Terror in America: The Mullah - Johann Hari meets Abu Hamza al-Masri, the Islamic fanatics' main apologist in the UK, and finds his warped rhetoric oddly banal
Five thousand people are dead, and I want somebody to hate. So I con my way into the mosque of London's very own Osama Bin Laden. For days, I have been hanging around the mosque in Finsbury Park, the base of Abu Hamza al-Masri. He has achieved fame as "the ayatollah of Finsbury Park", and is reportedly a friend of Osama Bin Laden. Abu Hamza himself was arrested in 1999 by police who suspected terrorist links, but was released without charge. He openly preaches a violent jihad against the west.
Since his hands were blown off in a battle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Abu Hamza has a hook. He resembles a pantomime villain, but I want something more. I want to see pure evil, and then, I imagine, I will understand the minds of the men who could have deliberately caused this Manhattan holocaust.
Finally, after days of persuasion, he allows me to speak to him for a few hours. He welcomes me into his office at the mosque, pulls out a chair and asks me if I'd like a cup of tea. Not exactly what I had expected. The pleasantries over, he begins to explain, in a voice that sounds as if it could only ever utter sweet reason, why he believes Osama Bin Laden was not involved in the World Trade Center bombings.
"First, he denied it himself, and he is not known to be a liar. He is very worried about his reputation, even after he dies, and he is very keen to be seen as honest.
"Second, he was under a lot of pressure after the USS Cole incident in Yemen [when a suicide bomb attack on an American destroyer killed 17 seamen last October], so he gave allegiance three months ago to Mullah Omar [Afghanistan's leading Taliban cleric]. That allegiance means that, anything he does, Mullah Omar is directly responsible for, and the country would pay the price.
"Third, and most logically, Bin Laden and the Taliban have decided to wage a war against the opposition, starting with the assassination of Massoud [Ahmed Shah Massoud, the anti-Taliban rebel who was fatally injured on 9 September], and the next day, immediately, they wage a big full-scale war against the opposition. The last thing he wants, two days after that, is for the operation to happen in America. The last thing he wants on earth is for an operation of that size at this time. It gives the opposition a golden opportunity to consolidate, to get western aid and to try even to take over the government. Here are three reasons why Osama Bin Laden would never do this kind of operation, at this time, at least."
I am prepared, for the sake of argument, to travel with him this far. What evidence do I have that Bin Laden is guilty? But Abu Hamza's next step reassures me that his views do, after all, border on insanity. Who, then, is responsible? "I am not saying every American government figure knew about this. But there are a few people [in the US government] who want to trigger a third world war. They are sponsored by the business lobby. Most of them are Freemasons, and they have loyalty to the Zionists."
So puppets for the US government hijacked the planes? Well, probably, he says, but that is not the most important part. "That neat collapse was a professional destruction job. A plane could not do that." Excuse me? "The planes were a Hollywood show. I know how this works. I was a civil engineer at Sandhurst military base [true: he worked there for six years until the early 1990s] and things don't collapse the way you have seen." So, he believes, there was a "demolition bomb" inside the building. "There is no reason for the frame to collapse, the frame is made of heavy, wide steel stations, they are joined well with nuts and bolts and plates. So when they get hot, they don't disintegrate. There is distortion, the building is twisted; if it is twisted badly then it will fall aside like a stick, not crumble." So, he concludes, "somebody had done a demolition on the heads of the rescue workers".
He ridicules the CIA's list of hijack suspects. "Can you believe they control the planes with some flick knives? Is that believable in the nation of Rambo?"
He does not believe that the Christianity of Bush and Blair is genuine. "I have no problem with Christians, but I wish these people were proper Christians, because if they followed proper Christianity, then the world would be a much better place. They are Christian only when it suits them, not when they want to kill. We live with Christians in Egypt and everywhere else, we live with Christians among us and everybody is happy." Bush and Blair are "extreme secular people . . . They can suck the blood of people through legislation and military manoeuvres all over the place."
There has been an attempt over the past week to portray Islamist political thought as utterly alien to us. Yet I am struck by how familiar some of Abu Hamza's arguments are. Once shorn of their paranoid conspiracies, his anti-American arguments sound much like any left-leaning critic of US hegemony.
