WE MUST SECURE THE EXISTENCE OF OUR PEOPLE AND A FUTURE FOR WHITE CHILDREN.!!!!!!!!! LET THAT SIMPLE STATMENT BURN INTO YOUR HEARTS AND SUPPORT THE NATIONAL FRONT. AND IF YOUR NOT A MEMBER PLEASE JOIN TODAY. YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU.

Sunday 30 September 2012

Muslim immigrant kills German job centre worker: “One Less German” scrawled at murder scene


Irene, the murdered German woman
“If you look for me, look in your hearts. If you find me there, I am still living inside you.”

A few days ago I linked to a story in the iostream about a Moroccan who had murdered a German woman in a job centre, although the report in The Local failed to mention the fact that he was a Moroccan Muslim called Ahmet S.
Ahmet S., her Moroccan murderer
Tributes to the murdered woman were left at the job centre, including the photo of her shown above.
But not everyone felt sympathy for her, it seems.
On Friday night, unknown persons scrawled malicious words on pillars, walls and doors of the Neuss job centre using felt pens.
“One less German!“ is written there – this was confirmed on Friday by the spokesman for the Neuss police, Hans-Willi Arnold.
There were also threats against the remaining job centre employees: “You’re next…”
The flowers and candles that colleagues and Neuss citizens left in tribute to the slain Irene N. (32) were knocked down and partially destroyed.
A janitor said to the EXPRESS: “In the morning, we also found ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard here. Along with a Playstation controller.”

Yes, we hate Islam


Yes, we hate Islam. Yes, we will mock your paedophile prophet Mohammed as much as we want. No, we don’t care what you think or how offended you are. We are British, and we are free to say what we want, when we want, no matter how much it offends your sensitivities. Don’t like it? Get out. You are not welcome here.




Like a good Muslim, Obama uses the annual White House Iftar Ramadan dinner to spew lies about America


Every year at this dinner, Obama highlights the Thomas Jefferson quran, as if it were a cherished book of his, rather than a manual of war so Jefferson could study the mindset of the Muslim Barbary Pirates who were attacking our cargo ships at sea – the Muslim enemy that our Marine Corps fought so hard and defeated at Tripoli. Jefferson probably hated Muslims more than we do.


Obama states that the Jefferson quran is a reminder, along with the generations of patriotic Muslims in America, that Islam, like so many faiths, is part of our national story. Even worse, he honors Hillary Clinton’s Muslim accomplice, Huma Abedin, as some kind of American hero, when she is nothing more than a Muslim Brotherhood shill, as are her mother, brother, sister, and late father.  Obama had the gall to say, “The American people owe her a debt of gratitude, because Huma is an American patriot, and an example of what we need in this country — more public servants with her sense of decency, her grace and her generosity of spirit.”

