Abu Hamza: A Very British Kind of Pariah

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Readers, this is my new column. Dedicated to 3AM thinking: to those nights when I toss and turn in my bed, and my train of thought derails, catches fire, falls off a cliff and there are no survivors.

GAVIN HAYNES' SLEEPLESS NIGHTS #2: ABU HAMZA, A VERY BRITISH KIND OF PARIAH

We've all preached some kind of hate in our time. For me, it was standing outside a Chicken Cottage in Barnet, telling a small crowd that Presbyterians were tight and the most likely denomination to buy their clothes from Marks & Spencer (that's not a prejudice, that's just a statistical fact).

For Abu Hamza, it was the years 1997 to 2004. As he stands in the dock in New York, having been chased there personally by the Queen, he might reminisce that his was not a particularly long innings, as hate preaching careers go. But it was a particularly fine one. Not a Mike Atherton-style grind towards the mid-forties – no, this was a Graham Swann coming-in-at-number-six slogfest; knocking those hate-bombs out of the park. Bin Laden? “Hero.” 9/11? “Great day in history.” The destruction of the Columbia space shuttle? “Allah's punishment of a trinity of evil.” Take Me Out? “Worse than Red Or Black.”

If you wanted to know who a good Muslim should wage jihad against in the early 00s, the only place to be was Finsbury Park mosque. And the only preacher to listen to was the guy who could get a stone out of a horse's hoof, no trouble.

The cricket reference is not for nothing: In his own way, Abu Hamza was a very British pariah. Only Britain's panto media could have dredged him out of our collective unconsciousness. He may have had his citizenship personally revoked by David Blunkett, but in reality, this Egyptian-born man now bound to die in the US is as British as Neil Morrissey in Union Jack boxer shorts or an ex-pat pub in the Algarve. In the same way that Britain's size and outward-facing capital is what made us the best in the world at producing and then warming pop groups to hysterical, teen-baiting boiling point, so too it is that we're just big enough to be able to produce hate-mongers with real character.

In any other country, a man with fewer than usual arms would not be so widely feared. In Britain, the national fascination with "the other" has awarded him the freedom, the luxury to become a sort of David Bowie of jihad. With habitual perversity we worshipped his eccentricity. We gasped as he paraded around before us with his outlandish costumes and miscoloured eye. We loved him for his Bond villain mugging and gnomic phrasings. Like Bowie with Lou, Kraftwerk and Iggy, Hamza gambled and won on his own wild, sinister and strange trifecta: the Chechen Beslan hostage-takers, 9/11's "20th Man" Zacarias Moussaoui and the shoe-bomber, Richard Reid. He had an eye for talent and buckets of charisma. The girls loved him and the boys wanted to be him. He was the one your parents warned you about. He gave us the ride of our lives.

Look at the photos of him in his youth: back in the days when he was a bouncer outside a Soho peep show. He may have only been preaching, "Look, you can't come in here with those trainers, mate," but you could see the Fat Dark Duke he'd become, even in those Pin Ups years.

Here was that age-old story of immigrant-done-good writ large. A veritable who's who of MI5's budget-sapping surveillance targets passed through Finsbury Park, as, presumably, did a lot of budget-sapping MI5 surveillance agents. When they banned him from preaching inside, he simply went and preached just outside the gates with his disciples. And we all know that's exactly what Jesus would've done, had he too been keen on destabilising the Yemeni government.

When he first came to Britain to study, he reportedly considered the country "a paradise where you can do whatever you want". Well, he did do exactly what he wanted. And, in the end, he got caught. But in the meantime, Great British liberalism and Great British pluralism cast their protective wings over him. There is nothing we love more, after all, than a cuckoo in the cultural nest.

In fact, Hamza has always revelled in his celebrity status to the extent that perhaps the worst fate of all for him is his coming anonymity. "You do know he's absolutely massive across the pond, right?" a bunch of well-placed tipsters will go. But we all know that, deep down, he'll be received in the US in the same way that Robbie Williams, Oasis, Cheryl Cole or anyone else who's British, but isn't Adele, has been received there in the last 30 years. "Eh?" America will go, before refixing their gaze on whoever the terror equivalent of Taylor Swift is.

And what of those aforementioned ex-pats? Who's Abu gonna knock around with? David Beckham won't shake his hand (footballers are notoriously bad at that). Piers Morgan will pretend not to know him when he sees him in the bodega. I doubt they'll even have a useable copy of that file photo that The Sun runs every time he does something – the one where he's holding up his bad hand and his good eye is perfectly framed inside the crescent of the hook.

No. Instead, he will simply be another one of the many terror-fomenters presently being magnetised back to the US for crimes both real and imagined, by means both legal and completely fucked up. He'll be a couple of lines at the bottom of page three of USA Today, a short trial to keep the liberals happy, then flung in the terror disposal unit along with the likes of old pal Richard Reid. Destined to spend the rest of his days in the Colorado ADX, where everyone does 23 hours a day in solitary with one hour for exercise, then repeats this pattern for as long as they shall live. Weekends not optional.

Reid would probably like to say "thanks for the inspiration", but after nine years as bomber-in-res, if you met him right now, he probably wouldn't be able to tell you his own name, let alone what he was ever accused of. After a decade perfectly solo, his brains must be little more than cranial Angel Delight. God knows how much faeces he's smeared up the walls.

Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes

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