Rod Liddle
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Halfway through all this, a young man who has been hitherto silent puts his hand up for a question.
‘Yes?’ says Abu Hamza al Misri.
The man looks down at his feet and says, ‘Excuse me, I don’t want to be offensive or anything, but…’ he pauses, ‘…are you completely mad?’
There’s a bit of a murmuring in the hall. Abu Hamza sighs and asks ‘What, exactly, do you mean, mad?’
And the man shrugs and replies, ‘Well, I told all my friends I was coming to hear you speak tonight and they said, uh-oh, he’s mad. And I’ve sat and listened to you for an hour and, well, I think they’re right. You are completely mad.’
Hamza replies at some length, without much rancour or, it has to be said, conviction. I bet poor Abu Aziz, the nice press man, got an earful later.
A week later I met up with Hamza again, this time in the scarcely more cheerful environs of the Kensington Hilton Hotel, where he’d agreed to a proper interview. Some of his young minions were with him. They looked quite scary, these boys, when they surrounded him at prayers outside the Finsbury Park mosque the previous Friday – all cool and threatening in their ghetto-chic-faux-intifada headscarves. They looked less of a threat when they were raiding the minibar for chocolate in room 1017, and sniggering whenever their boss mentioned the word ‘homosexuals’.
I’d brought up the subject. A pamphlet from Hamza’s organisation, ‘Supporters of Sharia’, recently criticised the government for reducing the age of consent for homosexuals ‘to the same as it is for human beings’. It continued – you want to know, don’t you? – with these words: ‘They call it gay. We call it digging filth out of young boys’ backsides.’ And so on. It’s just one example of the epic, almost heroic, levels of intolerance with which Hamza and his people are suffused. But it’s not his fault: it’s God’s fault.
‘We cannot stop saying these things simply because some people don’t like it,’ he said. ‘I know what you are saying about the language, it can seem extreme….’
Oh, a teensy bit, you might argue….
‘Well yes; but it is not me. It is not us. It is what God says. It is what it says in your own Bible.’
And that, just about, is Abu Hamza’s answer to every criticism that he is stirring up hatred, against the West, against homosexuals and, most potently, against Jews.
‘I am absolutely not anti-Jewish.’
Yes you are!
‘No, not at all. It is the Zionist Jews, that is where the problem lies. Historically, Jews have found a refuge in Islamic countries when they were being persecuted by the Christians. They fled from Christian Spain to the Muslim Ottoman empire. It is the Zionist Entity that we oppose.’
That notwithstanding, Hamza believes there will be a final battle which will sort out the pesky Jews once and for all. (The bad Jews, not the tolerable Jews.) ‘It says this will happen in the Koran. In your Bible. And in the Talmud.’
So there you are.
What, then, about his unspeakably foul observation that the destruction of the Columbia space shuttle was to be welcomed because it was a sign from God? What sort of a God would send such a sign, anyway?
‘I did not say the deaths of the astronauts were to be welcomed. But it was a sign from God. The shuttle had an Israeli on board! It exploded over the town of Palestine in Texas! How is that not a sign from God?’
Um, right. So the sign from God was to be welcomed? ‘Of course. All signs from God are to be welcomed.’
He makes no attempt, Abu, to soften these strange and to us (but not to – let us say – an unknown quantity of Muslims) offensive beliefs.
We part as always on good terms, with him shaking his head sadly about the fact that I’m going to burn in Hell for eternity unless I sign up for Allah sharpish.
‘Just listen, Rod, and you will hear God calling you,’ he says.
Well, I tell him, I hear voices calling me all the time, but they’re usually calling me down the pub. He says, in that case, it’s probably not God. He might be right about that.
These, then, are a couple of vignettes of life with Abu Hamza, a man we are desperate to strip of his citizenship and chuck out of the country. He doesn’t, on the face of it, seem much of a threat to me. You can argue that he says horrible things, but we don’t kick people out of the country for that. We have tried to append to our loathing of the man a bunch of allegations about his involvement in terrorism, but none of them has stuck, otherwise he’d be long gone. He has been relentlessly persecuted through the full office of the state. The charity commissioners tried to stop him preaching at the Finsbury Park mosque, and then his assets got seized. His mosque was raided and boarded up, and now the Home Secretary is pursuing a way of kicking him out of the country for good, revoking a citizenship he’s held for more than 20 years.
And why? Because of what he says and nothing el se, I suspect. And I wonder also if we aren’t a little ambivalent about some of his criticisms of our cherished, Western way of life: the pornography, the materialism, the vacuity.
He is, you have to say, profoundly anti-democratic, democracies being callow, man-made things, and, as a final irony, he doesn’t even agree with the concept of absolute freedom of speech. Ask him about it and his one good eye gets cloudy and he starts mumbling dark things about Salman Rushdie. Abu Hamza thinks Abu Hamza should have the freedom to speak his mind because, of course, it’s not really Abu Hamza speaking, but, in essence, God.
Should we deny freedom of speech to someone who doesn’t really believe in freedom of speech? Of course not. We let them have it. We let them have it and allow the injustice and contradiction inherent in such a stance do for them, in the end.
That’s the way a civilised nation would behave: allow itself to be described as a toilet without recourse, at times of provocation, to flushing everything we don’t like round the U-bend. In other words, engaging on our terms. Because we’re right, aren’t we?
Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator. His film is on BBC4 on 17 March at 10.20 p.m.
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