A preacher of hate
“After 20 years of preaching hatred, recruiting terrorists and glorying in bloodshed – while milking taxpayers of colossal sums in benefits and legal aid – Anjem Choudary at last faces jail,” said the Daily Mail. Choudary, 49, was the “unashamed mouthpiece” of the extremist group al-muhajiroun, and the organisations that took its place after it was banned. His many supporters included the killers who hacked Fusilier Lee Rigby to death in 2013; the 7/7 leader Mohammed Sidique Khan; and Siddhartha Dhar, thought to have replaced the Islamic State (Isis) killer known as Jihadi John. Fifteen major terrorist plots are directly linked to him. This has been known for years, yet Choudary “was left free to spread his poison through lectures, Youtube and Twitter, on which he had 32,000 followers”. Only now has he been convicted, along with his acolyte Mohammed Rahman, of “inviting support” for Isis.
“After every terrorist atrocity, promises have been made to gag, prosecute or deport the ‘preachers of hate’,” said The Daily Telegraph. However, “this has been easier said than done in a country governed by the rule of law”. Though Choudary advocated a medieval version of sharia law, he was, in fact, a trained solicitor, said Fiona Hamilton in The Times. The son of a Pakistani-born market trader from southeast London, he studied law at the University of Southampton, where he drank, smoked cannabis and had casual sex. After being radicalised, he was “careful to stay on the right side” of Britain’s hate speech laws. While ranting about a world dominated by Islam, he never openly condoned terrorist attacks on the West, though neither did he condemn them. Britain has struggled for 20 years with cases like Choudary’s, said Jamie Grierson in The Guardian: those who don’t actually plan or instigate acts of terrorism – which has always been illegal – but help create a climate in which they are acceptable. The law has changed, though, to cover “precursor” offences, such as disseminating terrorist material, or inviting support for a proscribed organisation. That is what Choudary did, when he pledged allegiance to Isis on an extremist website on 7 July 2014.
Jail is no doubt the right place for him, said Will Gore in The Independent – as long as he is prevented from radicalising other prisoners. But it does Britain credit that it was prepared to protect freedom of speech in the face of Choudary’s provocations. It would surely have been “fundamentally hypocritical” if we had silenced him when he was not clearly committed to terrorist violence. True enough, said Tom Goodenough on his Spectator blog. But many media outlets were overly keen to “give him a platform to spout his views”: a master of the shocking sound bite, he appeared on many occasions on the BBC and Channel 4. Choudary speaks only for the lunatic fringe. He should have been left where he belonged: on a street corner, ranting at indifferent passers-by.