The Terrorist Next Door (23 page)

Choudary became Bakri Mohammed's right-hand man in leading the notorious Islamist group al-Muhajiroun which, along with its various offshoots like al-Ghurabaa, the Saved Sect, and Islam4UK, has been banned in Great Britain in recent years under the country's counterterrorism laws. With Bakri Mohammed now gone, Choudary has taken the reigns of what is left of al-Muhajiroun. His followers led an infamous 2006 rally in front of the Danish Embassy in London in which up to 300 frothing Islamists protested the publication of cartoons of Islam's prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper by waving placards that read, variously: “Butcher those who mock Islam,” “Massacre those who insult Islam,” “Prepare for the real Holocaust,” and “Behead the one who insults the prophet.” For good measure, they chanted, “UK you will pay, Islam is on its way,” along with the standard guttural shouts of “Allahu Akhbar.” London police, true to form, stood by and watched impotently as this jihadist rabble publicly called for the murder of British and Danish civilians. Several of the protestors were later sentenced to prison time for “inciting racial hatred,”
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which is nice, except that their exhortations to murder had nothing to do with race and everything to do with religion—namely, Islam.

As I waited for him to arrive at the hotel for our interview, I had to wonder what it would take to see Anjem Choudary convicted on similar
“hate speech” charges. Some of his greatest hits include calling for the execution of Pope Benedict and helping lead a group, al-Muhajiroun, that posted fliers around London extolling the 9/11 hijackers as “the Magnificent 19.” As I was about to discover in our face-to-face meeting, his menacing pronouncements also targeted the British government.

Short, burly, and bespectacled, Choudary arrived along with three bearded friends who were dressed in exaggerated Islamic garb suggesting they had just raided Mullah Omar's closet. After some brief chatter, we got down to business in what would be an expansive, one-hour interview. Choudary has never met a camera he didn't like and was clearly in his element as we started rolling.

“Many people love the idea of jihad, you know?” he told me, as a smile crept across his face. “And they want to engage in it. ... There is a huge amount of support [among British Muslims] for people like sheikh Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.”

Choudary himself openly supports bin Laden, referring to him with the honorific title “sheikh,” and later in our interview, as “the emir of jihad.” As for support for jihad among British Muslims—particularly the young—a steady stream of polls have borne out Choudary's point in the years since 9/11. One poll taken in 2008, for instance, showed that onethird of Muslim students at British universities believe that killing in the name of Islam is justified.
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Despite his incendiary rhetoric against the British state, Choudary maintained during our talk that his group is a “non-violent political and ideological movement” that has a “covenant of security” with the British government, meaning they supposedly would not carry out attacks on British soil. Yet several former members have been convicted on terrorism charges. Peter Neumann, the London-based terrorism expert, said Choudary's group serves as a sort of conveyor belt for terrorism whose extreme teachings lead a young Muslim right to the edge of violence—with many choosing to make the short jump into armed jihad.

“A very significant amount of former al-Muhajiroun people were involved in terrorist plots against this country,” Neumann told me.
“A number of people have actually gone to Afghanistan, joined the Taliban, and died fighting for the Taliban.”

Thus, it came as no surprise that during our interview Choudary refused to condemn the 9/11 attacks or the July 7, 2005 London bombings.

“For the people who carried it out, it was legitimate,” he said of the London attacks, which saw fifty-two people slaughtered by four homegrown Islamic terrorists. “If you look at the will of [7/7 bombers] Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, they would be justified. And there are many verses from the Koran and many statements to say that's the Islamic argument. And that is a difficult Islamic argument to refute. And there are many scholars who support that argument as well.”

Khan and Tanweer both made their way to Pakistan's tribal regions prior to the bombings, where they likely met with members of al-Qaeda's hierarchy.
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They were among the some 400,000 Brits of Pakistani origin who travel to their ancestral homeland each year, ostensibly to visit relatives or friends. On the way to grandma's house in Lahore, a growing number of these British citizens take a detour into Pakistan's tribal regions, where they train with al-Qaeda before returning to Britain as well-trained, committed jihadists.
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Choudary assured me that he doesn't recommend jihad on British soil for now (after all, the government provides his welfare benefits), but he quickly added that “there are many youth out there who do contact us and do come to our talks and they have other ideas. And we can make sure that those energies are channeled through discussion, dialogue, interaction. But if you take us out of the picture, then you have a very volatile situation.”

He delivered these statements in deadpan fashion, gazing directly at me, as he did throughout the interview.

“Some in the British government might consider that a threat,” I replied.

“It's not a threat,” he countered. “It's a warning. It's a reality check.”

