Alive and Well and Living in London
Guitta, olivieR
Alive and Well and Living in London Why won't Britain extradite Islamic extremists? by Olivier Guitta Afew days before the March 11 suicide bombing that rocked Casablanca, Moroccan police arrested...
...the Saudi national Saad al-Faqih, listed as a supporter of al Qaeda by both the U.S...
...By and large, though, British Muslims are the most radicalized Muslim community in Europe...
...It wasn't until 2004 that Hamza was finally arrested...
...But while Husseini sits in jail, his boss, Mohamed Guerbouzi, lives a free man in Britain, despite being sentenced in absentia to a 20-year term by a Moroccan court...
...One of Britain's main Muslim nongovernmental organizations, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), describes Muslim Brotherhood leader Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi—who defends suicide attacks on civilians in Israel and U.S...
...For over a decade, French authorities have been frustrated by their British counterparts' relative inaction on extremism...
...Rushdie recently retorted: "If that's the only moderate Muslim Blair could find...
...Mosques are no longer the preferred recruiting ground, however, according to journalist Dominique Thomas: Prayer rooms, college campuses, and prisons have assumed that distinction...
...According to conservative MP Michael Gove, this picture is dispiriting for genuinely moderate Muslims...
...The young man in charge of Islamic affairs at the Foreign Office, Mockbul Ali, is himself an Islamist, who successfully lobbied to allow Sheikh Qaradawi— still barred from the United States—to visit London...
...Morocco has sought Guerbouzi's extradition, but the British government refuses even to arrest him, deeming the evidence provided insufficient, according to the newspaper Aujourd'hui Le Maroc...
...There's a reason for the moniker the British capital earned in the 1990s (also the title of a 2006 book by the journalist Melanie Phillips)—Londonistan...
...Defenders of British policy reasoned that by allowing radicals to stay in Britain, the authorities could keep them under surveillance and thus prevent attacks on the homeland...
...The director of the London-based Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, Patrick Sookhdeo—who predicted several years ago that the next wave of radical Islam in Britain would involve suicide bombings—is critical of British authorities...
...7/7 proved that that approach does not work—yet it is still being followed...
...Arabists in the Foreign Office also advocate closer links to Islamists like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and a drawing back from the Atlanticist legacy...
...Pressure is mounting from the Muslim community, seconded by Labour party politicians, for Britain to abandon its close links with America...
...This general approach is having an impact on Britain's foreign policy...
...If that sounds alarmist, consider that in September 2006, British police agreed to consult with a panel of Muslim leaders prior to launching counterterrorist operations...
...Unsurprisingly, the first recommendation of this task force was to cancel Holocaust Memorial Day (instituted in 2001) because it was "offensive to Muslims," a recommendation that so far has not been adopted...
...In 1998 and 1999, the DGSE, the French equivalent to the CIA, reportedly mounted its own surveillance of London's Finsbury Park mosque and of extremist leaders such as Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada...
...He appointed a select committee to advise him on tackling extremism...
...Citing British colleagues, he told authors Stephane Berthomet and Guillaume Bigot in 2005 that Islamists had deposited hundreds of millions of pounds in London banks...
...Unfortunately, that calculation turned out to be wrong...
...Since the bombings of 7/7, British authorities have clamped down on a few of the most vocal radical preachers, prosecuting Abu Hamza, for example, and expelling Omar Bakri...
...Treasury and the United Nations, and so on...
...They see the most religiously conservative and politically provocative groups enjoy the lion's share of attention, and they wonder how serious the British government is about countering extremism...
...by Olivier Guitta Afew days before the March 11 suicide bombing that rocked Casablanca, Moroccan police arrested a big fish: Saad Husseini, number two in the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM), the outfit responsible for terror attacks in Casablanca in 2003 and Madrid in 2004 that killed a total of 236 people...
...Lord Carlile, who was a parliamentary "reviewer" of Britain's anti-terrorist laws, estimates that more than 20 radical imams are still preaching...
...Said Chouet, "Nobody wanted to kill the golden goose...
...Yet prosely-tism is still going strong, if a little more discreetly...
...Panel members will offer to assess whether the information police have regarding a suspect is adequate and how a raid will impact community relations...
...Almost two years after 7/7, British authorities seem oblivious to the consequences of their tolerance...
...Christophe Chaboud, head of the French antiterrorism coordination unit, told the Guardian that Britain failed to take action against Abu Hamza long after it was given ample evidence of his extensive involvement in terrorism...
...In the 1990s, when a French investigative magistrate went to London to interview eight suspected members of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), for instance, British Olivier Guitta is the founder of www thecroissant.com, a foreign affairs and counterterrorism newsletter...
...One of its members, however, was none other than Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Swiss Islamist denied entry to the United States in 2004 and to France as long ago as 1995 for his dubious connections...
...He is now serving a seven-year sentence for soliciting murder and inciting racial violence...
...The longtime general secretary of the MCB, Iqbal Sacranie—knighted by the queen in 2005—said of writer Salman Rushdie back in 1989, after the Ayatollah Khomeini deemed Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses blasphemous and called for his murder: "Death perhaps is a bit too easy for him...
...Thomson has argued that "Blair decided to go to war in Iraq because he is under the influence of a sinister group of Jews and Free Masons...
...On July 7, 2005, London was attacked, at a cost of 52 lives, and Prime Minister Blair announced, "The rules of the game have changed...
...Anjem Choudary, deported from Lebanon to the United Kingdom in 2005 and seen taking part in the violent protests of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad...
...But they might ask themselves: Why should anyone assume that British shoe bomber Richard Reid was an isolated case...
...The MCB spokesman recently stated, "To call for violence against British society is unacceptable," implying that against other countries it might be fine...
...Another sometime adviser to the British government, Ahmad Thomson—a Rhodesia-born convert to Islam and a member of the Association of Muslim Lawyers—used this smooth formulation in the Cambridge University magazine Ar-Risaakh a couple of years ago: "I look forward to the day when the majority of British people have voted in favour of being governed in accordance with the Sharia of Islam...
...authorities denied him access to the suspects...
...He envisions Islamic communities within Britain eventually forming a state within a state if the government does not stop making concessions to Islamist leaders...
...Indeed, London still hosts a Who's Who of dangerous Islamists— Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the main Tunisian Islamist party...
...One explanation for the tolerance British authorities display toward Islamic radicals was offered by Alain Chouet, former head of the antiterror-ism unit at the DGSE...
...In 2006, Sookhdeo told the Telegraph: "The whole approach towards Muslim militants was based on appeasement...
...And it took Britain ten years to finally extradite Rachid Ramda, the mastermind of the 1995 terror campaign in France that killed 8 and injured more than 100...
...An ICM Poll survey in February 2006 found that 40 percent of British Muslims favor the institution of sharia (Islamic law) in Britain...
...The truth is, as long as extremist recruiters continue to operate more or less freely in the United Kingdom, Britain must be considered a potential source of danger to American security—a state of affairs that could seriously damage relations with our best ally in Europe...
...troops in Iraq in his popular commentaries on Al Jazeera TV—as a "defender of human rights...
Vol. 12 • May 2007 • No. 32
