Choudary’s connections
Well at least it’s clear that Anjem Choudary was in no sense a joke. The Daily Express reports that Scotland Yard wanted to arrest him for years but MI5 said no.
Counter terror officers believed they had enough evidence to build a case against the radical Islamic State sympathiser but were reportedly blocked from doing so because he was a vital part of MI5’s ongoing investigation.
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Serious questions were raised as to why Choudary was allowed to continue spreading his Islamist poison across Britain for more than 20 years, but now a counter terror source has said MI5 were responsible.
Following his conviction of inviting support for ISIS it emerged Choudary was involved in at least 15 terror plots dating back as far as 2001.
Police also believe he has connections to around 500 of the 850 young British Muslims who have left the country to join-up with ISIS jihadis.
You can see how he would be a useful source of information, but you can also see how he was, not to put too fine a point on it, dangerous.
Raffaello Pantucci, a terrorism expert at the Royal United Services Institute, said: “Intelligence officers have to generate leads somewhere, so if you have got a kind of honeypot that is Anjem Choudary and every nutter in the UK is gravitating towards him and from there you just trail them and follow them, you can see how it’s doing your job for you in some ways.
“There is undoubtedly an element of security folk who work in the intelligence side who would probably see this as something that is potentially quite useful.”
Well yeah.
I’m seeing headlines saying he’ll be in solitary when he is banged up, so that he won’t be able to share his wisdom with the other prisoners.
“Police also believe he has connections to around 500 of the 850 young British Muslims who have left the country to join-up with ISIS jihadis.”
Holy shit I don’t even have that many facebook friends
Isn’t MI5 just brilliant. The British and their so, so subtle approach to national security.
Let’s hope that there are no modern IS counterparts to Burgess, MacLean, Blunt, Philby et al.
I can well believe this of the security services and Choudary was, and is, clearly a dangerous person, BUT personally I’d look for a more reliable source than the Daily Express. After all this is the same paper that regularly backed Mohammed Fayed’s theories that MI5/6 assassinated Princess Diana.
The way Choudary has been treated compared to lesser offenders had been a total puzzle for UK citizens, even receiving benefits when there have been plenty of scandals of people with serious illnesses and disabilities being deemed “fit to work”. It was generally thought there must be MI5 involvement or some clunkiness from the secret state. But he has been such a blatant wind-up merchant that went about untouched – not even hauled in for the odd bit of questioning that it seemed obvious he was being protected some way. That really brings the police and law into disrepute.
He did seem a joke when he started – a kind of Muslim situationist seeing how far he’d go, his calls for an Islamic state like Johnny Rotten’s calls for anarchy in the UK, which are just a bit of pissing around in a stable, rather conservative state. The police were stupidly heavy handed with Johnny Rotten, and made themselves look ridiculous. They were hands off with Choudary and that was ascribed to cultural sensitivities. I thought they were right on libertarian grounds & dismissed Choudary as a publicity hunter, who got far too much attention from the media. But when we started realising what Islamism is, its aims and its methods – that it wasn’t a bit of gobbing outrageous punk, with a little vandalism, but a murderous theocracy – he stopped being a joke & his immunity looked very sinister.
Liberal Muslims like Yasmin Alibai-Brown hated the attention the poisonous git got, as being treated as a representative Muslim. He’s done terrible damage and the authorities’ weird attitude has done damage as well,. not to mention the media’s paying him so much attention – though to do the media justice, Islamism was new & strange & we were all forced (yuk!!) to learn about it.
““There is undoubtedly an element of security folk who work in the intelligence side who would probably see this as something that is potentially quite useful.”
Well no one has ever accused the intelligence services of being actually intelligent. If it hasn’t happened already you just know it’s only a question of time before MI5 is penetrated by Daesh. They just have to find a muslim old etonian with an Oxford degree in something quite useless – like “greats” or polisci. Once into MI5 they could subvert anybody CIA, BND, CSC, ISI – you name it. Fascinating.
If this is true, I can see that MI5 had a point. Choudhary is far from the only Islamist preacher out there and a lot of radicalisation happens online. If you know that anyone taking an interest will gravitate to a particular person, I can see why you might want that person to remain at large.
When an attack happens, everyone says “why didn’t MI5 know these people were dangerous?” I can see why they prefer to keep tabs on the dangerous ones, at the expense of convicting a person who spreads poisonous ideas but is not personally violent. Choudhary’s conviction is not going to put an end to UK Islamism. It’s satisfying but the ideas he preaches are not his own and they are very widespread.