Clowns for jihad posted by Meaders

(Posted by Meaders)

It might be easy, in the midst of SEND HIM BAK hysteria, to forget what ridiculous figures both Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza are. Hamza especially: from the improbable Finsbury Park/Tora Bora accent in which he delivered his MESSAGE OF HATE ("dem suicide bombers is ok, innit") to the oh-so-practical pirate hook, Hamza was less al-Qaida hero than a pantomime villain, apparently invented for the benefit of the Daily Mail cartoonist. Together with his small posse of bored north London teenagers, the "Sons of Sharia", Hamza's one-eyed grimace and notoriety were just ideal for lazy editors keen on Muslim-bashing copy - but somewhat less than ideal for anyone actually planning on blowing up the tube.

Bakri never quite managed the unique Hamza style, but the thick specs, portliness and a dopey grin at least showed he was making the effort. Most of Bakri's public pronouncements had a certain dopiness about them, too: I could be wrong, but one of the things you would not do, if you really fancied restaging 9/11 in London, would be to organise a widely-publicised conference in celebration of this fact. Jon Ronson performs a great service in reminding us all of Bakri's innate clownishness:

The documentary I made about him - Tottenham Ayatollah - has come in for a bit of a hammering of late, the Daily Mail writing, "The message [that he shouldn't be taken seriously] was wrong."

But, really? Some of the recent Timeline Of Hate newspaper profiles refer to events I witnessed. Yes, it sounds horrendous that Omar booked the London Arena for a rally to play videotaped messages from Osama Bin Laden. What isn't mentioned is that the rally was cancelled because Omar only sold a handful of tickets and the Bin Laden tape didn't arrive. Plus he never managed to negotiate car parking facilities with the Arena.

Another Rally of Hate - outside the Israeli embassy - was cancelled because Omar accidentally gave his followers the wrong address. He explained to me that when he telephoned directory enquiries, they deliberately gave him a false address in Knightsbridge. By the time Omar discovered the correct address it was too late. Many of his followers were already on their way and they didn't have mobile phones. This, Omar said, was proof that Scotland Yard's Muslim monitoring unit was in league with British Telecom's directory enquiries service.

"It cannot be a coincidence," he said.

The sophisticated New Labour line, developed within hours of the London bombings, was that we were facing a menacing ideology, not menacing individuals. Why, then, all the fuss about Hamza and Bakri? At least part of the reason is to play on the thought that though I, and perhaps you, wouldn't take these people seriously, those poor, childlike Muslims would. Except, of course, they don't.

You won't challenge an ideology by deporting or detaining a few individuals who express it - and express it badly, by the way, inarticulacy being an essential weapon in the Bakri-Hamza Axis of Evil. You might do something about it if you address its material roots - if you start to drain the swamp from which the ideas draw their nourishment. New Labour, for one reason or another, is not keen on looking too directly at the invasion of Iraq; so Hamza and Bakri play their allotted parts, and the pantomime continues. He's behind yooouuu...