Britain hands over a terror suspect

Good riddance to our “public embarrassment No. 1,” said The Sunday Times in an editorial. After years of abusing British hospitality and preaching against British values, the Egyptian-born cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri has finally been extradited to the U.S. to face charges of plotting to set up a terrorist training camp. Al-Masri, who lost both hands and an eye fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan, became famous for his fiery sermons exhorting Muslims to kill Jews and other infidels. In the 1990s, he turned London’s Finsbury Park Mosque into a “staging post for would-be terrorists,” including Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and attempted shoe-bomber Richard Reid—and our “lax and complacent” security services let him. Worse, he did it all on the dole, collecting more than $1,000 a week in benefits.

His coddling has been nothing short of “offensive,” said Evgeny Lebedev in The Independent. The U.S. requested al-Masri’s extradition back in 2004, yet this preacher of hate managed to string out the process “for eight interminable years by constantly lodging appeal after appeal, often by citing the flimsiest of claims of new evidence.” That the British courts kowtowed for so long to a man who “spent so much time insulting our way of life” is an indictment of our justice system.

Far be it from me to defend the man, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. He’s rather hard to love. With the hooks and that “baleful glass eye,” al-Masri is the very stereotype of a Muslim radical “as drawn by an inebriated cartoonist.” And yet it doesn’t reflect well on the U.K. that we imprisoned him merely “for saying stuff.” The actual charges were inciting murder and racial hatred, but still, it makes us look like we don’t actually uphold freedom of speech. Then we kept him in prison even longer merely because “the Americans wanted him on various vague charges” based largely on the evidence of a single criminal who cut a plea. I’m sorry to say that al-Masri heads off to America “having won a victory of sorts” by undermining Britain’s status as a bastion of free speech.

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Unfortunately, he didn’t go alone, said Victoria Brittain in The Guardian. Four other Muslim men were also extradited to the U.S. on the flimsiest of terror charges, but little has been said about them. It’s easier for the press to focus on al-Masri, a caricature of radical Islam, and pretend that the other suspects are as extremist and hate-filled as he is. In fact, though, there is very little evidence against the four others our government has held for years on the Americans’ behalf. Yet America’s hysteria surrounding the “war on terror” means these men stand little chance of acquittal in the U.S., and will have to endure “inhuman prison conditions” in American supermax facilities. “Years in solitary confinement, food put through a slot in a soundproof door, exercise alone in a cage in a concrete pit: This is a regime that breaks men.”