Finsbury ParkInside the British Jihad

Finsbury Park, North London
Stepping off the subway at Finsbury Park, the change in scenery could not have been more acute. Just an hour earlier, I had been awed by the grandeur of Big Ben, towering over the British Houses of Parliament. It is the symbol of the England in our history books: a beacon of liberty, tolerance, and stability.

Finsbury Park is different. Small shops and ragged apartments line the streets of this working class area of North London. More pronounced than the socioeconomic inequality is the cultural discrepancy. Grocery stores feature Middle Eastern foods and advertisements for cheap phone calls to the East while women clad in veils and burkas stroll with their young children wearing kufis.

After a short walk from the subway, I spotted a building at the corner of St. Tomas’ Road with a crescent moon and star at its peak. I walked up the steps to the mosque and opened the door with a bit of trepidation. A clean-shaven young man named Faisal welcomed me in with a cheery smile. Explaining that I was a student from the United States, he inquired, “Have you heard of this mosque before?” I had. With a dismayed look, Faisal replied in broken English “Not good things, I bet.”

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the Finsbury Park Mosque became a symbol of Britain’s problem with Radical Islam and the eerie face of “Londonistan.” The Mosque was conceived at the Prince of Wales’ request. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia donated over 2.3 million pounds to construct the building. From 1997 until his dismissal in 2003, however, the fiery Egyptian-born preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri served as the Mosque’s imam. Hamza’s notoriety extends beyond his eye-catching if unfashionable look: an opaque eye and right hook, both consequences of his involvement with the Mujahideen in the late 1980s.

Hamza rose to prominence on the British Islamist scene, preaching a message of jihad and anti-Semitism. “Killing of the Kaffir (non-believers) for any reason, you can say it is OK, even if there is no reason for it.” The ultimate goal, he said, is to see “The Khalifa sitting in the White House, ruling from there like the Prophet Mohammed said that Allah… told him that the whole earth, it will be for Muslims, booty for Islam.” Beyond propagating such fighting words, the Mosque featured Kalashnikov AK-47 training and served as a base for shipping telecommunications equipment and medical supplies to fellow jihadists in Pakistan.

Hamza’s activity at Finsbury Park attracted nothing less than an all-star lineup of terrorists:
• Richard Reid — The British-born terrorist who attempted to detonate a shoe bomb on a trans-Atlantic flight from Paris to Miami in 2001.
• Zacarias Moussaoui — The French Moroccan who earned the moniker, “20th hijacker” for his role in the 9/11 attacks.
• Abu Doha — The Algerian who was arrested in February 2001 for trying to leave
England for Saudi Arabia on a forged passport. He is also fighting extradition to the United States for his involvement in the “millennium plot” to blow up an airport in Los Angeles.
• Nizar Trabelsi — Tunisian ex-footballer jailed in Belgium for plotting to attack the Kleine Brogul NATO airbase.
• Djamel Beghal — Recruited Reid, Moussaoui, and Trabelsi for suicide missions. Jailed in France over an alleged plot to attack the American Embassy in Paris. Beghal was so extreme that Osama bin Laden labeled him “over the pale.”