“Osama bin Laden is a good man. Osama bin Laden wants the same as me — he wants to see the implementation of God’s law.” From the San Francisco Chronicle, with thanks to Twostellas:
London — “Osama bin Laden is a good man. Osama bin Laden wants the same as me — he wants to see the implementation of God’s law,” says Khalid Kelly as he sips coffee in a sun-filled London cafe and expounds on his allegiance to the man who has declared war on the West.
Kelly, an Irishman, converted to Islam two years ago while imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for distilling and selling alcohol. Since then, he has become the public face of the tiny London-based organization called Al-Muhajiroun. The radical organization is led by Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who has long been linked to bin Laden’s International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.
The presence of militants like Bakri has earned the British capital the sobriquet “Londonistan” among diplomats and terrorism experts, who see London as a worldwide center of Islamic terrorism.
“The Islamists use Britain as a propaganda base but wouldn’t do anything to a country that harbors them and gives them freedom of speech,” Camille Tawil, a terrorism expert at the Arabic daily Al Hayat, told the New Statesman magazine.
Recently, however, British security officials have staged several high- profile crackdowns on suspected terrorists.
On March 30, police netted eight suspects and more than half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the ingredient used in the 2002 Bali nightclub explosion that killed more than 200 people. The bust came after months of bugging telephone lines and tracking suspects and following a web of leads across Europe and the Middle East, according to Peter Clarke, the deputy police commissioner who serves as Britain’s anti-terrorism chief.
The scheme was apparently planned abroad but was to be carried out by British citizens. “That is something that is deeply worrying to us,” Clarke said.
In April, 10 foreigners suspected of plotting attacks were arrested in central and northern England.
Then on May 27, acting on an 11-count U.S. indictment, police arrested Abu Hamza al-Masri, the fiery former preacher at London’s Finsbury Park mosque, the spiritual home of several notorious terrorists, including convicted shoe- bomber Richard Reid.
Al-Masri, who lost both hands and an eye in Afghanistan, is being held in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison pending extradition on charges of aiding al Qaeda, attempting to set up a terror camp in Oregon and plotting the hostage-taking of 16 tourists in Yemen in 1998. At a hearing Friday, a London court delayed a decision on his extradition until Oct. 19.
But other clerics continue to take advantage of official British tolerance to openly espouse jihad and support for al Qaeda.
In recent weeks, Britain has allowed visits by two high-profile Middle Eastern clerics — Egyptian Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al- Sudais of Saudi Arabia — who are known for their anti-Semitic and anti- Western views. Yusuf, who has been banned from the United States since 1999, has publicly expressed support for suicide bombers on the grounds that the “martyrdom operations” are the only available “weapons of the weak.”
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