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| Anjem Choudary in a café in Walthamstow. |
Anjem Choudary is well practised in the art of making contentious or provocative statements. An acolyte of the extremist cleric Omar Bakri Muhammed, who fled the UK for Lebanon, the 47-year-old former lawyer was a founding member of Al-Muhajiroun, which celebrated the 9/11 attacks, and was proscribed along with several other groups that Choudary has fronted, including Islam4UK.
So it's no surprise that when I spoke to him last week he dismissed all allegations of Islamic State (Isis) atrocities, defended the use of crucifixion, and acknowledged Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as "the caliph of all Muslims and the prince of the believers".
Because of his large claims and small following, Choudary has often been derided, not least by fellow Muslims, as a joke figure of no significance. Yet he is known to have had links with a number of people convicted under anti-terrorism laws, as well as the killer of Lee Rigby, Michael Adebolajo.
His views may be unpalatable but, with as many as several hundred British-born Muslims thought to be fighting in Syria and Iraq with Isis and other jihadi groups, they cannot be ignored. Some reports suggest that many of the British jihadis want to return home, having grown disillusioned with the internecine warfare between rebel forces – which prompts the question of what or who inspired them to go in the first place.
Last year a report by the anti-racist organisation Hope Not Hate said that the network of groups run by Choudary has become "the single biggest gateway to terrorism in recent British history" and had "facilitated or encouraged" hundreds of young Muslims across Europe to join the more extreme militants fighting the Assad regime in Syria. While the report noted that there was no evidence that Choudary had instigated any terrorist plots, he was, it said, "a serious player on the international Islamist scene".
In reply, Choudary points out that the security services are well aware of him, and he has never been convicted or charged with a terrorism-related crime.
Whatever people may think of Choudary, it is now clear that a motivated minority of young Muslims share his views. Never was this more chillingly illustrated than in the videos of the beheadings of American journalist James Foley and his fellow hostage, US-Israeli journalist Steven Sotloff, in which a masked young man speaking with a distinct British accent wields a knife and seems to revel in a theatre of sadism. » | Andrew Anthony | Sunday, September 07, 2014