John Tyndall examines some popular nonsense about national identity

John Tyndall examines some popular nonsense about national identity
IT SEEMS to be the silly season for defining who we are, but at least there is one good omen in the current debate about what Britishness means: the press and TV would not be focusing on the subject in the way they are presently doing were they not sensitive to underlying currents of public concern that Britain's national identity is under threat, as indeed it is.
A few weeks ago we were treated to the unedifying public spectacle of a West Indian immigrant with the usual impeccable left-wing credentials taking us on a television on tour of Britain in which, with the aid of numerous carefully picked ‘spokespeople’, he informed us that the country our parents knew was gone for ever and that we had better get used to it because there was nothing - absolutely nothing - we could do about it. This prompted an article in these columns in which I attempted to define what Britishness meant in a way our dusky tour guide and his co-participants in the programme totally failed to do. But the media will not allow the issue to go away. It emerged again in a feature in the Daily Mail on the 30th March entitled ‘True Brit ’ in which, to use the paper's words, it asked six very different Britons how they define themselves.
Sri Lankan Briton
It was clear of course from the start how the Daily Mail defined them, for among these ‘Britons’ were Shyama Perera, a Sri Lankan, who was given first call, and Mihir Bose, the Indian sports writer. Two out of six from the ethnic minorities is apparently that paper's idea of a representative debate about our country and its identity. However, let Mrs. Perera have her say. She, she said, arrived in London in 1962 but held on to her Sri Lankan citizenship for 25 years until she went back to the Indian sub-continent on her honeymoon and noticed how no-one respected traffic lights and everyone wanted to barge in on everyone else's conversation. This was the decider:-
‘I couldn't bear the chaos and intrusion, so I applied for my British passport. I'd always known that, spiritually, I am British through and through.
‘It's nothing to do with district nurses on bicycles or bobbies on the beat. It's about Britishness as a state of being: an underlying emperance, a social tolerance.
‘You see it in the polite queues outside post offices and in banks when cashiers go to lunch at the busiest moment. London can come to a standstill while a lorry unloads scaffolding - not one driver will toot their horn. ’
This and other attractive features of human behaviour resolved Mrs. Perera that Britain was the best place to be. Very conveniently, however, she failed to address the question of why people, according to her own account, behave so differently in the Indian sub-continent. Could it have anything to do with national character and temperament? That would seem to be a question fraught with danger because it might lead us to a discussion of that taboo subject of race. Mrs. Perera would of course repudiate this by saying that she, having integrated herself into a British environment, has acquired British habits and attitudes on such matters as queuing, and that therefore everyone else can do so. But national identity is not about how the odd individual thinks and behaves; it is about how people in the mass - the average do so. A great many people of Afro-Caribbean origin have been brought up in the same British environment as Mrs. Perera. Some individuals amongst them have adapted to that environment and taken on British modes of behaviour but an uncomfortable number have not, as is easily demonstrable to anyone who cares to observe.
Subject of the Crown
Next in order to define being British was Sir Roy Strong. What made him British, he said, was being a subject of Her Majesty the Queen. What did that mean? Well, said Sir Roy, the Crown holds its diverse peoples in unity, one symbolised by a flag, the Union Jack. United we stand, divided we fall, and... "We have warded off every threatened invasion from without, including the might of Napoleon and Hitler."
But wait a minute! All the threatened invasions from without of which Sir Roy was speaking belong to ages before the huge influx of non-white races into Britain which began in the 1950s. Yes, at such times the country was united precisely because its people had a sense of belonging together, of being a single national entity, albeit with some minor variations as between English, Scots, Welsh, etc., and variations among those tribal groups. The British broadly looked the same, thought the same, shared an overall common culture and felt a sense of common loyalty to one another. That enabled their armed forces, responsible for national defence, to feel and act as one with London cockneys identifying themselves proudly with Scottish Highland and Yorkshire regiments and not infrequently serving in them. Within the British armed forces, as my own experience testifies, there was constant joking and leg-pulling between those of different regional backgounds, but nothing approaching the bitterly hostile ‘racism’ which now, apparently, causes deep divisions among serving men and women on the frank admission of the Ministry of Defence.
Would Britain, in a future war, be united and able to stand, or divided and prone to fall, with armed forces made up of the chaotic ethnic mix of which it is now composed? And would British citizens on the Home Front be able to behave in the calm, stoical and community-orientated way they did at the time of the Blitz in the early 1940s? Perhaps Sir Roy prefers not to consider such uncomfortable questions.
What is an invasion?
But there was another glaring oversight in Sir Roy's analysis obvious except to the purblind liberal. He spoke of invasions being ‘warded off’, but are the only invasions military ones? Is not any massive influx of foreign people over our borders, which portends huge and permanent changes in our national state of being, an invasion, quite regardless of whether it occurs by means of armed force or not? Elsewhere in this issue we shall focus on the threatened secession of the main part of America's south western area due to the encroachment of Hispanic immigrants over the past three or four decades. Had the same process occurred by means of an armed attack by the army of Mexico and the annexation by that country of the south western states of the US, no-one would think of describing it by any word other than invasion. Yet if these states are lost to the US by demographic conquest and a subsequent political ‘opting out’ by an Hispanic majority, the result would be no different. It seems futile to point out out to the likes of Sir Roy Strong that the same rule would apply to Britain; even if areas conquered and colonised by non British immigrants did not actually secede politically from the United Kingdom, but remained within it so that their people could continue to claim welfare benefits and other rights, they would cease to all intents and purposes to be British in the sense that we know the term. They would, in effect, have been invaded.
Sir Roy went on to speak of the rich cultural ‘heritage ’ which British people share, and alluded to Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Robert Burns and Dylan Thomas. He said that the British identity was one which he, as an Englishman, could share, not only with the Scots and the Welsh, "but others who have come to these shores, from Jews to Jamaicans..."
Frankly, this is pure drivel. Whatever one's individual preferences concerning writers like Wilde and Thomas, their works do belong to the authentic Anglo-Celtic-European cultural soil. But was Sir Roy seriously suggesting that there could ever have been a Jamaican Shakespeare, or for that matter a Jamaican Elgar, Turner or Christopher Wren? If he is, why have such immortal geniuses never emerged from that or any other Caribbean environment - or from out of the hundreds of millions who populate Black Africa or the Indian sub-continent from which Mrs. Perera has come?
Sir Roy concluded by speaking of his pride in his British identity, "an identity which it has taken centuries to forge and one which should not now be thrown away but rediscovered in all its pride of collective achievement."
