ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (23 page)

Choudary’s grievance-laden rants on Twitter and elsewhere have had an effect. An investigation by Britain’s
Daily Star
newspaper found that a growing number of misguided “good chaps” have been led astray by Choudary’s teachings and straight into the arms of ISIS:

          
We can . . . reveal new links between young Muslims fighting for the ISIS group and preacher Anjem Choudary.

                
Former followers of the terror sympathiser have been recruited to join the rebels fighting in Syria and Iraq.

                
Choudary boasted that young men he has taught have joined Isis, an outfit notorious for beheadings, crucifixions and amputations.

                
And the Kent-raised radical says it is “no shame” that extremists based in France, Belgium and even Australia and Indonesia share his dream of a global Islamic state.

                
We can reveal former members of Choudary-backed groups on the continent, including Sharia4Belgium and Sharia4France, are signing up for jihad after meeting the London cleric.

                
. . . an unrepentant Choudary, 47, told us: “Although we don’t recruit people to send abroad we are not surprised if they want to go abroad and stand with their Muslim brothers and sisters who are being killed and whose land is being occupied. Surely it is a noble thing to want to liberate Muslim land? I have no shame whatsoever in saying these people were at times in some way or other affiliated with us.”
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During our Skype interview, I pressed Choudary about the
Daily Star
report:

          
STAKELBECK: You have been accused in the British media of recruiting for ISIS and it’s been reported that some of your followers have actually gone to Syria to join with this group. How do you respond to that?

          
CHOUDARY: Well, you know, nobody has actually gone to date to Syria or Iraq having informed me beforehand. I mean, I have discovered that there are some people there, and by all accounts the people who are there who I know are just living there as citizens. They have decided that they want to live under the Sharia. They want to experience the Islamic State. They want to bring up their children according to Islam. . . . after the establishment of the Khilafah, I think you will find people are flocking there because they want to live under the Sharia. Remember, you have, now, a state there. Millions of people are living there, Christians, non-Muslims, Jews, Muslims, Yazidis are living there.
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Yes, the Islamic State is just one big multi-religious utopia. The abundance of reports detailing how non-Muslims are being slaughtered and harassed by ISIS? The footage of Christians, Yazidis, and Kurds fleeing their homes in terror with nothing but the clothes on their backs in the face of ISIS advances? The endless images of beheadings and mass executions? Choudary told me it’s all just Western propaganda driven by imperialist, anti-Muslim bigotry:

          
The Christians, by all accounts, are now coming back to Mosul. They prefer to live under the Sharia . . . and you find in fact that the Muslims and the non-Muslims who are actually living . . . under the Islamic State are quite happy now. They are having their basic needs of food clothing and shelter provided. Their life, their honor, their wealth is protected . . . in terms of the Islamic State, their basic needs are being met. The structure is there in terms of the Caliph, his assistants, the governors in the areas, the judges—you know, you can see from many clips that they have completely eradicated all of the vices in that particular area. By all accounts, I cannot see any reason why the people would not accept Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the Caliph.
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I’m sure the supposedly sharia-loving Christians whom Choudary describes, along with the Yazidis who have seen their wives and daughters sold into sex slavery by ISIS, could come up with a few reasons why al-Baghdadi would not be welcome in their towns and villages.

Anyone with a shred of common sense scoffs, as I did, at Choudary’s disinformation campaign, seeing through it as the shameless pro-ISIS propaganda that it is. Indeed, it was tough to keep a straight face during stretches of our interview. After all, a cursory Twitter search will turn up loads of photos of ISIS beheading, raping, and pillaging Muslims and
non-Muslims alike—and these are tweets proudly posted not by U.S. government agencies, but by ISIS fighters and their supporters. Yet Choudary has a script and he’s sticking to it—and he has the ears of hundreds, if not thousands, of radicalized Muslims across Europe who take what he says very seriously when he describes the Islamic State as he did to me during our interview:

          
. . . people are so happy. They have basic needs. They have free houses. Gas, electricity, water, etc. is free of charge. I mean, nobody in the world, really, has this at the moment. We are living in times in Britain and even in America, the countries with the largest GDP, where people don’t even have security for their homes. Their whole life they just work . . . and their basic income does not meet their everyday living expenses. And yet, it is a completely different scenario [in the Islamic State]. I am very happy. I would like to live in a society like that.
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So, apparently, would many other Muslims who have left comfortable lives in Great Britain behind to travel to the Middle East and join ISIS’s growing terrorist army.

There’s a reason it has been called “Londonistan.”

According to most estimates, around five hundred British Muslims have traveled to Syria or Iraq to join up with ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups.
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Others place the number as high as eight hundred British ISIS recruits, while one British MP has said that at least fifteen hundred Brits have trekked to the Middle East to join ISIS over the past few years.
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To put it in even starker terms, one out of every four Europeans fighting alongside ISIS hails from Great Britain.
¹⁹
Indeed, twice as many Muslims
are now fighting for ISIS as for the UK military.
²⁰
Many of these battle-tested British fighters have already returned home after completing their jihadi apprenticeships in Syria.
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Their next move is anyone’s guess—perhaps they’ll join Anjem Choudary on Britain’s welfare dole. Or maybe they’ll use some of the tricks they learned fighting with ISIS to carry out attacks on British soil. The UK’s Islamism problem is so acute—and such a threat to spill over into other Western countries—that the Obama administration, in a rare instance of being proactive, not reactive, in the face of the jihadist threat, reportedly sent a special unit of CIA officers to Britain to investigate. According to Britain’s
Daily Mail,

          
It is unusual for the CIA to send a team to the UK: the agency usually relies on information passed to it by MI5 or MI6 or by its agents stationed at the American Embassy in London.

