When will we learn?
The Islamists did warn us that they hated Jews
This is an edited version of a speech given at an event on Islamist Antisemitism held by the London Centre for the Study of Antisemitism at King’s College London on November 3rd 2025.
I’ve been looking back a lot, recently. I guess that’s what happens when you’re about to hit 60. I often think about the end of the 1990s and the early days of the 21st century and how much the events of those years changed the way we think about dissidents, revolutionaries and heroes of the resistance.
I found a tattered old contacts book the other day and I have to say I was pretty well plugged in to the Islamist networks of what later became known as Londonistan.
There is the number for the office of Al-Muhajiroun (The Emigrants) and a home and mobile number for its larger-than-life “Sheikh”, Omar Bakri Mohammed. Over the page is Abu Hamza, the hook-handed imam of Finsbury Park Mosque. And Abu Qatada, the intellectual theologian of jihad who once described me as a gentleman of the press. Yasser al-Siri (or Abu Amar) was particularly useful as the head of the Islamic Observation Centre.
There’s also the contact details of the various hapless policeman and spooks who dealt with me at the time – reassuring me that blowhards like Abu Hamza and Sheikh Omar were just “jokers and clowns”. They will remain nameless to save their embarrassment.
These jokers and clowns had one thing in common: a virulent hatred of Jews. For Abu Hamza, the Jews were “sons of monkeys”, Abu Qatada issued a fatwa authorising the killing of Jews, including children, and Al-Muhajiroun put up posters calling for a holy war against Jews. Not so much hiding in plain sight as flaunting their antisemitism and parading their murderous intentions. The joke was on us.
This was a particularly excruciating outbreak of what Tom Wolfe called “radical chic”. These guys (and they were all guys) were anti-imperialist warriors, our contacts within the Islamic resistance.
Even after al-Qaeda called for jihad against “crusaders and Jews” we still didn’t quite get it. Part of the reason for this was a catastrophic category error. Every one of these Islamists was a refugee from an authoritarian regime and the UK has a fine tradition of sheltering political dissidents – from Lenin to the anti-apartheid movement.
Some would have us believe Abu Qatada was an Islamist Mandela. But this was a new type of dissident: these were homophobes, misogynists and antisemites. These were effectively fascist dissidents, opposed to authoritarian regimes, for sure, but opposed from the Islamist right rather than the revolutionary left.
I also found an old article from the New Statesman that I wrote almost exactly 24 years ago, just weeks after 9/11. Reading it now, you can see the torturous ideological gymnastics I was going through as a youngish, left-leaning journalist still heavily influenced by 1968 and the New Left.
I tell the story of Khaled al-Fawaaz, a mild-mannered Saudi dissident and remember sipping tea cross-legged on the floor of his home in Dollis Hill, in north London. In fact it was August 1998, just days after truck bombs ran into the US embassies in Dar-es Salaam and Nairobi. Although he had distanced himself from Osama bin Laden since the Al-Qaeda leader’s move to Afghanistan, Fawaaz still used his office to distribute the organisation’s communiques. A few days after our interview, I called to clarify a few points and a man from Special Branch answered the phone. Al-Fawaaz had been arrested over the embassy bombings. Round-ups of Islamist suspects followed.
“The world of radical Islam can be deeply alienating,” I wrote with characteristic understatement, “cartoon villains with confusing Arab names and violently anti-western views make make for unappealing revolutionaries”. You could say that.
Gareth Peirce, the campaigning lawyer, who made her name defending the Guildford Four told me: “We are in danger of demonising a whole community and creating an atmosphere where we will have a new series of miscarriages of justice”.
My conclusion makes for interesting reading two and a half decades later. “Much has been made of the West’s failure to engage with Islam. But it is not enough simply to clutch the Koran to our hearts and selectively quote from passages condemning violence. We need to recognise that no matter how alienating we may find these radical Muslims, they deserve a fair hearing.”
Of course this is true. But it’s a troubling conclusion? The point is that we gave Omar Bakri Mohammed and Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada a fair hearing. For years they were able to walk the streets of Britain in complete freedom to spread their message. And their message was this: “We hate Jews and we want to kill them.”