Excellent sentiments! But where lies the danger of our identity now being thrown away? I suggest that it lies, not only in the political correctness of Tony Blair Cool Britannia culture, but also in the vast changes in our population that are now taking place through immigration of peoples culturally a whole world removed from us, and from the prolific birth rate of those of them already here. Yes, Sir Roy, our identity has taken centuries to forge; and what has forged it has been the merging and development of closely related North European peoples with only very minor ethnic variations between them. This identity will most surely be thrown away through similar merging between the native British and the mostly alien newcomers of the post-1945 period - just as prize dairy stocks will be destroyed by the interbreeding of them with stocks of wholly different origins and type. These truths are elementary to any farmer, and neglect of them would soon lead to ruin, but apparently when it comes to applying them to human species the subject is unfit even for decent discussion!
Life in the country
To Val Hennessy, another contributer, "the essence of Britishness is found where I live, in rural Britain." Miss Hennessy went on to speak of:- "Woods carpeted with bluebells, ringing with birdsong... you can't beat the beauty of our countryside, a pair of wellies, a pub lunch and walking the dog in a land of people who love dogs."
And there was more of the same: ancient churches; National Trust gardens; village stores; cream teas; coffee mornings; the singing of Handel's Messiah. Miss Hennessy expressed her infuriation that in Blair's Britain these things were scarcely understood, and I, for one, would not argue with her on that point.
But how do these images come to be regarded as intrinsic to Britain? Apart from the natural beauty of the countryside - which many nations, and indeed races, can claim of their native habitats - they are products of our own traditions and culture, which stem in turn from the type of people we are. Those who note with satisfaction that the British love dogs ought to go and see how dogs are treated in, for instance, India. Ancient churches? Yes, well, one will find churches of great beauty over most of Europe, though the beauty is often of a different kind. But what of Africa or the West Indies? Any churches of similar quality to be found in such places are certain to have been designed, and their construction overseen, by Whites. National Trust gardens? Another art form in which we British are unexcelled. Again, beautiful gardens may also be found in Continental Europe and lands overseas colonised and built up by Europeans. But where, except when created by white expatriates, are they to be found in the lands from which most recent migrants have come? Handel? Well, he was German but nonetheless European. Is there a West Indian Handel, or an Asian one? If so, I have yet to hear of him!
And if the red guards of multi-culturalism and multi-racialism have their way, Miss Hennessy may not for very much longer be hearing the Messiah in her village hall but may find that it has been replaced by gangsta rap, or some such new British musical idiom. I suspect that already that stirring sound can be heard across the local garden hedges by means of walkmans or in the pubs in response to the debased demand of the growing legions of morons who patronise such ports of call.
Inventors of cricket
Mihir Bose, by his own account, came to Britain as a young student. After his studies he had three choices: he could have gone to America, returned to India or stayed here. "I chose to stay here," he affirmed, "and have never regretted it."
That I would not doubt. A return to his homeland would not have been likely to enhance Mr. Bos's pay packet and living standards, so it was a case of Britain or the United States. Maybe his fondness for cricket ruled out the latter country. Anyway, Mr. Bose was very proud of being British, he said. But his pride was not in the great wars the country has won, or the nationalism that can so often turn to jingoism and violence. It is, he said, "in the cultural and scientific riches of this country and its sheer humanity."
All this deserves a little closer analysis. Pride in victorious wars cannot, to any intelligent person, go to make up the be all and end all of patriotism and a sense of national identity; but in the case of a country like Britain at least, it should form quite an important part. An element of our self-respect demands that when our courage has been put to the supreme test it has not been found wanting. Only the bully goes looking for war as an end in itself, but history demonstrates that armed struggle is a recurring feature of the lives of most nations, and it is no more than human to gain satisfaction from struggles in which we or our ancestors have performed well.
But of course, quite regardless of arguments as to how important military prowess is in the folklore of any nation, British military prowess and achievement are not part of Mr. Bose's folklore, no matter how he may protest to the contrary. That he should seek patriotic inspiration in the martial deeds of is own forebears, whatever they may be, would be understandable. But one can hardly expect him to gain any such inspiration from those of our forebears - especially when some of them were at the expense of his.
As for cultural and scientific riches, those of Britain may indeed by admired by the likes of Mr. Bose, but I find it difficult to see how he can be ‘proud’ of them. I might as well settle among Australian Aborigines and proclaim that I am ‘proud’ of their having invented the boomerang! It all gets us nowhere in defining national identity.
Flattery
Sheer humanity? It is at this point that we have to be careful, for what is happening is that we are being flattered. Native Britons, I am afraid to say, have an almost fatal weakness for this kind of compliment. It adds to our feel-good reserves just when we are most in need of them. Mrs. Perera knows that too, as she has demonstrated in her talk of an underlying temperance, a social tolerance. It is of course vital to those from outside who want our gates to remain open to them that Britons should be laid-back as to who comes through the gates. Of such a laid-back attitude all sorts of descriptions might apply: lazy, apathetic, cowardly, stupid, wishy-washy, unvigilant, unpatriotic, lacking in duty towards posterity - the list is extensive. But tell British people that they are these things and they might not like it. How much more comforting it is to their consciences to put it all down to their ‘humanity’ and their ‘underlying temperance’. In that way they can enjoy a little glow of self-righteousness instead of reproaching themselves for their failure to defend their frontiers and their heritage!
All this having been said, it is true that there is a certain humanity and temperance in Britons (and other Northern Europeans). Those things can be our strength or our weakness depending on circumstances. They are a strength when the need is for social cohension, respect for the law, polite behaviour, care for the very old and very young and other needy folk amongst us all civic virtues in times of national security and calm. On the other hand, when not carefully rationed and regulated this very same humanity and temperance can be a grave weakness in times of danger, when our national survival is under threat and we are beset by enemies who wish us ill. Prudent politics demand that we should not get carried away by slushy sentiment and dazzled by words when such things come into the equation but should know where the brake needs to be applied to them.
But this is not to say that when faced by enemies we have not usually displayed great humanity and temperance towards them. The British when victorious in war have generally taken their enemies prisoner and provided them with food, warmth and as humane conditions as circumstances have permitted a much kinder treatment than scalping them or putting them in the stewing pot. But this is the way we British are as a people. It stems from something in the race. Take away that racial ingredient, and there is no certainty that our captives would not have been subjected to much more barbaric practices.
For the future, we should endeavour to maintain the same standards of humanity in our dealings with other races, but this is very different from allowing them to walk all over us and take away our country.
Contradictory attitudes
Malcolm Bradbury, another writer, clearly wants it both ways, which might be because he wants to appeal to opposite sections of his reading public at the same time. His sense of Britishness, he said...
‘...derives from both sides in this political debate. I want, as a writer, to live in a cosmopolitan and creative nation, active in the energetic cultural life of the 21st century world.