                
. . . Professor Anthony Glees, of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at Buckingham University, said the mission . . . showed the level of concern in Washington over the issue, which he claimed was rooted in the UK’s “lax” immigration policies.

                
“The US is worried about the British situation. They fear there might be a knock-on effect for them,” Prof Glees said.

                
. . . “The Americans regard the UK as a disaster because of our lax stance on immigration which has allowed this militancy to take hold.”

                
. . . sources also admitted that the move revealed a growing lack of trust in Washington over MI5 and MI6’s ability to provide a reliable assessment of the security threat presented by young Muslims under the sway of imams who are radicalised and then recruited to fight in religious wars around the globe.

                
The Obama administration has become increasingly anxious that young American Muslims could follow the same pattern. There are strong links between British and American
radicals and the sources say the CIA feels British efforts to identify and unmask them have been inadequate.
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Don’t look now, but America has its own problems with “lax immigration policies,” not to mention a wide-open southern border that ISIS could drive a caravan of pickup trucks through. If things continue the way they’re going, we’ll get to where Britain is soon enough. And to put it bluntly, our cousin across the pond is a jihadi wonderland.

How bad are things in the UK? During my trips to Britain over the past few years, I’ve interviewed 1) An al Qaeda–linked, U.S.–designated global terrorist named Saad al-Faqih, 2) An al Qaeda–linked radical named Yasser al-Sirri who was wanted in the United States and Egypt on terrorism charges, 3) Noman Benotman, a former Libyan terrorist leader and associate of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and 4) Anjem Choudary, who needs no introduction.
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And that’s not even mentioning the various Muslim Brotherhood types and Hamas supporters with whom I’ve shared a spot of tea.

Benotman, to his credit, has since disavowed al Qaeda. He has transformed his life and left Islamism behind and now works against jihadists. The others, however, remain hardcore Islamist radicals with documented ties to the global jihadist movement. Yet none of my face-to-face interviews with them were conducted behind prison walls. Rather, all of these men are living comfortable lives in London, moving about freely in the land of Churchill and Thatcher (who are likely turning in their graves as I write this). And even Abu Qatada, long considered al Qaeda’s top spiritual leader in Europe, lived in London for years and collected welfare benefits before finally being deported to Jordan in 2013. British taxpayers were no doubt thrilled to see him go.

Great Britain circa 2015 is a place that Churchill would not recognize and that Thatcher fought doggedly to prevent. It’s a place where Mohammed is the most popular name for male babies;
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where soldiers are murdered on the streets in broad daylight by Islamic fanatics; where Anjem
Choudary shouts for sharia law while leeching off the very government he’d like to see overthrown; where some eighty-five fully functioning sharia courts operate in major British cities;
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and where hostile Islamist enclaves have been established in London neighborhoods. As I wrote in my 2013 book,
The Brotherhood:

          
In Europe, many . . . areas become no-go zones for non-Muslims where sharia law is enforced and even police are hesitant to enter. The Tower Hamlets section of East London, in the shadow of London’s financial district, is well on its way to no-go status. I’ve walked the streets of this area on numerous occasions, spent time in its outdoor bazaars, and observed the massive flow of South Asian immigrants in and out of Friday prayers at the vast East London Mosque—which serves as the de facto British base for Jamaat-e-Islami, considered the South Asian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s a stunning experience to see thousands of predominantly Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims dressed in Islamic garb spill out of the mosque and swarm the streets of East London, giving the area a distinctly non-Western, Islamicized feel. In the summer of 2011, Islamists (reportedly in league with our old friend Anjem Choudary), put up posters around Tower Hamlets proclaiming it a “Sharia Controlled Zone” where “Islamic rules are enforced.” They wasted no time in getting busy “enforcing.” Harassment of non-Muslims—particularly homosexuals, women, and alcohol consumers—at the hands of self-proclaimed “Muslim London Patrols” has become a regular occurrence in East London.
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The same people who survived Hitler’s blitzkrieg seventy-five years ago and were famous for their stiff upper lips now seem doomed to succumb to Islamization—led into it by the British elites:

          
All of this is happening against the will of native-born British citizens. According to a 2013 report by a London think tank, British Future, one out of three Brits sees the culture clash between immigrants and indigenous Brits as the primary cause of the country’s problems. Seventy-five percent would like to see a reduction in immigration, with 51 percent desiring a large reduction. Granted, Britain gets immigrants from around the world, but it seems likely that Catholic Poles, French job seekers, or other Europeans are less difficult to assimilate than sharia-governed Muslims. Between 2001 and 2011, the Muslim population of the UK doubled—from 1.5 million to 2.7 million (and those numbers don’t include the country’s many undocumented Muslim immigrants). In only ten years, Muslims grew from 3 percent to nearly 5 percent of the British population. And there are no signs that British politicians have the will or desire to turn off the spigot.
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