UK is world’s leading recruiting ground for al-Qaeda

This is the Britain that Blair, Brown and Cameron have made. This is the Britain that Cameron wants to feature a London that will “stand alongside Dubai as one of the great capitals of Islamic finance anywhere in the world.” This is the Britain that thinks it is appeasing and satisfying the forces of Islamic supremacism by banning Pamela Geller and me from the country, prosecuting those who desecrate Qur’ans, and clamping down ruthlessly on any resistance to the Islamic supremacist agenda.

“Abu Hamza is gone, but Britain remains the world’s leading recruiting ground for al-Qaeda,” Telegraph, May 20, 2014 thanks to Pamela Geller):

When will we ever learn? While David Cameron and Theresa May rightly rejoice over the conviction in New York yesterday of Abu Hamza on a range of terrorism charges, they still have not come to grips with the fact that London and other parts of the UK remain a major operational base for Islamist terror cells.

During the 1990s I wrote a series of articles for The Telegraph pointing out how Britain had become the favoured haunt of leading Islamist terror groups, from as far afield as Saudi Arabia to Algeria. But these warnings went completely unheeded by the security services, who kept insisting that the likes of Abu Hamza posed no threat to Britain or British interests.

And yet, more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, and as the tenth anniversary of our own terrible 7 July attacks on London’s transport system approaches, anti-Western Islamist groups continue to flourish in Britain, busily recruiting naive young British Muslims to fight in Syria, and using Britain as a base from which to launch terror attacks against our long-standing allies in the Arab world – countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt.

Last year’s murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in south London should have served as a wake up call to our security services that Islamist cells based in Britain are not only concerned with targeting foreign governments. More recently the estimated 450 British jihadists who have travelled to Syria – and in all likelihood been radicalised by al-Qaeda and other related groups – should have got the alarm bells ringing.

And yet, just as happened during Abu Hamza’s heyday at the Finsburty [sic] Park Mosque in North London in the 1990s, I get the sense that British ministers and security officials still do not grasp the enormity of the Islamist terror threat Britain continues to face today. Frankly, the fact that the Americans can bring Abu Hamza to justice, and Britain did nothing even though most of his crimes were committed on British soil, is a damning indictment or our approach to this growing menace.