LONDONISTAN [2]

‘For Islamist terrorists and jihadi ideologues, London during the 1980s and 1990s was the place to be. Kicked out of or repressed within their own countries, they streamed in their thousands to the British capital because they found it to be more hospitable and tolerant than any other place on the globe.

A more brutal way of putting it, however, is that British entry procedures were the most lax and sloppy in the developed world - a system which asked no questions, required no identity papers, and instead showered newcomers with a galaxy of welfare benefits, free education and free health care regardless of their behaviour, beliefs or circumstances. To state it more brutally still, during the 1990s Britain simply lost control of its borders altogether because of the gross abuse and total breakdown of its asylum system. Of the thousands of asylum seekers who arrive every year, most have no legal entitlement to remain in Britain. Yet only a very small minority are sent home, and the remainder melt into British society. The reason so many are attracted is largely because illegal immigrants can simply disappear with no questions asked.

It was hardly surprising, therefore, that so many Islamist terrorists and extremists found Britain to be such a delightful and agreeable destination. As the counterterrorism analyst Robert Leiken has pointed out, al Qaeda and its affiliates depend on immigration to get into the West to carry out their terrorist plots, and to that end they use - or abuse - every immigration category to infiltrate Western countries. According to Imam Abu Baseer, one of the leading religious supporters of al Qaeda:

“One of the goals of immigration is the revival of the duty of jihad and enforcement of their power over the infidels. Immigration and jihad go together. One is the consequence of the other and dependent upon it. The continuance of the one is dependent upon the continuance of the other.”

The asylum shambles thus provided cover for the influx of large numbers of people into Britain who posed a direct threat to the state from without.’

And:

‘In 1989, the European Court of Human Rights extended the scope of the provision in the European Convention on Human Rights that prohibits torture or degrading treatment. This ruling made it impossible to deport illegal immigrants - including suspected terrorists - to any place where the judges thought such abuses might be practised. Although the ruling applied to all signatories to the Convention, the English courts applied it far more zealously than anyone else. At the same time, English judges began to interpret the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees much more broadly than other countries, so that the definition of a refugee was expanded from its original meaning of someone persecuted by the state to anyone threatened with harm by any group.

As a result, asylum policy descended into farce. Thanks to its courts, Britain was now obliged to grant asylum to potentially billions of people who could claim to be harmed by any group; and if such immigrants turned out to be themselves harmful to Britain, they could not be thrown out if they claimed that they faced further harm where they were being sent - which many promptly did. This impasse was then deepened by a series of judgements under human rights law - such as the ruling that halting welfare payments to asylum seekers denied them a right to family life - in which the judges thwarted all government attempts to end the abuse.

The consequence was that human rights doctrine was used to uphold patently false claims against the British state, with ruinous consequences. Those who were refused asylum simply disappeared into Britain; all they had to do to stop being deported was to claim that they would be ill-treated in their country of origin. As a result, they were not even sent back to the last country of transit, such as France, on the basis that the French might in turn deport them to a country that would ill-treat them ...

The absolute prohibition of torture is one thing. But to interpret this so that the country is forced to accept people who pose a potential danger to the state, on the grounds that sending them back to a country where torture is practised is tantamount to practising torture oneself, is demonstrably absurd. It has stood all notions of justice, logic and elementary prudence on their heads. Thus a Taliban soldier who fought the British and Americans in Afghanistan was granted asylum because he said he feared persecution - from the Western-backed government in Kabul. On the other hand, a group of Afghan hijackers, who diverted a flight to Stansted and then claimed asylum on the grounds that they were fleeing the Taliban, still remain in Britain despite the fact that they had committed a crime, despite the defeat of the Taliban, and despite the best efforts of the government to remove them.

The resulting chaos in immigration procedures produced a catastrophic breakdown in British security. According to Home Office figures slipped out quietly just as MPs were departing for their Christmas vacation in December 2005, almost a quarter of all terrorist suspects arrested in Britain since 9/11 had been asylum seekers. At least two of the men accused of involvement in the failed July 21 attacks on London are alleged to have obtained asylum using bogus passports, names and nationalities.

What’s more, the courts refused to extradite terrorist suspects if the countries requesting extradition were themselves suspected of ill-treatment. Case after case was mired for years in legal challenges and court rulings that overturned the government’s decision to extradite these extremists. The Algerian Rachid Ramda, for example, was accused by the French government of having financed an attack on Saint Michel station in Paris in 1995, in which eight people died and 150 were wounded. Britain had granted Ramda asylum in 1992. The French government requested his extradition in 1995, 1996 and 2001. Ten years after the first request, and after two home secretaries had ordered his extradition, he was finally sent back to France.

In 1995, the home secretary tried to extradite the Saudi extremist Mohammed al-Massari to Yemen after Saudi Arabia, with whom Britain has lucrative and extensive trade dealings, vehemently requested his extradition. When the courts blocked this, a deal was done with the Caribbean island of Dominica, which agreed to take him in exchange for help from Britain with its trade negotiations with the European Union over the export of bananas. The courts blocked this too. As a result, al-Massari has lived for years in north London, posting on his website videos of civilian contractors being beheaded in Iraq - an activity he briefly suspended after the 2005 bombings but then resumed, inciting Muslims to join the global jihad, advocating the beheading of homosexuals and describing 9/11 as the “blessed conquest of New York and Washington”.’

Melanie Phillips, writing in her book Londonistan.