‘But that surely means sustaining much that is distinctive about Britain: its peculiar traffic between tradition and change, elitism and democracy, the strength of its countryside and the traces of past human history. It means not letting our urgency to live in the electronic present destroy continuity with the Britain of the past.
‘Britishness for me is not being quite American, not being European. It means not over-emphasising the tradition, yet not discarding the past. Above all, it means hoping that the result of our growing energy and diversity is a society comfortable with, and optimistic about, itself.’
The amount of waffle in all this leaves one breathless, but there are a few things which call for comment. There is nothing uniquely British about the problem of reconciling tradition with the modernisation essential to national efficiency; every nation has to grapple with that, but some do it better than others. Wise statesmanship is most certainly needed here, and wise statesmanship is something which we in contemporary Britain have not got. The climate of dripping liberalism almost everywhere results in our constantly sacrificing the best of our traditions in pursuit of an efficiency which we seldom seem to achieve. It is the innate silliness of the liberal consensus which dictates that efficiency and tradition must inherently be in conflict with one another, whereas in more adult and mature cultures that is rarely so. Just what has the downgrading of Shakespeare in favour of Rasta poetry got to do with getting British industry and public services to run better?
Mr. Bradbury seems to feel that, as a writer, he needs to live in a nation that is cosmopolitan and creative, as if both those things hung essentially together. They do not. Perhaps the most culturally creative period in English history was the Elizabethan period, not one noted for being cosmopolitan. It is true, of course, that the greatest fertility of European culture has come from the influences of one highly developed national culture bearing upon another; but that is not the same thing as cosmopolitanism. Great European writers, poets, artists, musicians and architects have enriched their output through contact with the works of others of different nationality but within a framework of common race; and virtually all the great art of Europe bears the imprint of such contact. But how much has European culture been enriched by contact with that of Asia? Not a lot. And with Africa? Not at all. Nevertheless, when Mr. Bradbury spoke of cosmopolitanism he clearly meant multi-racialism, not the mere cross-fertilisation of European national cultures that has been taking place for centuries.
And what of Mr. Bradbury's reference to "the energetic cultural life of the 21st century world?" Here, it seems, he was confusing energy with deafening noise, lurid illustration, literary shock and outrage and mere architectural bigness.
But he also wanted, so he said, to sustain much that is distinctive about Britain. What does this mean in his language? Not being ‘quite American’, not being European in other words, being more American than European. Just how this tallies with British distinctiveness is not explained, but we must not be unfair to Mr. Bradbury. By this time he was running out of space.
The passage about a society being comfortable with... itself seems to come right out of the phrasebook of John Major. But is it an ideal to be aspired to? It all sounds too much to me like smugness, stagnation and contentedness with the second-rate and the inferior. A nation comfortable with itself seems to be one not disposed to strive to eliminate the rottenness within, to reach after new and expanding horizons, to excel. It all evokes the image of old age, when great ambitions have been renounced and a cosy chair by the fireside is the highest aim - not a state to be disparaged in individuals who get to that stage of life but hardly an ideal for nations which, to survive, must submit themselves to a constant process of renewal.
Light amid the fog
By far the most sensible contribution to the subject of Britishness came from Alan Massie. "I am British," he said, "because I am Scottish." And he continued:-
‘Some may see this as a paradox. It isn't. It is a fact of history. Likewise, William Hague is British because he is English. We are what we are as a consequence of centuries of history.
‘Some may resent this fact. But their resentment makes no difference...
‘My eight great-grandparents were all born, and lived all their lives, in Aberdeenshire. This reinforces my sense of Britishness because they, too, were inextricably British Scots...
‘Then I am a child of the Empire, which was always the British Empire, never the English or, indeed, Scottish Empire. At the age of 19 my father went out to be assistant manager of a rubber estate in Malaya...
‘I am British because I recognise how, over three centuries at least, Scotsmen and Englishmen have influenced each other.
‘The Romantic Movement, which in the early 19th century produced the finest flowering of English poetry since the Elizabethan Age, had its roots in Scotland.
‘The greatest moral force in Victorian England was a Dumfriesshire peasant's son, Thomas Carlyle. We have helped form each other, Scots and English; and what we have formed is British.’
Nowhere here, of course, is there mention of the dreaded word race, but one gets the feeling that it was not far from Mr. Massie's mind when he wrote the words. He is British because he belongs, ethnically, to one of the most vital and valuable components of the British Nation and ipso facto to the British ethnic Nation as a whole. At last we were getting somewhere near the core of the matter, even if Mr Massie, as a professional journalist, had to be a bit careful about his choice of words.
He spoke of the British being "a consequence of centuries of history." That is of course true, though it is not the whole truth. The American people are the consequence of their (fewer) centuries of history, and in their case that is nearly the whole truth. But in the case of us British the historical process happened to jell with ethnic homogeneity and compatibility - and was in fact primarily a consequence of those things. This makes our identity all the stronger, if only we rediscover the will to assert it.
Definitions absurd
So, out of six definitions published by a national newspaper of what Britishness means we have just one which makes a bit of sense, and out of the other five we get two provided by people who by no stretch of imagination are British. O tempora, O mores!
All of this just illustrates the world of fantasy in which the media dwell, but to some extent even the media are the victims of concepts of Britain which would seem absurd even to Continentals, most of whom know the meaning of nationality quite clearly.
Go to most parts of Europe and you will find refreshingly commonsense and down to earth definitions of what a nation is: it is, according to such definitions, a community of people distinguished by an ethnic identity, that is to say people belonging to a particular biological type, recognisable by physical characteristics, mentality, language, culture and norms of behaviour. Of these things, the last three can be acquired through environmental influences - but only within the boundaries imposed by the first two. These are truths that can, and should, be accepted whatever one's political views about the race issue may be. In former Yugoslavia, for instance, it is well understood that a Albanian Kosovan does not become a Serb merely by living in Serbia and learning the Serbo-Croat tongue. These two nationalities are also distinct races. It is not considered beyond the realms of polite conversation to state the fact.
Even in Britain we were not always so daft about this matter. My main dictionary is Chambers's Twentieth Century, published in 1934 but not much changed since the first edition of it appeared in 1896. There nation is described as what it is: "a body of people born of the same stock", and later: ‘a race.’
By this definition, Britons can be Scots - as is Alan Massie, English - as is William Hague, or Anglo-Irish with a bit of Scots as I am. They can be these things because the stocks in question are close enough to be considered as of the same racial family. They cannot, remotely, be Sri Lankans, Indians, Jamaicans or people of any other stock hundreds of centuries removed, in anthropological and evolutionary terms, from the peoples of Europe. This is not to ‘hate’ them. It is not to suggest ill-treating them. It is only to recognise difference.
We therefore return to the definition of Britishness which I ventured in these columns two months ago: We British are the indigenous peoples of the British Isles. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.




