Hate-filled words of self-styled sheikh
SEEN as a recruiting sergeant for Brit- ain’s radical Muslims, Anjem Choudary has played a cynical cat-and-mouse game with British authorities.
But the self-styled ‘sheikh’ has been careful to keep his incendiary speeches on the right side of Britain’s hate law.
His comments that Woolwich murder victim Fusilier Lee Rigby would ‘burn in hellfire’ and calls for an anti-war march through Wootton Bassett, the Wiltshire town that honoured soldiers who died in Afghanistan, were repugnant, but deemed not to have crossed the threshold for criminal prosecution.
His network of supporters, the banned group Al-Muhajiroun, has been the focus of attention for the authorities, yet Choudary has never faced any serious prosecutions.
Worryingly, he has warned that jailing him will give him access to a new, captive congregation to radicalise inside prison.
Speaking after a Home Office banning order, the preacher said: ‘If they arrest me and put me in prison, I will carry on in prison. I’ll radicalise everyone in prison.’ Choudary, a trained solicitor, has been immersed in radical Islamism since the 1 0s when he and firebrand cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed formed Al-Muhajiroun.
The group’s supporters praised the September 11 terror atrocity and the July 7 London bombings which killed 52 innocent people in 2005.
Choudary has preached that jihad, or holy war, is an ‘obligation upon Muslims’ – an interpretation rejected by moderate Muslim scholars – and has called for a draconian form of sharia law to be imposed across Britain.
Public lashings for the sale of alcohol, amputations for thieves and stoning to death for adulterers would all form part of that dystopian vision.
Yet Choudary himself was known as a hard-drinking womaniser with a penchant for excess while studying medicine at Southampton University.
The son of market trader from Welling, Kent, he was known as Andy and switched his studies to law after failing his first-year medical exams, before embracing extremism. Scotland Yard has continued to monitor his speeches and online comments for potential breaches of the law.
Meanwhile it has simultaneously provided him with police protection after far-Right groups threatened to attack him.
Uniformed officers were stationed outside his home in East London last year after it emerged that Woolwich murderers Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale had both attended Al-Muhajiroun demonstrations.
Al-Muhajiroun was officially disbanded after it was banned under antiterror legislation in 2004 but critics have argued that subsequent spin-off groups formed by Choudary espoused the same radical beliefs and aims.
Choudary has called for the ‘flag of Sharia’ to fly over Downing Street and for Britain to be conquered by an Islamic country.
Yet his apparent disdain for Britain has not stopped the married father of four claiming up to £25,000 a year in benefits from the British taxpayer.