"When we see George Bush saying that his own people in America come first, we know he is a racist." He condemns Bush for ripping up the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, and says: "Look at the problem with globalisation. Not everyone is agreeing with globalisation, but because of this standard where America comes first or what America says is right, we just have to accept it. Look at the contamination of our planet, everyone has a right to live free of this kind of thing. But the Americans said 'no'. Why? Because an American comes first." He adds later: "If I carry a knife in Britain, I am arrested. But if Americans come to Muslim countries, they bring tanks and land in their own airports, and nobody arrests them. Isn't that provoking people?"
At other times, Abu Hamza, who is a British citizen, sounds like a member of the Tory right, a cultural warrior who longs to turn back the clock. He discourses eloquently on the disintegration of the family, the rise of divorce, the "looseness" of British women, and, for a minute, it could be a Melanie Phillips with a hook sitting in front of me. At one point, he even laments Britain's high levels of taxation. We want Islamic fundamentalists to be freaks, but in truth they are more like halls of mirrors, reflecting ourselves, only with some parts exaggerated.
His warm praise for the Taliban, just minutes after chatting about taxes, is a cold shower. "They are wonderful people, because I could see the picture before them. They brought to this no-man's land security and justice." He admits, making what is surely the understatement of the millennium, that "they have to go some way for women's rights". "Hindus and Sikhs are treated well,'' he insists. "They are not forced to take anyone else's religion."
Abu Hamza does not believe the United States has the stomach for a full invasion of Afghanistan. "I think they are waffling. They wouldn't stay. Once you see pilots are torn apart and some people cooking meals on the heads of the soldiers, they are not going to sustain it." Even if they succeed in their plan to "take out" Bin Laden, it will be a very short-term success. "Bin Laden is a phenomenon, not a person. People have to understand this. You can kill Bin Laden the man, but the phenomenon will never die."
This new Islamist movement was born with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. An "Islamic legion" recruited from across the world (and backed by the CIA) was sent to back up the Afghan mujahedin in the battle against the communists. Muslims who had previously been diffuse and barely conscious of each other's existence came together to battle a common enemy.
The solidarity forged on the battlefields of Afghanistan did not disintegrate with the defeat of the Soviets; it moved on to the Gulf war, battles within Afghanistan itself, and along the way it mutated into the Bin Laden networks we now confront.
Abu Hamza has a horrifying warning for the west if Afghanistan is invaded. "You are asking for somebody to fly a plane at a nuclear power station. Suicide bombers who just want to kill - you are provoking them. If you kill people, and they look around and their loved ones are dead, what do you expect? They have no taste for life any more. And when this war starts, even the winner would not have much to celebrate. It's horrible. There are a lot of nuclear bombs everywhere."
The vast majority of British Muslims naturally oppose Abu Hamza. Even the governors of his own mosque launched a court case in a failed attempt to remove him. It's easy to baulk at his terrifying rhetoric, and to conclude that he is just a madman. But should we not do something of which he is incapable and extend our empathy even to those who hate us? Here is a man who has seen friends and relatives killed in wars across the world. "I have buried some clothes that are full of the blood of my friends. I've buried my hand next to them." This is a wounded, deranged man. People do not spontaneously become filled with this kind of hatred - they do it because they are mistreated.
As I browse in the mosque bookshop after the interview - deliberating whether to buy the video Jihad Combat Tips: for the armed and unarmed - a man in his early twenties rushes in. Not noticing me, in a state of extreme tension, he says to the three other blokes there: "The halal butcher was punched in the face this morning by a kaffir." "Where?" somebody asks, with perhaps a hint of scepticism in his voice. "Here!" he responds with irritation. "Everywhere! For years Sheikh Hamza has said we need to arm ourselves. He said we can't trust anyone. We didn't listen. Now we have to listen . . . We have to take out the bastard kaffirs before they take us out. I'm telling you, this is war."
It is the punch that leads to the hatred. Just like battered wives who kill their husbands, the hatred felt by Abu Hamza and his followers is an illegitimate response to a legitimate grievance. I went looking for a bogeyman, but what I found was much more complex and disturbing. For the first time, I feel I really understand Hannah Arendt's description of "the banality of evil". Abu Hamza is capable of evil deeds, I have no doubt, but his idle ravings and warped bitterness have an oddly banal quality.
As I sat, sipping tea and chatting amiably with this man who would cheerfully kill off not only me, but my way of life, I remembered the words of Leonard Cohen's poem "All There is to Know About Adolf Eichmann". He wrote it after seeing the trial of the Nazi war criminal in Israel. "Eyes: Medium/Hair: Medium/ Weight: Medium/Intelligence: Medium/. . . What did you expect?/ Talons?/Oversize incisors?/Green saliva?/Madness?"
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