GREECE: Illegal Muslim invaders say, “We deserve respect.” “Don’t insult our prophet or our quran.” Or else!


Greece is on the verge of bankruptcy, and this flood of Muslims, mostly illegals from Turkey and Albania, bring nothing to the economy except crime and a growing class of parasites and entitlement whores.

RIOTING MUSLIMS ATTACK ATHENS POLICE WITH STONES, GARBAGE AND WHATEVER ELSE THEY CAN FIND

Athens Police are so overwhelmed by the Muslim scourge that they turn a blind eye when right wing nationalist groups like Golden Dawn intervene against the invaders.

Digital Journal  This time the riots were against a film produced in the U.S. that denigrates Islam’s paedophile prophet Mohammed. Greek riot police used tear gas and pepper spray to disperse Muslim protesters who clashed with officers Sunday during a rally. Usually the riots are about the government not giving them enough free stuff. 

Around 1,000 Muslims hurled bottles and other objects at police that were trying to prevent the rioters descending on the U.S. Embassy. Protesting Muslims gathered in Omonia Square holding banners proclaiming “We demand an immediate punishment for those who tried to mock our Prophet Mohammed”  Shouting “Allah is great” they assaulted police with bottles, stones and slabs of marble they broke from the sidewalks, as police tried to prevent the protesters approaching the U.S. Embassy.

Inside Britain's terror cells: A chilling insight into how gangs of convicted terrorists recruit prisoners for Al Qaeda - and the courageous men and women sent in to 'turn' them.


To reach the heart of HM Prison Belmarsh is a bleak and time-consuming process. It means a thorough search at the gate, the issuing of a special biometric identity card, and a long, repetitive journey through successive electronic gates in the vast, brick-built perimeter and concentric layers of razor-wire fence. It is a journey down long, harshly echoing corridors to the centre of a maximum-security onion.
It is also an education in the technology of control – from control rooms linked to CCTV cameras scanning every cranny to the special BOSS (Body Orifice Security System) chairs that will sound an alarm if the person sitting in them has hidden a forbidden item – for example, a mobile phone – inside them.
It is at once unnerving and reassuring – reassuring because Belmarsh houses some of the most dangerous men in Britain.
A Muslim prisoner prays in his cell. Nearly one in five prisoners at Belmarsh now claims Muslim allegiance
A Muslim prisoner prays in his cell. Nearly one in five prisoners at Belmarsh now claims Muslim allegiance
One of them is Abu Hamza, Britain’s least-loved prisoner. The one-eyed, hook-handed extremist Muslim preacher has been at the high-security prison for the past eight years.
He might well be leaving soon. He has already served a sentence for inciting terrorism and racial hatred and the European Court of Human Rights on Monday cleared the way for his long-pending deportation to America, where he faces further charges of involvement in a murder plot. (On Wednesday Hamza made an application against his extradition, the High Court temporarily barred it and his appeal is due to be outlined at a hearing early next week.)
Even while incarcerated, he is said to have tried to disseminate his poisonous message, both inside and outside the jail.

Few staff at the South-East London prison will mourn his departure, but the problem he came to symbolise will remain. To use Whitehall jargon, when Hamza leaves, about 110 ‘AQI’ (Al Qaeda-influenced) ‘TACT’ (Terrorism Act) prisoners will remain here and at other British prisons. Some of the hundreds of other Muslim inmates in our highest-security jails revere these figures and they are widely feared.
Nearly one in five prisoners at Belmarsh now claims Muslim allegiance. In the space of little more than a decade, gangs speaking the language of jihad have become the biggest grouping in Britain’s jails, intimidating staff and fellow prisoners. The danger that they may spread their ideology cannot be ignored.
Such is the magnitude of that threat, the Prison Service has been pushed to devise a new, more radical approach: not only enhanced security measures, but a concerted theological and  psychological effort to counter extremist inmates. The programme is the first of its kind in the world.
Hard talk: Reporter David Rose interviews a Muslim inmate at Whitemoor prison
Hard talk: Reporter David Rose interviews a Muslim inmate at Whitemoor prison
Over the past six weeks, The Mail on Sunday has been granted exclusive access to the ‘high-security estate’ – the eight prisons, including Belmarsh and Whitemoor, near March, Cambridgeshire, which house the ‘Category A’ inmates deemed to pose the greatest potential risk – to see at first hand the new front-line of Britain’s war on extremist violence. 
‘In a word, yes, I’m scared of intimidation – not only for myself in here, but for my family, and for what might happen if and when I get out. To stick your neck out and engage with the prison authorities and go on their courses without a “get out of jail free” card – well, it’s an issue, a risk.’
I’m sitting in a bare, locked meeting room in another high-security prison with Karim (not his real name), an AQI, TACT offender. He’s serving time for a plot which might, if successful, have led to many deaths. But in order to get him to agree to speak to me, I’ve had to promise that I will write nothing that could identify him, what he did, or where he is being held. What he has to say is fascinating, all the same.
'Regular' gangsters are bonding with Muslims
 
