For such a tiny band of ostensibly big-mouthed clowns, it is astonishing how many terrorists Anjem Choudary and his Al-Muhajiroun followers have inspired over the years. The damage this crackpot organization have inflicted on the reputation of British Islam, and consequently on community relations, is incalculable. How did this happen?
When Choudary was finally imprisoned in 2016 for inviting support for ISIS online, Muslims cheered. Mainstream Islam had been denying him a platform for years. In Luton in 2009, Choudary and his followers protested at a parade of troops just back from Iraq by burning poppies. Bedfordshire Police defended them on the grounds of free speech. By contrast, even back then, not just mosques but shopkeepers in Bury Park, Luton’s Muslim enclave, were putting up signs denying Al-Muhajiroun supporters entry, as part of a noisy public relations campaign called #notinmyname. Al-Muhajiroun have been ostracised in Luton ever since.
“We are Brits,” local Luton business leader Mohammed Nadeem told me. “Those soldiers they insulted were our soldiers, too. I hate those guys. I’ve had threats. But when they go about the place telling people that voting is haram [forbidden], even while they are claiming benefits? I mean, come on.”
After the London attack, Theresa May warned us—yet again—that segregated communities are breeding grounds for extremism. Bury Park, the heart of a community of more than 50,000 Muslims, certainly looks like one of them. The 7/7 bombers who met here before setting off to attack London Transport in 2005 were sadly not one-offs. Yet, clearly, not everyone who lives in these communities is an extremist. We now know that in both Manchester and London, mosques, neighbours, even family members tipped off the police about the increasingly radical views of the eventual terrorists. The authorities can’t say they weren’t warned.
A curiosity about the London Bridge attack was that the perpetrators’ suicide belts were fake. What was the point? Perhaps there was some tactical motive we still don’t know about, but all those belts actually achieved was to ensure their wearers were swiftly shot dead by the police. No doubt they wanted to become ‘martyrs.’ But it still seems an oddly amateurish way to orchestrate one’s own jihadist exit. Now, however, that we know that at least one of the attackers, Khurram Butt, was a former acolyte of Choudary, the stage props make more sense. The attack was in
Now, however, that we know that at least one of the attackers, Khurram Butt, was a former acolyte of Choudary, the stage props make more sense. The attack was in a large part theatre, designed for maximum publicity, modelled on the technique of the most accomplished jihadi impresario of them all.
In June 2016, just after the Brexit vote, I watched Choudary arrive for his trial outside the Old Bailey. He came around the corner at a nonchalant stroll, sandals slapping, his hands in the pockets of a billowing white thobe. Then he caught sight of the waiting press pack, and I saw his usual sanctimonious expression change to an unalloyed, almost childlike beam of pleasure.
“He’s a master puppeteer,” muttered a photographer snapping for the alt-right news organization, Breitbart. “It’s all Punch and Judy to him, and he just loves it.” Breitbart, in turn, loved him, as he could always be relied on for a good story. The photographer called him their “bread and butter.”
Choudary was banned by court order from talking to the press during his pre-trial months on bail, but Breitbart rang him up anyway, at his home in east London, from where he revealed that he would be voting to remain in the EU, on the grounds that EU laws made it harder to deport Muslims.
A week on, the Breitbart photographer shouted: “So, what do you think of the referendum result now, Mr Choudary?”
“I’m delighted,” he preened. “Brexit weakens Europe and weakens the British state, and that is to the advantage of all Muslims.”
“So, er—the opposite of what you said last week?”
“What you reported last week is not what I said,” Choudary replied, wagging a finger. “I said that either result, exit or remain, would be to the maximum advantage of Muslims.”
Choudary’s Islamist politics were, and are, so ridiculous as to seem beneath contempt. Scratch the surface bombast, and all you ever find is incoherence. But then, I suspect his outward agenda was always ever a smokescreen for a deeper motive, the satisfaction he takes in public notoriety. I think he was, as he probably remains, a very sick man. Which begs the question: why, for so many years, did our mainstream media give him the time of day?
Choudary appeared, endlessly, not just on Breitbart but on TV shows hosted by Nicky Campbell, Jeremy Paxman, and Andrew Neil. The mosques and shops of Luton steadfastly refused to give him a platform, yet the mainstream media couldn’t get enough of him. The coverage he enjoyed suggested he was a man of significance among Britain’s Muslims, a representative, even a “leader” if you watch Fox News.
Were they, as the Muslim tweeter @mrjammyjamjar3 suggested this week, unwitting recruiting sergeants to his cause, and thus peripherally complicit in the radicalization of his followers?
“What if I was a vulnerable young Muslim watching Anjem on tv?” he explained. “Wow! Look at him! He’s always on tv. He must be an important Muslim.”The media gave Anjem Choudary a platform to spew his hate. Not us Muslims. We threw him out of our Mosques. He wasn't allowed to speak there — JammyDodger (@mrjammyjamjar3) June 5, 2017
Last year, one of the London Bridge attackers featured in a Channel 4 documentary called The Jihadis Next Door. He’s on TV even more now; a lot more.
Ordinary British Muslims are right to be aggrieved—as should be the families of the terrorists’ victims. And we might wonder if Margaret Thatcher maybe had a point, after all when she insisted, back in the IRA era of the 1980s, that terrorists should be starved of the oxygen of publicity.
James Fergusson’s Al-Britannia, My Country is published by Bantam Press (£20)
