Tolerating the Intolerable

The smirk on his face tells all one needs to know.  Abu Qatada, a notorious hate preacher and terrorist suspect, has been released on bail.  This follows a successful appeal against deportation to Jordan, where he stands accused of various terrorism offences. 

I’m sure you’ve heard the script before – he will not get a fair trial, say the liberal old judges sitting on the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, proving once again that an ass is far too intelligent an animal to be compared to the law.    It’s not justice denied, it’s not justice delayed; it’s justice mocked.  More than that: we as a nation are mocked, a refuge for every murderous fanatic who knows how to manipulate the system.

Apparently David Cameron, our benighted Prime Minister, shares the nation’s ‘frustration’ at this latest development.  Nick Clegg, his Deputy, says that the government is still “absolutely determined” to deport Qatada. 

Now, here’s a question for you: what does Cameron’s ‘frustration’ and Clegg’s ‘determination’ amount to?  Oh, I know, the answer is just too, too simple.  They amount to precisely nothing, because nothing is what we shall get.  Oh, sorry, that’s not true: we shall get years and years of Abu Qatada. 

I personally would send Qatada off on the next plane to Amman.  No, I don’t care about the asinine judges and I don’t care about the European Convention of Human Rights, adopted wholesale into our own legal system without consideration or reflection by Tony Blair and his toy town government.  I don’t care if the evidence to be used against Qatada in Jordon is based on confessions obtained by torture, the chief objection of the judges.  I don’t even care if he is tortured himself; I just want rid of him; I do not want this appalling man to breathe English air.  I really do not care if he breathes any air at all. 

This is too, too awful of me, don’t you agree?  Taking a more than usually pompous tone in the Telegraph yesterday, Dan Hodges writes that the calls for the immediate deportation of Qatada will rightly receive short shrift –“Once we start simply ignoring the laws of the land, Abu Qatada has won.  Nor do we want politicians muscling aside our independent judiciary.”

Frustrated Dave and Determined Nick most assuredly won’t do that, or anything else, for that matter.  Once the law of the land starts to offer shelter and protection to the enemies of the land then it is worse than useless.  Fine, I’m happy to let Qatada have the victory, just so long as he smirks about it in Jordan.  What I want is a politician less ‘frustrated’ and less ‘determined’; I want a politician with the character of Alexander, one who acts, not talks, one who has the courage to cut through the Gordian Knot and to hell with the consequences.

In essence what I want is to see the loathsome Abu Qatada smirk on the other side of his face.  As it is he is likely to spend years amongst us, all at huge public expense, smiling away at the stupidity of our judges, our law, our politicians and our country, a country that can tolerate the intolerable.  

The Lights of a Perverted Faith

Do you have a definition of abject cowardice?  I do, one that I recently acquired.  A coward is a man who walks on to a school bus, full of children, and shoots a fourteen-year-old girl twice at close range, in the leg and more critically in the head.  The girl in question was guilty of a dire crime: she believes that education is a fundamental right for all.  This was enough to mark her as a target for assassination by the Pakistani Taliban. 

I was a bit out of the loop so far as news was concerned when I was in Tunisia.  But the one item that gripped my attention in early October was a report I saw on the BBC World Service concerning the attempted murder of Malala Yousafazi by a Taliban hitman, principally because she was an active campaigner for schooling for girls which, by their perverted lights, was ‘un-Islamic.’ 

Malala – her name means ‘grief stricken’ – has been active in her cause since the age of eleven.  It was then she began to write a blog for BBC Urdu, detailing what life was like after the Taliban took control of her native Swat Valley in Pakistan.  Her principal fear was over the future of her education – “I was afraid of going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from schools.” 

The Taliban, it has to be said, was allowed to consolidate its position in Swat in an act of retreat and appeasement by the Pakistani government, which hoped thereby to stop the spread of the cancer.  For several months, before they were finally ousted by the army in the summer of 2009, these religious fanatics established their own republic of Islamic virtue, the stuff of nightmares by any reasonable standard.  Men were forced to grow beards and women to wear burqas.  Those who did not comply faced lashing or beheading.  The brutish regime also closed schools, the majority of them for girls. 

After the Taliban’s removal Malala appeared on national television to talk about girls’ education.  Her courage in speaking against the Taliban was enough for the Pakistani government to select her as a fitting recipient of the country’s first National Peace Award for Youth.  But it also singled her out in another way.  At the beginning of this year she was placed on a Taliban hit list. 

That would terrify anyone, particularly a teenager; it would certainly have terrified me.  But Malala would not be silenced by fear. “Sometimes I imagine I’m going along and the Taliban stop me”, she said on television, “I take my sandal and hit them in the face and say, ‘What you are doing is wrong.  Education is our right, don’t take it away from us.’  There is this quality in me – I’m ready for all situations.  So even if (God let this not happen) they kill me, I’ll first say to them, ‘What you are doing is wrong.’”