‘Coming to your senses doesn’t happen in a moment: it’s not as if you just click your fingers. It takes a lot of time and courage. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I took a very wrong turning. It has been traumatic, first coming into prison, and then coming to terms with what I’ve done, and finally to let all this out when I’m under constant pressure not to.
‘But this course has given me the means to look at myself, and to gain perspective. It’s been a massive burden off my shoulders, a breath of fresh air.’ 
The central Extremism Unit based at the Ministry of Justice is now implementing a three-pronged campaign across its ‘high-security estate’.
Its first element is perhaps the least surprising: an enhanced security and prison intelligence ‘toolkit’, involving much closer liaison between the jails, police and MI5.
The other two elements break entirely new ground, however. One is an effort to enlist Muslim prison chaplains (imams) in a carefully structured theological struggle against extremism. In their meetings on the wings with prisoners, through courses of religious study and in their sermons at Friday prayers, the imams are trying to counter the jihadist interpretation of Islam.
‘I’m engaged in this battle every day,’ says Tariq Mahmood, the head of the prison chaplaincy at Whitemoor. He has written and introduced his own general  religious courses and also runs a specific programme for TACT prisoners. Known as al-Furqan, this attacks the Islamic justification for terrorism using sacred texts, and has been developed by a noted Egyptian scholar.
Britain's least-loved prisoner, Abu Hamza: The extremist Muslim preacher has been in the high-security prison for eight years
Britain's least-loved prisoner, Abu Hamza: The extremist Muslim preacher has been in the high-security prison for eight years
Mahmood is realistic about the size of his task: ‘I know that some prisoners will always view me negatively, because I am a government imam. With the person who was ready to blow himself up, I can’t be sure I have changed him. But I can say I have shown him another way, and that their theology is wrong.
‘I don’t have a thought detector, so I don’t know what’s happening in a prisoner’s mind. I just have the hope that through honesty and prayer, I can lead them towards self-improvement.’
The last of the three elements is psychological: the deployment of ‘interventions,’ in which experienced prison psychologists or probation officers first explore and then contest the deep-seated origins of TACT offenders’ beliefs. In the process, the Prison Service has acquired something valuable: a large bank of knowledge about the diverse paths that have led AQI offenders to wage violent jihad.
‘Until very recently, the assumption made by prison staff was that as a TACT offender, I was simply the enemy,’ says Karim. ‘I must love Osama Bin Laden, and if I sat down with someone for dinner, I was trying to form a gang.
‘The attitude was, “We’re going to assume you’re the worst of the worst,” and there really wasn’t much interest in looking at the individual reasons for why I am here.’ Understandable as those assumptions were, they were self-defeating in the end. Not all TACT offenders are the same. 
Psychological programmes have been available in jail for years, and thousands of prisoners have passed through them, with good research evidence that ‘cognitive-behavioural’ courses to deal with issues such as anger management make jail life calmer and cut re-offending rates.
But if a way was going to be found to use such methods  to tackle AQI extremism, the first step had to be to develop a reliable means to tell TACT offenders apart.
The result, after four years’ work, was an intensive assessment method known as ERG22+ – the letters stand for Extremism Risk Guidance, while the 22+ refers to the number of separate factors examined. Built up through months of interviews with inmates, ERG requires the psychologist to dig deep into an offender’s life story, allowing an assessment of his past and current risk under three headings:
Engagement (what has motivated him to be involved with extremism?)
Intent (what, given a chance, would he be willing to do for jihad?)
Capability (has he, for example, learnt bomb-making?).
United front: The multi-faith chaplaincy team at Whitemoor prison, with, far right, its manager imam Tariq Mahmood
United front: The multi-faith chaplaincy team at Whitemoor prison, with, far right, its manager imam Tariq Mahmood
Changing lives: Three imams at Belmarsh prison. Some prisoners will always view them negatively, because they are government imams
Changing lives: Three imams at Belmarsh prison. Some prisoners will always view them negatively, because they are government imams
By March next year, all 110 TACT prisoners will have gone through this process. About one third – the more dangerous and ideologically ruthless – have simply refused to co-operate. But with some who have, the results have been remarkable.
At Whitemoor, head psychologist Natasha Sargeant has been piloting ERG22+ for the past 19 months.
‘The biggest surprise has been how much they wanted to talk,’ she says. ‘In some cases, there’s been this huge sense of relief at having an opportunity to explain and understand how they got involved, and then to do something about it.’
Crucial to the scheme’s success is the need to build trust, a process which takes ‘at least’ six months. ‘For most of them, it’s the first time they started to engage with any kind of prison programme.
‘In some ways, that may not be a bad thing: I’m not sure some of these offenders would have been ready to talk if they hadn’t already spent years reflecting, and when a TACT prisoner first arrives, there’s an awful lot to process – the very fact you’ve been convicted of a terrorist offence, for example, how you’re going to be perceived or how you’re going to survive.’
Some inmates, for the time being at least, show little sign of wanting to moderate their fanatical beliefs. But others, says Sargeant, have ‘opened the path towards change’. For them, the next step, also piloted at Whitemoor, is the Healthy Identities Intervention (HII) – many more months of intensive sessions in which the psychologists build on the disclosures the inmate has made in his ERG.
These prisoners, she says, are mainly young men who became ‘trapped by an ideology’ at traumatic, vulnerable points in their lives, and so absorbed a ‘distorted message of what it means to be a Muslim: that you’re not a true Muslim unless you’re also a jihadist. As with all human beings, if these beliefs are not challenged, they will be reinforced’.
A Muslim prisoner prays in his cell
A Muslim prisoner prays in his cell
Through exploration of the insecurities and political beliefs that led the prisoner to join a terrorist cell, HII aims to rebuild their outlook on the world, or as Chris Dean, head of the Extremism Team at the Prison Service’s national psychological unit, puts it, ‘to give them alternatives’ to the status and sense of belonging they had derived from joining the jihad. There are, he says, ‘considerable overlaps’ with the work some psychologists undertake with members of religious cults.
Those alternatives aren’t merely political. Through HII, Dean says, AQI prisoners have developed much better relationships with their families, and filled the gap once occupied by fanaticism with prison education.
Of course, as Sargeant admits, some inmates may ‘go through the motions’ of participating in ERG and HII in the hope of one day impressing the Parole Board: ‘But such people tend to trip themselves up. Or they can’t stop themselves from doing what we call “offence paralleling”: lording it over others on the wings; shouting slogans out of windows.’
So what lessons have been learnt? Like non-TACT criminals, Dean says, their routes to their offences are diverse. Some, for example, were already involved in crime and, for them, extremism offered a way of justifying violence, of avoiding responsibility for their behaviour.
Others still have learning difficulties, mental-health issues, or simply a need for acceptance. ‘The group meets their personal needs, provides their sense of identity, of belonging and significance. Sometimes it’s about trying to maintain that more than anything else, and the actual cause doesn’t matter.’
His analysis is backed by Karim. ‘Some TACT prisoners are very much like other offenders. They use their ideology to justify the business they do.’ But what he passionately wants to get across is the beneficial role he sees for HII and ERG: ‘The hard guys still full of bravado.
They say, “Don’t engage, don’t go on the courses, they’re run by the psychobabes [prison slang for psychologists] and they’re just going to stitch you up.” But it’s not true. And if they can’t knock the integrity of all this, eventually they’ll lose the argument.’
‘It’s definitely one of the biggest challenges the prison service has ever faced,’ says Belmarsh’s governor, Phil Wragg. ‘We thought we were well-versed in dealing with ordinary criminal gangs, but this  is something much bigger, and  it comes on the back of the 7/7  atrocities, in the wake of terror. We knew we had to be safe, not sorry. But what did safe look like? It took a little while to work that out.’
Like the other officials I met, he was under no illusions about the deadly influence a handful of determined AQI TACT prisoners could all too easily wield.
High-security prison HMP Belmarsh. In the space of little more than a decade, gangs speaking the language of jihad have become the biggest grouping in Britain's jails, intimidating staff and fellow prisoners
High-security prison HMP Belmarsh. In the space of little more than a decade, gangs speaking the language of jihad have become the biggest grouping in Britain's jails, intimidating staff and fellow prisoners
‘We used to have a great deal of intelligence about the problem, but nowhere for it to go,’ Wragg says. ‘We weren’t sure how to use it. That has changed.’
Paul Cawkwell, governor of Whitemoor, says: ‘My job isn’t to make escape difficult. It is to make it absolutely impossible.’
Of the British population as a whole, about four per cent is Muslim. But in high-security prisons, the proportion is much greater: at Whitemoor, 41 per cent, and at Belmarsh, 19 per cent. Some of their families are of Pakistani origin, but many are Afro-Caribbean or white, Caucasian converts. Across the whole prison system, roughly 1,500 inmates have joined Islam while incarcerated.
The need for stringent measures is clear. ‘We had one TACT prisoner who was a top-end proselytiser,’ says the senior officer in charge of Belmarsh’s Counter-Terrorism Unit, who asked not to be named. ‘He was brilliant at it. He’d get someone vulnerable, not an experienced prisoner, and offer him protection and support through religion. He’d build a rapport over a long period: it’s what he lived for. And then from that, influence his idea of what it means to be a Muslim.’
Every day we go into battle with the 'heavy players' - terrorists at the top of the prison pecking order

