Mick Hartley

Amir Taheri looks at the strange history of Abu Hamza in the UK – a man who’s spent his life here breaking the law, with, till now, total impunity:

He fled Egypt and arrived in Britain on a tourist visa at the age of 22. The first question he might ask is: How come they gave me a visa when they knew I had a criminal record in Egypt?

His visa allowed a three-month stay. Those months came and went without anybody asking him to leave. Instead, he became a bouncer in a cabaret . . . without documents such as a work permit. Again he might ask: Why did no one bother to remind him he was breaking the law?

Next, his buddies advised him that he had to marry a British citizen if he wanted to stay in Britain permanently. This he duly did by wooing a naturalized Briton in whom he of course had no interest. Again, no one told him that arranging a fake marriage to obtain British documents was breaking the law.

Soon, he was granted his British passport — a document denied to millions of people who used to be citizens of the empire. Abu Hamza might have wondered why he could get a British passport while his fellow Egyptian Muhammad Fayed, the owner of the luxury shop Harrods, couldn’t.

Now a subject of Her Britannic Majesty, Abu Hamza suddenly discovered a passion for the most radical version of Islamism. And in those days, for anyone who wanted to build a career as a “Holy Warrior,” Afghanistan was the place to be.

So, our bouncer-turned-holy-warrior traveled to Pakistan to join the mujahedin in the fight against Soviet atheists. He might have wondered why the British authorities, who must have known what he was up to, never took an interest. After all, here was a British citizen going to a foreign land to kill people and then return home to have his teeth cleaned by the National Health Service, no questions asked.

His spot of jihad done, Abu Hamza decided to promote himself to the position of “Islamic scholar” and “Islamic cleric.” No one in Britain, this land of undreamt freedoms, ever asked him for his credentials. He must have wondered why you need a permit to work as a cab driver, but can pose as an “Islamic scholar” with no qualifications.

Soon, things got even better. Abu Hamza targeted the mosque in Finsbury Park for what might be called a hostile takeover: One day he turned up with a group of heavies and elbowed out the mosque’s board of trustees. When one or two trustees tried to resist the illegal takeover, Abu Hamza made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. The trustees complained to the police, but were told to take a walk.

It is not hard to guess what Abu Hamza might have thought: Here was a country where law enforcement was selective, to say the least. […]

With Britain a headquarters of Islamist terror, he must have concluded that, the term “Londonistan” (coined by the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere) was no mere token of Gallic pique.

Not surprisingly, Abu Hamza took his activities a notch further, organizing an attack on the British Embassy compound in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. His commandos failed to kill any British diplomats, but still caused quite a stir. Yet he continued his London life unmolested, with the police claiming insufficient evidence to bring him to court.

As this month’s trial showed, Abu Hamza believed he’d reached a tacit understanding with the British authorities, whereby he was free to plot every crime under the sun against other countries as long as “there is no blood on our streets.”

Prime Minister Tony Blair says that things changed with last July’s terror attacks in the heart of London.

Have they?