The U.S. government, for one, has received the message, and U.S. intelligence sources have told me off the record that Britain's radical
Muslims may be our greatest security threat, due in part to a program that enables them to travel to the United States without a visa. This needs to change, fast. Indeed, no fewer than twenty-eight countries have suffered attacks at the hands of Britain-based jihadists over the past several years, solidifying the country's status as Mecca West for Islamists.
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At the end of the day, hurting feelings at 10 Downing Street beats seeing American civilians get blown up. Besides, British officials have no one to blame but themselves for fostering this untenable situation—not that Choudary appreciates their craven, kowtowing behavior.

“I think that the British government is sitting on a tinderbox, you know, full of dynamite,” he told me. “And they have the matches in their hand and they're being very flippant. They're not dealing with it properly. It could all blow up in their face and it could be a very vicious situation.”

It wasn't hard to read between the lines: if the British government dared arrest Choudary or harass his followers, there would be hell to pay. Despite his clever wording, these were clearly threats against the British state. As he rose to leave, Choudary, perhaps fearing he had spoken too freely, looked me over for a moment.

“I know you'll be passing this tape on to the intelligence services here,” he said, heading for the door. “I'll look forward to seeing your story when it airs.”

I never showed the tape of our interview to anyone before it aired on CBN. But I'll wager I could have showed it to the entire British Parliament, the directors of the BBC, and the Queen herself, and it still wouldn't have affected Choudary's freedom one iota.

Great Britain, as we've come to know it, is on life support. The heady days of the “stiff upper lip,” when the Brits carried the banner for advancing Judeo-Christian, Western civilization to the ends of the earth, have passed away, never to return. Despite his woeful record of groveling to the Islamic world, Prime Minister Cameron made headlines in early 2011
for proclaiming British multiculturalism a failure. While he perhaps deserves some kudos for stating the obvious, his declaration—even if, improbably, it led to meaningful action—comes too late. What's left of Britain today is a spiritually dark place that's on course for pseudo-Third World social unrest and widespread religious and ethnic strife in the not-so-distant future. An overwhelming chunk of this social and cultural decay has been driven by Islam's rapid, aggressive ascent in the country over the past four decades.

For the American observer of the decline and fall of the British state, there are lessons to be learned to ensure the United States does not meet a similar fate. Unfortunately, those lessons are being ignored by the U.S. government, and the Brits' mistakes are being repeated here. Let us count the ways:

All of the above also unfolded in Great Britain. Now Anjem Choudary and others like him eagerly await the day when they will preside as judge, jury, and executioner in Islamic courts on British soil.

The terrorist had called me a taxi, which now sat idle outside Saad al-Faqih's house waiting to zip me to the other side of London and my interview with Anjem Choudary. But as al-Faqih led me to the door, I had one more question to ask: where was this civilizational conflict between the West and the Muslim world heading over the next few years?

Without hesitation, he gave me an unnerving answer: “No matter what Muslim leaders do, there will be more friction with the West—regardless of al-Qaeda. There will be more confrontation between the West and Muslims, with attacks even bigger than in 2001.”

Attacks bigger than 9/11—and this was straight from the mouth of a man who reportedly has direct links to al-Qaeda's hierarchy.

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
he president of the United States shook the terrorist's hand.

Cameras flashed. Onlookers gasped. Security contingents for both sides pressed in tightly, seemingly as shocked as everyone else standing in the lobby of the United Nations building that U.S. president Barack Obama and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were clasping hands. Although both men had been invited to address the UN General Assembly only two hours apart, no one expected they would actually come face to face. Ever since Ahmadinejad had assumed power in 2005, handlers for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama had taken great pains during the General Assembly to avoid any random meetings between the leader of the free world and the Holocaust-denying public face of the world's most dangerous rogue regime.

No U.S. president had spoken in person with an Iranian leader since Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution deposed the Shah in 1979. And the effects of Iran's recent, successful nuclear test—an act that completely blindsided U.S. intelligence agencies, which predicted the Iranians would not have such a capability until 2015 at least—were still reverberating
throughout the world. So was Ahmadinejad's pronouncement that Iran's newfound status as a nuclear power meant that the destruction of Israel and America, and the return of the Shiite Twelfth Imam, or Mahdi, would occur “in the next eighteen months.” Each day, large rallies in Tehran featured speakers trumpeting that Allah had granted the forces of Islam a mighty victory over the West, with Supreme Leader Khamenei publicly giving his blessing to the Iranian bomb in order to dispel any doubt as to whether nuclear weapons were “Islamically correct.” Even secular Iranians who detested the regime were caught up in the spectacle, seeing Iran's membership in the exclusive nuclear club as a source of pride—finally, the great Persian nation that ruled much of the known world under Cyrus and Xerxes had reassumed its rightful position as a global force.