Abu Qatadas Freedom Might Be the Price We Pay for Ours

A Champion For His Own Human Rights

 

He doesn’t have a hook. He does have a big, bushy beard, and eyes that don’t look all that friendly, but Omar Mahmoud Othman, who’s also known as Abu Qatada, doesn’t have a hook. It’s Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, who’s also known as Abu Hamza, who has a hook instead of a hand.

It’s quite easy to get them confused. Both men live, when they’re not in prison, in big houses, with their wives and children, and both men seem to think that the British taxpayers who pay for those houses, and their children’s food, and their lawyers, and their food in prison, and the specially adapted taps you need in your cell if you have a hook instead of a hand, are infidels who should be slaughtered.

Abu Hamza, who once worked as a bouncer for a strip club, used to preach at my local mosque. He used to tell people that if you didn’t like other people’s religious beliefs, then the best thing to do was kill them. He didn’t, he said, believe in democracy. But what he did believe in was human rights.

He was so keen on human rights, or at least on his human rights, that he got the best lawyers to make sure they were upheld. When, for example, the American government wanted him to go to the U.S. to be tried for supporting a terrorist training camp, and helping al-Qaeda, and British courts said he could, he made sure his lawyers launched an appeal. You’d have thought it might be tricky to fight a case like this when you were also in prison for encouraging people to murder other people, and for stirring up “racial hatred”, and for owning, and producing, DIY guides to jihad, but it didn’t seem to be. His lawyers said he couldn’t go to the U.S. until everyone was sure that he wouldn’t be treated “inhumanely”, and the European Court of Human Rights agreed.

So Abu Hamza hasn’t gone to the U.S., where everyone seems to think he wouldn’t be treated nearly as well as he is in Britain. He has finished his sentence, because you don’t have to stay all that long in prison, even if you’ve encouraged other people to kill people, but he’s still in Belmarsh while the British and European courts argue about whether he can go. If he’s feeling a bit fed up about it all dragging on, he might well have been cheered up by some MPs. The MPs, who have just written a report about the “roots of violent radicalization”, went to Belmarsh to ask him for his advice. They wanted, they said, to know more about the “drivers” of “radicalization”. And Abu Hamza, who they called “Mr Abu Hamza”, which must have made him feel quite important, told him that they were “grievance” and “guilt”. He didn’t say that it was the guilt you’d feel if you’d cost the taxpayer millions and still wanted to kill him. He said it was the guilt that “you were safe” and your “brother was not”.

Perhaps when he said this, he was thinking about Abu Qatada, who isn’t his real brother, but who shares so many of his views you might think he was. But if he’s worrying about whether Abu Qatada is safe, he probably shouldn’t. Qatada, it’s true, has been a bit worried himself. He’s been worried that he might have to go to one of the countries where he’s wanted on terrorism charges, which include Algeria, the U.S., Belgium, Spain, France, Germany and Italy, and, in particular, Jordan, which wants to send him to prison for trying to blow tourists up. Qatada knows, because he’s from Jordan, that prisons there aren’t very nice.