Her shooting caused widespread outrage, in Pakistan and across much of the world.  How could it not?  How could it not given the callousness of the action, given her youth and given the cause for which she was prepared to risk her life?  Even countries with the most dubious record on human rights recognise the importance of universal education.  I’m almost tempted to say that girls’ schooling is no more of a ‘right’ than breathing; it’s a reflex. 

It’s impossible to breath under the Taliban.  These disciples of Iblis have blown up Sufi shrines, worshipers at mosques, and men and women in markets.  Bombs have been planted to ensure maximum loss of life.  Then there is murder incorporated, the assassination of specific individuals.  Public officials and journalists have been targeted but so, too, have religious scholars belonging to Muslim sects the movement has condemned as heretical. 

Malala was singled out because her campaign for educational rights was an ‘obscenity’, so said Ehsanullah Ehsan, a Taliban spokesman.  Greater poverty of spirit, greater ignorance, I find almost impossible to imagine.  These are people who kill in the name of God knowing nothing of God.  Is there any greater heresy, I have to ask?  There is obscenity alright, the obscenity of the Ehsanullah Ehsan and his debased kind. 

Of all the dark forces in the world the Taliban is among the darkest, deep in evil and ignorance.  To paraphrase some words of Sir Winston Churchill’s, if the movement succeeds all that we have known and cared for will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted faith.

The Monster in our Midst

We all have our favourite monsters from childhood.  One of mine was Captain Hook from J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan.  It was a tingly delight to see him brought to life by Dustin Hoffman in the movie Hook.  My, look, see that big iron hook in place of his missing hand; that was the stuff of nightmares.  Wake up!  Monsters don’t exist; they are all in the imagination.

Oh, no, they are not, I retort in my best pantomime style.  Childhood fears give way to adult realities.  Monsters do exist.  They are here, living among us.  There are few more monstrous than Abu Hamza al-Masri.  Like the fictitious Hook, Hamza has a hook.  But the Captain, for all his wickedness, has a certain charm; Hamza has none.  He is nothing but a nightmare, unrelieved in any way.

He is in our midst at the moment.  He has been for years, presently in prison, fighting deportation to the United States on terrorism charges.  He only has one hand and one eye, though where the missing appendages went is a matter of some dispute.  He says that they were lost in Afghanistan, the result of an encounter with a landmine.  Others say that the injuries were sustained while he was practicing bomb making. 

A supporter of Osama bin-Laden, Hamza was formally an imam at the Finsbury Park Mosque in London, which under his care became a setting for bile and hate, the message of a lesser God.  It was there on the first anniversary of 9/11 that he co-organised a conference praising the hijackers.  It was from there that he called for the creation of a caliphate and the destruction of democracy.  He was just another vampire, prepared to suck the life from the very system that guaranteed his freedom and his right to speak. 

But there are limits to tolerance.  In 2004 he was arrested for various offences under the Terrorism Act.  He was eventually found guilty of soliciting the murder of non-Muslims and incitement to racial hatred.  In sentencing him to seven years imprisonment, Mister Justice Hughes said that he had helped to “create an atmosphere in which to kill has become regarded by some as not only a legitimate course but a moral and religious duty in pursuit of perceived justice.”  

The judge went on to say;

No one can say what damage your words may have caused.  No one can say how often or widely your preaching was repeated. You are entitled to your views and in this country you are entitled to express them — up to the point where you incite murder or incite racial hatred.  You commended suicide bombing, you encouraged them to kill in the cause you set out for them. 

For years Hamza represented a clear and present danger, effectively ignored by successive governments, more attuned to ‘human rights’ than to human safety, the safety of the people of this country.  No action was taken despite mounting evidence of his involvement in international terrorism. 

We want rid of him.  The sooner he goes the better.  The sooner he is extradited to the United States, where he is wanted on various terrorist offences, the better.  Nothing could be simpler. 

Alas, when it comes to European law, ‘simple’ is a word that should never be used.  We in England come under the purview of the European Court of Human Rights, which really should be called the Terrorist Court of Last Resort.  People like Hamza know how to play the system.  He and his lawyers – it’s a really big earner - have been playing it for years, launching appeal after appeal with Strasbourg. 

In Hamlet the Prince muses on the law’s delays.  Shakespeare did not know the half of it.  The law’s delays?  Extradition has now been delayed for five years, the judges previously blocking his removal to the States just in case of… in case of what exactly?  Was the fear that he might not get a fair trial, that he might be tortured, that – God forbid – he might be executed?  No, none of this; the concern was that the poor creature might not live in the manner to which he had become accustomed; that the American prison system might just be a tad ‘too harsh.’ 

