With his prosthetic hook, one-eyed scowl and vitriolic sermons, Abu Hamza al-Masri, the prayer leader at London’s Finsbury Park mosque, became the European poster boy for international jihad and the favorite boogeyman of Britain’s tabloids. Last month, while British authorities were scratching their heads trying to find some legal means of getting rid of the troublesome imam, the U.S. Justice Department solved their problem with an extradition request. Abu Hamza, as he is known to his followers, has never set foot in the U.S., but he has been charged by the Justice Department with trying to set up a terrorist training base in Oregon, abetting a 1998 hostage-taking in Yemen that resulted in the deaths of three Britons and an Australian, and sending one of his acolytes for Al Qaeda training in Afghanistan. U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft personally announced the indictment at a news conference in New York that featured a poster of the Egyptian-born cleric gesturing with his prosthesis. The case will be the first test of a new fast-track extradition treaty between Britain and the United States.
The case also underscores the difficulties that Britain and other European countries with large Muslim minorities face as they try to cope with radical or fundamentalist preachers who hold great sway over legions of alienated young Muslim men, but whose messages often run counter to the basic values of liberal, Western democracies. After spurning Osama bin Laden’s recent offer of a truce, European governments have been struggling to find a balance between the need to uproot potential terrorist threats and uphold the principles of free speech and religious tolerance. They want to crack down on the preachers without alienating the vast majority of Muslims who are law-abiding.
| So toss the preachers, keep the law-abiding Muslims. What's so complicated about that? |
Abu Hamza, who sustained his injuries fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s, has been an irritant to British authorities since the late 1990s, but he did not attract widespread notoriety until the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when he lionized bin Laden and shrugged off the attacks as a "Jewish conspiracy." After it came to light that French-born Moroccan Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged "20th hijacker," and convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid were among the faithful who attended Abu Hamza’s sermons at the Finsbury Park mosque, authorities put him under close surveillance. Last year, police padlocked the mosque, and the government began procedures to strip the preacher of his British citizenship, a tactic that alarmed some human-rights activists. "You don’t play around with people’s citizenship," said Michel Tubiana, a Paris-based human-rights lawyer. "If a person does something wrong, you judge him and you punish him, but you don’t take away his nationality."
| You don't play around with the lives of millions of your citizens, either, jughead... |
After the U.S. indictment was announced, the British government acknowledged that its efforts to bring criminal charges against Abu Hamza were thwarted by the inadmissibility of phone-tap evidence in Britain.
| Maybe they need to work on that. There's safeguarding the rights of citizens, and there's committing mass suicide. |
Another frustration for the British government is Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, who lauds the Sept. 11 hijackers as "the magnificent 19" and heads a group called Al-Mohajeroun that calls on British Muslims to expand the boundaries of jihad. "The battlefield must not have any borders or nationality," said a recent news release from the group. Law-enforcement officials say the Syrian-born Mohammed generally stops short of pronouncements that would be criminal violations in Britain, but he has been under closer scrutiny for the past year after two young Britons who attended his lectures were involved in a suicide attack in Tel Aviv that killed three Israelis.
| Yeah. I'll bet that lit up the guys at Scotland Yard... |
One remedy under consideration by the government is a law that would require all Muslim preachers to pass an English-language and culture test. The idea was put forth by Nizar Ahmed, one of the few Muslim members of the House of Lords. It prompted Mohammed’s organization to accuse Ahmed of apostasy, a transgression punishable by death, according to Koranic law.
| There don't appear to be any laws against death threats in Britain, either... |
France, enmeshed in a cultural war over a new law that prohibits Muslim head scarves in public schools, has tried to gain a measure of control over what is said inside the country’s mosques by creating the French Council of the Muslim Faith as a quasi-official regulatory body. To demonstrate the government’s resolve, new Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin recently ordered the expulsion of two controversial imams. Midhat Guler, a Turkish national accused of leading an extremist movement "that preaches the use of terrorism and violence," was deported, as was Abdelkader Bouziane, an Algerian-born prayer leader and father of 16 who asserts that the Koran permitted men to beat unfaithful wives. But a French court last month ruled that the expulsion of Bouziane was illegal, and to the embarrassment of the government, he is back in France. Tubiana, the human-rights lawyer, said both preachers may have violated French law by inciting violence but that de Villepin was wrong in trying to deport them. He drew a parallel to the historic 1905 reforms that established the basis of French secularism. "This resulted in a lot of Catholic priests calling for the overthrow of the republic. At the time, it was a real political struggle, and it was only resolved by prosecuting these priests in the courts," he said.
| But they were native-born citizens... |
Spain, still reeling from the train bombings that left 191 dead in Madrid three months ago, has adopted an approach similar to France’s. Last month, new Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso announced reforms that give the government control over the funding of mosques and allow it to monitor the content of sermons. Mansur Escudero, president of Spain’s Islamic Council, called the measures an attack on religious freedom, but Mustafa el-Mrabet, head of the country’s Moroccan Immigrant Workers Association, endorsed the idea, saying government funding would loosen the grip of Saudi-sponsored imams whose Wahhabist vision of Islam is at odds with Western norms. |