by Brendan O’Neill
In a recent Vanity Fair feature, Christopher Hitchens bemoaned the transformation of London into “Londonistan.” He wrote about Finsbury Park, a shabby, multicultural corner of the capital, where the old sights of Irish immigrants staggering from dingy pubs and Greeks trying to hawk kebabs have been replaced by young Muslim men sporting beards and women cloaked in the black hijab.
Then there is the notorious Finsbury Park mosque. Abu Hamza al-Masri, the hook-handed, one-eyed former Mujahi-deen of the Afghan-Soviet War, was the imam there until his arrest and imprisonment in 2006 for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred. The 7/7 bombers were inspired by Hamza’s rancid rhetoric. Other visitors to the mosque included Richard Reid, the failed shoe-bomber, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-Moroccan found guilty of being the “20th hijacker” of 9/11.
For Hitchens, the transformation of this once lively mixed suburb into a hotbed of Islamic radicalism, where the “the scent of Algeria … now predominates along the main thoroughfare,” is symptomatic of a broader shift in British society. “How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation?” he asks.Hitchens also revisits the curious case of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. As British as they come, he was brought up in a leafy suburb in northeast London, where he was privately educated, and later attended the London School of Economics. Now he is in prison in Pakistan for orchestrating the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl. According to Hitchens, Sheikh’s shocking journey, from burying his head in books at the LSE in the early 1990s to crudely removing the head of an American writer in Pakistan in 2002, shows the lethality of the radical Islamist bug sweeping the British Isles.
Yet Hitchens omits one important fact about Sheikh. You see, Hitchens and Sheikh—the celebrated journalist and the imprisoned murderer—share a striking feature. Both were radicalized by the same issue: the civil war in Bosnia of 1992-95, and both were set on their current political trajectories by their deep sympathy for the Bosnian Muslims and their loathing of the Bosnian Serbs. Indeed, while they may have ended up worlds apart, with Hitchens writing pro-interventionist articles for the American press and Sheikh a crazed killer in Pakistan, one might argue that, politically, they are cut from the same cloth.
http://amconmag.com/2007/2007_07_16/feature.html