A hate preacher and the craven liberal elite

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 for drumming up support for Islamic State.

like decent people of every religion and none, the Mail is hugely relieved that this sworn enemy of our security and way of life has finally been brought to justice.

But doesn’t his case raise profoundly disturbing questions about why he was tolerated – and indulged – for so long?

A remorseless publicity-seeker, Choudary never made a secret of his ambition to recruit others to his cause of ‘world domination’ by Islam and Sharia law.

Indeed, he was the unashamed mouthpiece of the banned fanatical group AlMuhajiroun, which is said to have radicalised 850 jihadis, while his supporters included the killers who hacked Fusilier lee Rigby to death in 2013.

Yet though all this was known, he was left free to spread his poison through lectures, Youtube and twitter, on which he had 32,000 followers. Even the BBC, to the disgust of its licence fee-payers, was ever ready to offer a platform to this champion of holy war.

Meanwhile, taxpayers have been forced to provide for Choudary and his five children, with expensive NHS treatment for his wife (who ran the women’s section of Al-Muhajiroun), and benefits said to have topped £25,000 a year. that’s not to mention police protection for his rallies and six-figure sums in legal aid to defend his ‘human rights’.

true, freedom of expression is a vital feature of liberal democracy, while Choudary’s legal training made him adept – until now – at exploiting laws drafted to uphold it.

But leave aside the urgent need to review those laws in light of the spate of Islamist attacks across Europe, and the ease with which hate preachers circumvent the ban on incitement to violence. Didn’t Choudary’s kid-glove treatment go far beyond tolerance of free speech?

Why were twitter and Youtube so loath to close down his accounts? Why were benefits and legal aid granted so readily to a man who apparently owns luxury cars?

Why, above all, did our national broadcaster see fit to give him a platform for his message of hate, as if ‘balance’ requires that opponents of murder must be offset by its apologists?

Isn’t it almost as if the West’s liberal elite, in its craven terror of offending minorities, has a death-wish for our values and way of life?