But at last came the dawn of reason.  In April of this year the judges ruled that he, along with other alleged terrorists, could be deported to the States because their facilities are better than our facilities.  Hamza – thank goodness- would have access to all of the things that make life worthwhile, like television, a telephone, and arts and crafts. 

That’s alright then; off you go Captain Hook.  So, why is he still with us?  Why?  Because – wait for it – another appeal, an appeal beyond the final appeal, has been lodged.  His lawyers have now applied for the case to be heard before the European Court’s Grand Chamber, twenty-four hours before the deadline for his removal had passed.  This consists of a panel of five judges, not due to assemble now for at least two months.  If they conclude that there is a case it may take another year before they reach a decision.  Yes, it is a joke, but I for one am not laughing.  

Hamza, of Egyptian birth, has cost this country millions, in welfare payments, in state housing, in health and prison bills, in trials and in appeals.  Up until April the legal bill alone amounted to £1.5million, that’s about $2.4million.  There are other costs, too, that he has brought to us, costs associated with his wretched family. 

The hook-handed, one-eyed imam was in the habit of preaching against the moral laxity and the ‘decadence’ of the West.  He would know all about moral laxity and decadence, not from looking at Western society.  No, it comes a lot closer to home; it comes to his home.  In 2009 three of his sons were imprisoned for fraud involving stolen cars.  The following year another son was jailed for violent disorder and yet another for armed robbery.  Now, Imran Mostafa, (yes, yes, still another son; will the line go on to the crack of doom?), keeping the family tradition, has been convicted for his part in an armed raid on a jewellery store. 

Amongst other things Hamza wanted the introduction of Sharia law in this country, with the strictest of interpretations, I imagine.  One handed bandits might then also have become a tradition in his family, like father, like sons.  But we, in our decadence, do not descend to barbarism.  We just allow barbarians to live among us. 

Extremism4UK

What follows was in part inspired by the editorial in the latest issue of The Spectator (A golden age for fascism) and in part by previous pieces I have written here, particularly The Resistible Rise of the BNP and All Votes Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others.

I’m sure it is no revelation to most of you if I say that fascism and hate feed off fascism and hate. The rise of the British National Party, as The Spectator says, now owes little to the anti-coloured vote, rather a thing of the past, and everything to the equivalent rise of Islamofacism. Just as the Nazis needed the Communists in the days of the Weimar Republic, so, too, does the BNP need the likes of Islam4UK and the reaction this movement induces.

Nick Griffin and the equally vile Anjem Choudary are distilled from the same poison; they are brothers from the same womb. If we ever do have fascism in this country then it will be thanks to reactionary Islam, just as Hitler owed thanks to the German Communist Party. We will not ever have Islam4UK, but may we very well have Extermism4UK.

But there is something else; there is the shameful silence over mass immigration by the political class at Westminster; silence by Labour, which created the problem, and silence by the Tories, fearful of the accusation of racism. It’s against this silence that the BNP made its electoral strides, the most successful fascist party this country has ever seen. It was Margaret Thatcher who killed the last fascist wave, that of the National Front, by making fears over immigration mainstream, part of the Conservative agenda. My goodness; if people felt that they were being ‘swamped’ then they are being drowned now.

Still there is only silence from the political establishment as the fascists and the Islamofascists shout louder and louder. But although the Tories might be partially at fault here it is the Labour government that is by far the most culpable in the nurturing extremism, not just by allowing mass migration, but by new forms appeasement and old forms of neglect; appeasement of Islamic radicals and neglect of the Old Labour heartlands. Here is part of what I wrote in ‘The Resistible Rise of the BNP’;

…the ‘outcasts’, for want of a better term, are the traditional working class, once the backbone of Labour and the Labour movement. These are the people who have continually been taken for granted by the corrupt political oligarchy that controls England at the present; the New Labour establishment, created by the Tony Blair, and perpetuated by Gordon Brown; an establishment that concocted ‘marshmallow politics’ out of spin, sound bites, media manipulation and outright lies.

I have more still to add to this mix. Though not generally recognised contempt for certain sections of the lower classes has been a fairly constant feature of the Labour establishment, originating in the likes of such left-liberal icons as Sidney and Beatrice Webb and William Beveridge. One of the principle targets of the 2009 Welfare Reform Act was the ‘undeserving poor’ always to be separated out from those ‘hard working families’, another New Labour mantra. But there are huge areas, Labour areas, old, corrupt Labour rotten boroughs where this approach has induced high levels of insecurity and anxiety, a feeling of abandonment. Add to this the fears over mass emigration and Islamic extremists then a bad situation becomes positively lethal.

Labour is thus the godfather of the new-style of British fascism, however one chooses to define it. Their only refuge and defence is in silence.