Apostles of Anger

One of Tony Blair’s best-known promises has been to get "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime." Now the Prime Minister is getting tough on terrorism too. In his speech to the Labour Party conference last week, he announced tighter antiterrorism legislation, which will strengthen powers to freeze terrorist funds and to detain, deport and extradite suspects. Such proposals have concerned the civil libertarians who felt the new Terrorism Act, unveiled in February, already went too far.

But to others the measures are long overdue. Britain is "the weak link in the largely successful and cooperative effort to fight terrorism in Europe," says Roland Jacquard, the French president of the International Observatory on Terrorism. Britain is proud of its record as a refuge for those fleeing tyranny, and over the past two decades has provided a haven for many political dissidents from the Middle East. But critics say that extremists have used this openness to plan attacks, raise funds and otherwise foment terrorism. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has complained that Britain harbors "terrorists under the slogan of human rights." Others suggest that the absence of identity cards gives would-be terrorists an enviable freedom of movement. The "lack of controls inside Britain . . . means people plotting terror will continue to regard the U.K. as a haven," Jacquard says. "People come and go as they please, to and from [terrorist] training camps or on missions." A French antiterrorist official is even more accusatory: "In the last half-decade, virtually all Islamist extremists from Europe have shared the same itinerary: radicalization in London mosques and exit from Britain to Afghan camps."

The suspected terrorists who have used Britain as a transition point include the French national Zacarias Moussaoui and the Franco-Algerian Djamel Beghal. Moussaoui, who was arrested in the U.S. before the Sept. 11 attacks, lived undisturbed for years in south London despite French warnings that he had strong links with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization. And Beghal, the admitted leader of a bin Laden European network, lived in Finsbury Park in the late l990s. Extradited from the United Arab Emirates, where he detailed his operation to investigators, Beghal now awaits trial in France. The hub of Islamic extremism in Britain is the Finsbury Park mosque Beghal frequented, located in a shabby neighborhood of north London. From here, cleric Abu Hamza al-Marsi, who lost both hands and an eye in Afghanistan, runs Supporters of Shariah, a group that promotes "military training for brothers" and whose website last week suddenly disappeared from the Internet. Hamza, an Egyptian who came to Britain in 1981 and is wanted in Yemen for terrorism, welcomed the Sept. 11 attacks as "justified." Since then, police have been guarding the mosque — they say for the Muslims’ protection, but this also makes monitoring visitors easy.

In response to the Sept. 11 attacks — and pressure from other European states — the British government has started to crack down. Last week, Sulayman Balal Zainulabidin, a 43-year-old cook, was arrested over connections with Sakina Security Services, an organization whose website — before it too suddenly disappeared — offered Muslim youths the "ultimate Jihad experience." This military course included training on how to "improvise explosive devices" in live operations and sessions at a U.S. firing range.

British police also opened an investigation into the activities of Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Syrian-born judge who has preached militancy since arrriving in Britain in 1986. He founded the group al-Muhajiroun, which he claims has 7,000 members, and is dedicated to establishing a worldwide Islamic state with, in the words of an aide, "the black flag of Islam flying over Downing Street."

Bakri, who has raised funds for Hamas and Hizballah, was banned from university campuses but otherwise left undisturbed. In the days after Sept. 11, al-Muhajiroun issued leaflets welcoming the attacks, but interviewed last week at his office in a modern north London business park, Bakri was moderate in tone. He condemned the terrorist attacks and said he had never met bin Laden, and did not even always agree with his views.

Another facet of the British crackdown is to speed up the extradition process, where lengthy appeals procedures have often frustrated other governments. French authorities are still awaiting the extradition of Rachid Ramda, an Algerian arrested in Britain in 1995 for his alleged role in the Paris Métro bombings of that year. And the U.S. currently wants five terrorism suspects in British custody, including Lotfi Raissi, who has been accused by prosecutors of training four of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots. Khalid al-Fawwaz, wanted in the U.S. for his alleged role in the 1998 American embassy bombings in Africa, faces his last appeal against extradition this month. "Britain has been too tolerant," argues Jorgen Nielsen, professor of Islamic Studies at Birmingham University. That may be so, but the question is whether the country can be tolerant and anti-terrorist at the same time.