Counterterrorism Blog

In fact, our British friends do not seem to have learned anything from the past.
As I show in my latest Weekly Standard piece, London remains one of the most worrisome places when it comes to Islamists.

Here is an excerpt:

A few days before the March 11 suicide bombing that rocked Casablanca, Moroccan police arrested a big fish: Saad Husseini, number two in the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM), the outfit responsible for terror attacks in Casablanca in 2003 and Madrid in 2004 that killed a total of 236 people. But while Husseini sits in jail, his boss, Mohamed Guerbouzi, lives a free man in Britain, despite being sentenced in absentia to a 20-year term by a Moroccan court.

Morocco has sought Guerbouzi's extradition, but the British government refuses even to arrest him, deeming the evidence provided insufficient, according to the newspaper Aujourd'hui Le Maroc. Indeed, London still hosts a Who's Who of dangerous Islamists--Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the main Tunisian Islamist party; Anjem Choudary, deported from Lebanon to the United Kingdom in 2005 and seen taking part in the violent protests of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad; the Saudi national Saad al-Faqih, listed as a supporter of al Qaeda by both the U.S. Treasury and the United Nations, and so on. There's a reason for the moniker the British capital earned in the 1990s (also the title of a 2006 book by the journalist Melanie Phillips)--Londonistan.

For over a decade, French authorities have been frustrated by their British counterparts' relative inaction on extremism. In the 1990s, when a French investigative magistrate went to London to interview eight suspected members of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), for instance, British authorities denied him access to the suspects. In 1998 and 1999, the DGSE, the French equivalent to the CIA, reportedly mounted its own surveillance of London's Finsbury Park mosque and of extremist leaders such as Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada.

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