Islam versus Europe

Today I came across a Johann Hari article in the Guardian archive in which he claims to have seduced and had sex with both a male neo-Nazi and an Islamic fundamentalist (not the same person, I hasten to add; that would probably have stretched plebular credulity past breaking point, even back then). Ironically, in a post a few days ago about Hari's week-long hang-out at the Finsbury Park mosque (assuming there actually was one and that he wasn't stretched out at home surfing the internet instead), I noted that since, according to his own description, he looked like a 12-year old, "he was lucky one of the Mohammedans didn't try to 'marry' him on the spot."

It seems this surmise was a little closer to the mark than I expected, assuming any of what he says is true of course, and that caveat must unfortunately now be inserted into virtually everything that concerns his written work. In this separate Guardian article based on the same visit, Hari claims to have seduced and committed buggery with two fundamentalists who despised gays, one a brawny American neo-Nazi and one a Muslim extremist called Mohammed from the Finsbury Park mosque.

Before getting down to the nitty-gritty of the act of coition, a few other points about the article are worth noting.

Maybe it's just me, but many of its details strike me as a little too good to be true:

I sat in rooms where sweet-looking grannies would rock slightly muttering, "Kikes, kikes" under their breath as they carried on knitting.

Or maybe the old grannies had previously written about the "Kikes, kikes" in books and he just copy/pasted the quote from there?

In discussing the assassinated Dutch politician, Pim Fortuyn, Hari, shamefully, calls him a fascist and a 'nut' and insinuates a moral equivalence between him and the Nazis.

I despise and loathe the far right, but many, many gay men have been drawn not just to the ludicrous pantomime of fascism (footage from Mussolini's Italy looks uncannily like a Mardi Gras), but also to the actual practice. Ernst Rohm, one of Hitler's close advisers until the Fuhrer had him shot, was a deliriously promiscuous gay man; Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch hard-right nut who was assassinated earlier this year, used to boast that his anti-Muslim policies were not racist: "How can I be against north Africans? I have slept with so many of them."

It is exactly this kind of irrational, overblown rhetoric that got Pim Fortuyn killed. That the politician was a potential new Hitler is exactly what his murderer believed. But even after his death, Hari has no scruples about repeating such base smears. Fortuyn was a good and decent man who repudiated any association with the old-skool far right. We can now see that he was extraordinarily prescient about the threat Islam posed to the Netherlands and to Europe as a whole.

With regards to his 'penetration' of the mosque, Hari states that he has "always found Islam fascinating, and I was able to bluff my way in fairly easily - stuff about needing to rally around to keep up the assault on America at this time, and so on." I find it really hard to believe that all a soppy-looking white boy - one who looked like the Milky bar kid - had to do to infiltrate the most hardcore mosque in Britain - and remember this was just after the September 11th attacks, when Muslims were even more paranoid and defensive than usual - was turn up and spout some nonsense about "keeping up the assault on America".

Recall that, in the wake of September 11th, intelligence agencies identified the lack of reliable human intelligence as being the West's key weakness with regards to Islamic terrorism, a failing caused by the difficulty of infiltrating westerners into extremist Muslim circles. Undercover intelligence agents might well spend months or years gradually building up credibility within a community before they gain access to its secrets, if they ever do at all. The Undercover Mosque reporters spent months infiltrating mosques and were themselves, presumably, Asians. Johann Hari spent precisely one week on this assignment. Yet only a few days after turning up, they were showing him the Jihad tactics videos, "How to Kill and Kill Again". Is this credible?

If it is, and he loses his job at the Independent, MI6 or the CIA should definitely snap him up then dispatch him round the world, visiting all the most hardcore mosques on the planet - just a few days for each one should suffice - where he can 'penetrate' the jihadist networks, feed the intel back to base and roll them up. With his mad skillz, he should be able to defeat the entire global jihad in no more than a year or two.

Plus it's interesting that in this article Hari is now presenting his visit to the mosque as a kind of undercover op in which he pretended to be a Muslim, participating in prayers as if he was a Muslim and expressing a wish to keep up "the assault on America". Reading his earlier article about the same visit gives a very different impression. Although he starts it by saying "I con my way into the mosque of London's very own Osama Bin Laden", the rest of the article does not suggest that he was consistently presenting himself as a Muslim while there. The alleged interview with Abu Hamza is interesting in several respects. First of all, the process leading up to it sounds like the normal one through which a western journalist might have gained an interview with Hamza:

Finally, after days of persuasion, he allows me to speak to him for a few hours. He welcomes me into his office at the mosque, pulls out a chair and asks me if I'd like a cup of tea. Not exactly what I had expected.

A normal Muslim attending the mosque would presumably find it easier to get an opportunity to speak to the imam, although the imam would no doubt find it strange if a random member of his flock asked to speak with him for a few hours.

The text of the interview itself also reads like a normal interview with a western journalist, not a conversation with a fellow Muslim believer wanting to "keep up the assault on America."

