Via Hudson, a fine article by Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens on how the ideology of Anwar al-Awlaki has been and promoted in the UK by, amongst others, Cage Prisoners and Mohammed Hamid AKA ‘Osama bin London’.
Here is a video of Muhammed Hamid at one of his jihad training camps:
In the United States, pro al-Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki has recently attracted the attention of mainstream media and counter terrorism commentators. His involvement with Fort Hood attacker Nidal Hassan has sparked a public interest in a man whose role in disseminating al-Qaeda ideology has been overlooked for far too long.
Nowhere is this complacency more acute than in the United Kingdom, where a number of organisations have openly promoted and supported Awlaki for years with impunity. As set out in a briefing for the Centre for Social Cohesion recently, the most active Awlaki promoters in the UK are a group called Cage Prisoners (CP), for whom Awlaki acts essentially as an emir (religious leader).
Since 2003, CP has campaigned on behalf of convicted terrorists, presenting almost any Muslim in prison as a victim of the supposed war on Islam waged by the West. As well as Awlaki, CP support other jihadists like Mohammed Hamid, who calls himself ‘Osama bin London’ and was convicted in 2008 for providing terrorist training and soliciting to murder. They crave legitimacy for their extremeist message and have so far successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of a number of mainstream organisations such as Amnesty International, and leading UK law firms such as Freshfields, who have both sponsored and endorsed CP’s work.
The organization is headed by former Guantanamo inmate Moazzam Begg, released by President Bush in January 2005, despite protests from the Pentagon and a number of his senior national security advisors that he still represented a threat. The Defence Department spokesman at the time, Bryan Whitman, said of Mr. Begg that “He has strong, long-term ties to terrorism — as a sympathizer, as a recruiter, as a financier and as a combatant.” Mr. Whitman also told the New York Times in 2006 that Mr. Begg was “a sympathizer, a recruiter and a financier” for terrorists. It has been suggested that Mr. Begg was in fact the unwitting beneficiary of a political deal between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which, as a reward for his unflinching support for the liberation of Iraq, Blair was allowed to be seen as the liberator of Guantanamo’s British detainees.
Read the article in full.
And voicing over this Jihad video, is the “imam” himself: