Cold comfort from Anjem Choudary conviction

This is an extract from an article by Mark Gardner that originally appeared on the website of the Jewish News. Read the full article here.

Anjem Choudary, Britain’s most notorious Jihadist rabble rouser, has – at long last – been found guilty of “inviting support for a proscribed terrorist organisation”. On the surface, it looks like good news, but look deeper and it is hard to take much comfort.

CST has been raising strong concerns about Choudary and his predecessors for over 25 years, warning the authorities that open incitement for Jihadist extremism and terrorism was causing not only antisemitism, but all manner of radicalism that could literally explode against the British public at any time in the future: as it is still doing, both here and across western Europe, fuelled by events in Syria, Iraq and beyond.

The 1990s were especially frustrating for CST. Colleagues and I would go to meetings at Scotland Yard and warn about the fully public Jihadist incitement that was increasingly building on university campuses, and on the streets of London, Manchester, Luton and elsewhere throughout the UK. We were always politely heard, but it was hard to escape the feeling that nobody actually believed such terrorism would occur here: not even as France was suffering Algerian Jihadist terrorism, part facilitated from Finsbury Park mosque.

_{Image credit: Day Donaldson}