group. The British courts refused,13 finally allowing his extradition in December 2005.

  After the British courts refused to extradite to Saudi Arabia Dr. Mohammed al-Massari, who was suspected of terrorist acts there and who helped set up al-Qaeda’s office in London, the former Saudi ambassador to London, Prince Turki al-Faisal, described Saudi
frustration: “When you call somebody, he says it is the other guy. If you talk to the security people, they say it is the politicians’ fault. If you talk to the politicians, they say it is the Crown Prosecution Service. If you call the Crown Prosecution Service, they say, no it is MI5. So we have been in this run-around for the last two and a half years.”14

  One former senior U.S. intelligence official was reported as saying of the British: “They have a really hard time understanding that people like Massari and Abu Qatada are real goddamn problems. It took a long, long time before they began taking those threats seriously. . . . There is a certain amount of reluctance on the part of the British to move quickly. What they never seem to realise is that by the time they know they have a problem it is too late.”15

  So why has Britain been so singularly reluctant to act against the Islamist extremists in its midst? The reasons, as always when questions are asked about the behavior of the secret state, are inevitably murky. But through the self-serving excuses, evasions and obfuscations that such an inquiry tends to throw up, a picture emerges that raises some urgent questions about Britain’s ability even now to defend itself and the rest of the free world against Islamist terror.

  The first explanation is that, during the 1990s, both the British and the Americans failed to grasp the threat to the West that was developing in the Islamic world. The British, moreover, were gazing firmly in the wrong direction. Instead of studying the Middle East as a cause for concern, they were staring across the Irish Sea at Northern Ireland, where a terrorist insurrection against the UK had been in progress since the 1970s. The mindset, on both sides of the Atlantic, was that terrorism was tied to discrete grievances against individual states. And with the end of the Cold War, the notion of a global threat rooted in ideology was assumed to be dead and buried.