 
Muslims, he adds, ‘are now at the top of the pecking order, the internal prisoner hierarchy. And the TACT inmates are at the summit’.
Governor Wragg recalls another Belmarsh TACT prisoner who used to go to Church of England and Catholic church services, as well as Muslim Friday prayers.
‘He said he was doing it for educational reasons. What he was actually doing was preaching, not on a weekly but a daily basis, recruiting in the yard. He had been urging people to join the fight in Afghanistan on the outside – and he just carried on doing it here.’
Wragg says his staff have come across worrying examples of bonding between TACT offenders and ‘regular’ gangsters, some of whom are Muslim converts.
‘We had one guy, a notorious  murderer, who’d been the head of a powerful street gang.
‘Very soon after he came here, he became a front-runner in the Muslim extremist hierarchy. But even if they don’t convert, the members of organised gangs form alliances, simply because the Muslims are such a big group.’ The ‘challenge’, to use Wragg’s word, is not new. I spent several days at Whitemoor on a previous occasion, and found that the large Muslim contingent, at the time 35 per cent, had assumed many of the features of an organised prison gang. 
‘Some join them because they’re weak,’ one non-Muslim London gangster told me, complaining about how the pecking order had changed to his disadvantage. For a man like him, respect was no longer automatic. ‘Say we were having a fight, and I was a Muslim and you’re not. It wouldn’t be a fair fight, because the next thing you’d know, there’d be half a dozen of them on you.’
Prison convert: 'Shoe Bomber' Briton Richard Reid was jailed in 2002
Prison convert: 'Shoe Bomber' Briton Richard Reid was jailed in 2002
I also witnessed first-hand the menace exuded by a man who was serving a long sentence for TACT crimes. His muscles bulging from heavy gym use, he strode the prison landings as if he owned them. He said he knew he was likely to die in prison, but believed he was there to spread his extremist message. ‘For me, it’s like a decree from God. Whatever it is, I’m happy with it.’
The problem hasn’t only been described by journalists. In May, an authoritative study of Whitemoor  led by Professor Alison Liebling of Cambridge University concluded  that ‘heavy players’ in the Muslim population were ‘orchestrating prison power dynamics’.
Muslims, she wrote, were not only sponsoring coerced conversions, but intimidating non-Muslims so that they were afraid to fry bacon in the wing kitchens. They have also taken to wearing boxer shorts in the showers for fear of causing offence.
Until now, the only case of someone becoming a terrorist after converting to Islam in a British prison is that of Richard Reid, the London petty criminal who almost succeeded in detonating a shoe bomb aboard an airliner in 2001. But it is all too plausible that others are waiting to follow his example.
According to Liebling, who carried out her research between 2009 and early 2011, most Muslim prisoners were so ignorant about their faith, that ‘those with extremist views could fill a gap with misinformation . . . support for moderate interpretations of Islam was muted’.
With about 110 TACT prisoners across the country, most serving life or long fixed terms, the challenge of prison extremism is not about to go away. Like AQI terrorism itself, it is also international.
America already offers a chilling vision of what might lie in wait, as described in last week’s special edition of the Prison Service Journal on  ‘Combating Extremism and Terrorism’.
Professor Mark Hamm of Indiana University writes of recent developments in America, where ‘more than a dozen [prison] converts to Islam have been indicted for waging terrorist plots since 9/11’.
One California prisoner told him: ‘People are recruiting on the yard every day. It’s scandalous. Everybody’s glorifying Osama Bin Laden.’
Many of the AQI offenders now resident in our high-security prisons are young, and they will be there for decades. Doing nothing is not an option.
The religious and psychological courses are all experimental, and while initial, as yet unpublished evaluations suggest they are having a positive effect, it would not be wise to rely on them to curb the threat of extremism on their own.
'I can show him another way - and teach him his theology is wrong'
 
