IMAMS WILL BE IMAMS

Already hooked on poison (Dean Godson, The Times, February 8th, 2006)

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 ”.

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” . [...]

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.

It’s a long and sorry road that led us to the point where many now seem to believe that preaching hatred and death publically is just a kind of emotional release and no evidence of any intent to cause hatred and death.

Posted by Peter Burnet at February 8, 2006 6:16 AM