• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 974 0

al-Shibh had acquired the correct registration papers, in his real name, for a German university which he used to obtain a student visa from the embassy in Yemen.69 There was virtually no co-ordination between courts, interior ministry, immigration authorities, prisons and police, in contrast to the teams of legal activists such men could mobilise if ever they were arrested. At a rarefied level police and intelligence services co-operated, but lower down national jurisdictions ensured no co-ordination of policy in any depth. A conversation recorded by Italian intelligence agents reveals how such men regarded Europe as a soft touch, even without the aid of sympathetic immigration and human rights lawyers, professions that have successfully insulated themselves from all criticism. The named speaker was Mahmoud Abdelkader Es Sayed, a high ranking Egyptian Al Qaeda member, who had anticipated the Italians’ curiosity by admitting connections with Islamic Jihad:

Unknown man: Did you get political asylum?

Es Sayed: Yes, when I got here I went to Rome. I came to Milan only after obtaining the asylum. Anyway, when I came here, I shaved my beard and I ‘shaped up’.

Man: Yes [laughing] of course they never got to know anything about your extremism …

Es Sayed: I filed my claim in Rome … [laughing] naturally I told them I have three brothers in jail … I also told them I had been in jail.

Man: Even with the brothers from the Aden Army [he meant the Yemeni Islamic Army of Aden]?

Es Sayed: This is a thing … I left Egypt a long time ago … I told them I was a wanted man … I told them I was unjustly persecuted … that my wife had a car accident … bad luck … but I told them that the accident had been caused by the Egyptian secret service.

Man: Very nice!

Es Sayed: All this seemed like persecution and, as a consequence, they gave me the asylum in the month of November … December.

Italy was in the process of updating its asylum laws, a subject the two discussed later in this conversation, in a passage which readers might like to reflect on:

Es Sayed: Now there is a law in Italy which requires that asylum claims, even those that have already been approved, have to be reviewed every three months to see if the initial conditions are still in place … this is a very strange thing … by doing so a person can suffer oppression.

Man: This is a form of terrorism.

Es Sayed: Of course it is terrorism … Italy is a terrorist country … it is a criminal country … all this shows you that in Italy you cannot obtain a real political asylum … the intent of the government is to take advantage of the Muslims living in this country.70

A further abuse involved European welfare systems, which are administered by those who have ingested the full multicultural credo. Abu Qatada received £400 a week in government benefits, broken down as £322 for housing and £70 a week disability allowances. Abu Hamza’s rent was paid by the taxpayer, to the tune of £2,400 a month, for a substantial home in a west London suburb. With his large family, Omar Bakri received a total of £275,000 in welfare payments, which extended to a £31,000 Ford Galaxy people-carrier to ferry them about. Europe’s traditions of freedom of worship meant that powerful taboos protected the main sites of Islamist activity. Mosques, together with the archipelagos of community centres that accompanied them, were one crucial nodal point in the elaboration of a pan-European jihadist network. To put this in perspective, French security authorities calculate that of France’s 1,685 mosques, which are regularly attended by only 10 per cent of five million French Muslims, eighty or 4.7 per cent gave cause for concern, with 1.1 per cent actually controlled, rather than contested, by radical salafists. Most imams were actually rather meek people, avoiding controversy so as not to offend their congregations or the presbyterian-like mosque committees that controlled the money from collections. The committees often preferred to hire these foreign village preachers because