Hence the toolkit – which Ruth Stephens, Whitemoor’s security chief, describes as a new and effective means of identifying the most dangerous inmates, and where necessary, to take action.
Many of its details are classified, but it is clear from talking to officials that it involves high levels of surveillance and analysis of prisoners’ communications, not only with people outside, but with each other. TACT offenders, Stephens says, may be at the top of the pecking order, but only a small minority of them ‘are actively engaged in trying to influence others’.
Some of them, however – as Liebling found – use proxies: an ‘inner circle’ of associates convicted of non-terrorist crimes. The improved security system, says Wragg at Belmarsh, enables prisons to be ‘smarter’, not to assume that any gathering of Muslims is up to no good – but to be aware when it is.
The initiative also sponsors regular ‘multi-agency’ meetings with other counter-terrorist bodies, such as the police and the secret services.
‘We’re much more of a partner at the table now,’ Wragg says. ‘We’re supplying information to the other agencies at these meetings, not just receiving it.’
When it does become apparent that an inmate is trying to spread extremist ideology, he adds, there is the usual range of sanctions: withdrawal of privileges such as television and access to cooking facilities, and, if necessary, moving a prisoner, either to another wing or prison.
Is it all starting to work? Prof  Liebling and her team recently returned to Whitemoor, and she says she is optimistic, partly because it is evident that her earlier, critical report is being taken seriously and acted on.
‘We were struck by the changes we found, in particular by the role of faith and faith identities in relationships.’
Whitemoor’s governor Cawkwell points to other, harder evidence. Although the proportion of Muslims has increased, this is not as a result  of conversion, but simply Islam’s  popularity among recent arrivals – mainly young, very violent gangsters from London.
In fact, this year, the highest rate of conversions in his jail has been to Judaism, which has six new adherents, a function, it appears, of the fact that prisoners who describe themselves as Jewish can get better, more expensive food.
Meanwhile, the past year has seen the lowest number of assaults in Whitemoor’s 21-year history, as well as a record low staff sickness rate. As for cooking bacon and feeling free to shower naked, these are now ‘red lines’, Cawkwell says. Prisoners objecting to such behaviour will not be tolerated.
It doesn’t mean the challenge has been ‘solved’. With 81 per cent of Whitemoor prisoners serving either life or indeterminate sentences for public protection, it never will be.
On the other hand, as Governor Wragg puts it: ‘Though you do need a no-holds barred approach, I believe we have now got the confidence to ask our staff to go out on the landings and, where necessary, push back.’