Cabbages & Kings: Britain's free speech dilemma

“The dog barks up the wrong tree
While behind him whole forests grow
His indulgence in fantasy
Means there are things he’ll never know.”
From Dhoka Kola by Bachchoo

This week, the Old Bailey announced a verdict of guilty against Islamist preacher and activist Anjem Choudary and one of his associates. The verdict of the Old Bailey jury was passed in July when the case ended, but the judge put a restriction on its release because another trial of nine defendants on similar charges was in progress at the court. The juries in each of the trials were carefully kept segregated and unaware of each other’s cases. Choudary, a notorious public figure was found guilty of encouraging terrorism and practically supporting ISIS or Daesh, or whatever you want to call the death-cult “Caliphate” active in Syria and Iraq. He has been accused of sending somewhere around 500 men, women and children to join ISIS by urging them to go and providing them, through communication with the death cult, practical support for the migration. He and his associate Mizanur Rahman will be sentenced in September.

Choudary has for several years been, at the least, a negative presence in the UK. His activities and the British state’s reaction or reluctance to react to them demonstrate the dilemmas that a democracy such as Britain’s faces. He has, for years, preached in person and on social media about jihad and the conversion of Britain and the world to Islam, about the immediate implementation of Sharia law and about his support for the vandals who murdered thousands in the 9/11 incidents in New York, for the July 2005 suicide bombers in London who murdered people on the underground and for the two Africans who knifed and beheaded a British soldier on the streets of Woolwich in open daylight. Choudary had preached hatred and jihad to these fellows and British intelligence traced his connection to the underground bombers.

Choudary was a founder of the now outlawed organisation Al Mahajiroun and of several other organisation taking on different fantasy names after Al Mahajiroun was banned. He is 49 years old and was born in Britain into the family of a Pakistani market trader. In keeping with the ambitions of second-generation immigrants everywhere, he enlisted in a medical college but failed his first year exams and had to leave. He switched to studying law, worked in a law firm and several years later qualified as a lawyer and became the chairman of the Society of Muslim Lawyers. He doesn’t really practice law or believe in it as he demonstrated at his recent trial. You can’t be a lawyer and insist that you don’t recognise the courts or think the laws, which are those passed by the British Parliament and not Sharia, to be illegal. Nevertheless, till July 28, Choudary used his knowledge of the liberal laws of Britain to stay just this side of being successfully prosecuted.

He leads small demonstration of followers to jeer at the coffins of dead British soldiers at their funerals. These demonstrations, protected from the reaction of grieving friends and families of the dead servicemen and women and the wrath of the public who gather to pay their condolences, by cordons of British police are not illegal. The British law allows the right to demonstrate and shout slogans and carry placards which may be distasteful and insulting, as long as they don’t advocate racial hatred or violence. To give speeches supporting Al Qaeda, to repeatedly praise Osama bin Laden and the mass murderers who flew hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, to say you support the actions of the deluded murderers who killed 53 people and themselves in London, or to demonstrate in support of the killers of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and journalists is not illegal. That’s not a legal loophole, that’s the protection of the sacred right of people in Britain to exercise their right to freedom of opinion. It is a freedom that the British people and legislators will defend, even in the face of characters such as Choudary and his hapless fantasy-outfit followers.

Choudary lives off proceeds from the British welfare state. No doubt his organisations are funded by international regimes favouring his stances, but he, his wife and four children live in a house which they own and whose mortgage is paid for by the British state. Choudary claims £25,000 a year in what the government hands out as unemployment benefit, renamed under the last government as “job-seekers’ allowance”. Very recently Choudary made a recorded speech urging his followers to become unemployed and live off this British welfare benefit and regard it as “jihad seeker’s allowance”. He later said it was a joke and, this may be regarded as funny, depending on your sense of humour or irony, or it may appeal as appropriately encapsulated by our Urdu phrase “namak haram”. Now, of course, after he and his mate are sentenced for their active support of a terrorist organisation, he will in all probability be living off a “jail seeker’s allowance” — again at the expense of the British taxpayer.

Soon after Al Baghdadi declared himself the Caliph of Islam, Choudary sought the advice of his mentor Omar Bakri Mohammed, at present in jail in Lebanon and volunteered his support for this “Caliphate”. Despite his cautionary strategy of using British liberality to get away with the most provocative acts and propaganda, he then overstepped the mark. He was convicted of actively supporting Daesh, though he has made no moves to join the Caliph’s jihad personally and journey to Syria. Let no one conclude that Choudary is a popular figure amongst Britain’s Muslims. A network of 4,000 people calling themselves “Muslims Against Choudary” welcomed his conviction. He has been denounced by imams, leaders of opinion in the British Muslim world and by former “jihadists” who were once his disciples but now characterise his Salafi-Wahhabi and improvised medievalism as non and even anti-Islamic.