Well, it’s only taken a quarter of a century, but Britain has finally put one of its most ardent and outspoken Islamist terror supporters behind bars for life.
According to the Associated Press, 57-year-old Anjem Choudary received a life sentence in Woolwich Crown Court on Tuesday for his role directing the terrorist group al-Muhajiroun, also known as ALM.
The group was effectively banned in the U.K. in 2010, long after Choudary and others associated with it had become notorious for their promotion of the organization and its offshoots.
While Choudary said he’d left the organization in 2004, according to the BBC, prosecutors provided evidence that he was still acting as an effective leader of the group as late as July 2023, when he gave a series of online lectures to an American offshoot of ALM.
Justice Mark Wall bought the prosecution’s version and said Choudary “was front and center in running a terrorist organization,” which “encouraged young men into radical activity,” the AP reported.
“Your actions while directing Al-Muhajiroun ran the risk of causing or contributing to the deaths of very many people,” Wall said.
“In addition, by running an organization such as Al-Muhajiroun, you contributed in a significant way to the fear of terrorist attack by radical Islamic organizations, which then existed in this country and abroad.”
ALM was founded in 1996 and underwent a series of name changes over its lifetime. It was first banned under the name Al Ghurabaa in 2006 by the United Kingdom’s home secretary; in 2010, ALM was listed as an alias for the organization, according to the BBC.
Choudary has made no secret of his views. In 2016, he was sentenced for supporting a banned organization — namely, the Islamic State group, which controlled a wide swath of the Middle East at the time and ran it as a de facto caliphate, with the public beheadings to boot.
Was this a just sentence?
During his trial, Choudary tried to explain away a 2014 tweet in which he said “Allah bless Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the Khalifah” — in reference to the former Islamic State group leader. He told the jury that he really believed that al-Baghdadi had established a caliphate under Islamic law. (If only he’d called al-Baghdadi an “austere religious scholar,” as The Washington Post infamously did when he died in 2019, maybe he’d gotten away with it.)
The problem is, given Choudary’s history, he may really view the Islamic State group’s barbaric reign as the apotheosis of what a true Islamic state might indeed look like to him.
In a copy of his sentencing remarks, Justice Wall said that he must “consider whether you are a dangerous offender.
“I have no doubt that you are. I watched you give evidence for about a week. You are an intelligent man and a persuasive speaker to those who are open to the messages of hate which you spread,” he said.
“You are a man of great determination who has continued to pursue your aims despite your previous conviction for a terrorist offense and subsequent imprisonment. You have no doubt as to the rectitude of your views. Your views are entrenched and abhorrent to most right-thinking people. It was chilling to hear as part of the evidence at trial your denial of the Holocaust, and your joking about the 9/11 attacks which remarks I am sure were designed to signify approval for what happened that day in New York.”
Furthermore, Wall found that Choudary became leader of ALM upon the departure of his mentor, Omar Bakhri Mohammed, to Lebanon in 2014 until his arrest in 2023.
However, as early as 1999, Choudary, the Indian Express reported, was telling the media that insurgents fighting for Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front in Chechnya were receiving training on British soil.
He told reporters conducting an undercover investigation that jihadists, “before they go abroad to fight for organizations like the IIF, the volunteers are trained in Britain. Some of the training does involve guns and live ammunition.”
And, if you needed a spokesman for Islamic extremism, the British media were all too happy to have him on to spread his views — such as this 2010 interview with Jeremy Paxman, one of the U.K.’s most distinguished TV interviewers:
If you needed to know what this guy was about — in 1999, in 2010, or in 2024 — he was more than happy to tell you, in other words. And Britain was more than happy to listen, even though evidence connected him to terrorist groups for years.
Now, he’ll have the rest of his life to spread this message to the prison population. At least it’s where he belongs.