Abu Hamza has a horrifying warning for the west if Afghanistan is invaded. "You are asking for somebody to fly a plane at a nuclear power station. Suicide bombers who just want to kill - you are provoking them. If you kill people, and they look around and their loved ones are dead, what do you expect?

In this extract, it is clear that Hamza sees Hari as a representative of the west, not as a Muslim. "You are asking..." So how does this square with the claim that he was posing as a believer?

Also, crucially, Hamza denies that either Bin Laden or Muslims were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. When asked who was responsible, he replies:

"I am not saying every American government figure knew about this. But there are a few people [in the US government] who want to trigger a third world war. They are sponsored by the business lobby. Most of them are Freemasons, and they have loyalty to the Zionists."

So puppets for the US government hijacked the planes? Well, probably, he says, but that is not the most important part. "That neat collapse was a professional destruction job. A plane could not do that."

How does this square with Hari's claim that he gained the trust of the Muslims there by talking about the need "to rally around to keep up the assault on America at this time, and so on"? He gained the trust of Muslims by talking about the need to keep up the assault on America when they themselves denied that they had, in fact, assaulted America?

If there is going to be an inquiry into Hari's conduct, someone should ask him whether, during this alleged conversation with Abu Hamza, the imam thought he was speaking privately to an ordinary Muslim member of his congregation, or whether he was aware that Hari was a non-Muslim western journalist who would be reporting what was said. If Hari revealed to Hamza, and to Hamza alone, that he was a non-Muslim western journalist, how can he have been able to maintain the pretence of being a Muslim with the other Muslims present in the mosque? Surely Hamza would have said something if he saw Hari performing Muslim prayers even though he knew him not to be a Muslim?

His accounts of the mosque "infiltration" become more fantastical as time goes on. In the first article, published on September 20 2001, the only suggestion of anything covert is the phrase "I con my way in". By the next article, in December 2002, it is clearly presented as an "undercover gig". But the infiltration in this case was performed "fairly easily".

In one:

I was able to bluff my way in fairly easily - stuff about needing to rally around to keep up the assault on America at this time, and so on."

By January 2003, however, it had retrospectively become a bit harder.
In this article:

Although there are a fair few non-Arab Muslims who
hang around, it took a while to convince the regulars
that I was One of Them.

It took a while, but no more than a week?

Also, as Johnny Rottenborough points out in a comment, his description of simultaneous praying and preacherly ranting at the mosque is ludicrous.

And at the centre of all this was Abu Hamza. You've probably seen him in the newspapers: he's the guy with only one eye and no hands. He's the one, to put it bluntly, with hooks. I will reassure you, at this point, that this is not a story about seducing Abu Hamza. As we prayed to Mecca, he ranted against "the Jews, the feminists, the gays" and so on.

Muslims have an extraordinarily elaborate set of rules regarding prayer. See here, for example. Uttering a single wrong syllable, moving in anything other than the prescribed way, even a simple turn of the head can invalidate the prayer. But we are asked to believe that the Muslims in the mosque listened to Hamza crazily ranting against Jews and gays while they performed their prayers?

Although Hari admits that the Muslims in Finsbury Park mosque were "swapping videotapes with titles like Jihad tactics: how to kill and kill again" he feels it necessary to point out that they were "totally atypical of Britain's overwhelmingly decent and moderate Muslim population".

These, or other, videotapes are also described in another anecdote in the original article:

As I browse in the mosque bookshop after the interview - deliberating whether to buy the video Jihad Combat Tips: for the armed and unarmed - a man in his early twenties rushes in. Not noticing me, in a state of extreme tension, he says to the three other blokes there: "The halal butcher was punched in the face this morning by a kaffir." "Where?" somebody asks, with perhaps a hint of scepticism in his voice. "Here!" he responds with irritation. "Everywhere! For years Sheikh Hamza has said we need to arm ourselves. He said we can't trust anyone. We didn't listen. Now we have to listen . . . We have to take out the bastard kaffirs before they take us out. I'm telling you, this is war."

Somehow this doesn't have the ring of authenticity to me. It's a little too pat, and the dialogue doesn't sound quite right. In particular, does the phrase "For years Sheikh Hamza has said we need to arm ourselves" sound like the kind of remark that might have been uttered by a breathless Muslim "in a state of extreme tension" or does it sound, rather, like one that might have been typed by an unscrupulous whiteboy making it up?

But back to the buggery. Here is Hari's description of the Muslim wackjob he claims to have seduced:

Mo (as his friends call him) had a very dry sense of humour, like most of that group, and a really attractive sense of purpose and loyalty (all, unfortunately, poured into killing people like me).

Then the consummation:

But after a long smoke and a lot of flattery, Mo was fairly easily coaxed. Of course, he seemed a bit hung-up about it afterwards. Since I was nearing the end of my undercover gig, I tried to persuade him that perhaps gay people weren't evil, especially in light of the fact that he had just been having wild gay sex.

Is this credible? Judge for yourself. I suppose we'll never know for sure unless Hari decides to write a book, Jayson Blair-style, explaining how he fooled people all these years. That may indeed be the optimal strategy for him now.