If this zealot can stun John Humphrys into silence we really do need a change in the law
Abu Izzadeen has had, in his terms, a good week. First of all he shouted down John Reid, the Home Secretary, as he gave a speech to an audience of Muslims in east London. Then he came close to doing what no one else has done: reducing John Humphrys, the notoriously aggressive interviewer of Radio 4's Today programme, to stunned silence.
Mr Humphrys is used to exposing the equivocations and evasions of politicians. But Mr Izzadeen did not equivocate: he called John Reid "a murderer", said Tony Blair was "a terrorist" and "an enemy to Muslims and an enemy of Allah". Mr Izzadeen insisted that he couldn't care less about free speech, and that he would only observe "the Islamic process, not the democratic process". Allah "created the UK: it doesn't belong to you, or to the Queen, or to the Government, but to Allah. He has put us on earth to implement Sharia law."
At that point, you could almost hear John Humphrys's jaw drop.
You could hardly blame him. Most of those listening were in a state of shock too. Mr Izzadeen's bigoted religious intolerance was breathtaking. It was a salutary reminder of what the ideologues of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism actually believe. This is not a movement, as some claim, precipitated by British foreign policy. It is not a stand against "oppression" or a cry for "greater respect". Its goals are far more extensive: dismantling our secular, pluralist and tolerant democracy and replacing it with Sharia law and an Islamic state.
Mr Izzadeen (the name means "Might of the Faith") is a convert to Islam. He was born Trevor Brooks in Hackney, east London 31 years ago, to parents who had emigrated from Jamaica. Before he discovered Allah, Brooks/Izzadeen used to be an electrician. Five days before the suicide bombings of 7/7, he told a meeting of the "Saviour Sect", a group he claims to lead, that Muslims had to "instill terror into the hearts of the kuffar" (an insulting term for non-believers). He added that: "I am a terrorist. As a Muslim, of course I am a terrorist. I want to be blown to pieces with my hands in one place and my feet in another." After the 7/7 murders, another member of that sect said that they were all justified, because the victims were guilty of capital crimes: they did not abide by strict Islamic laws.
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The fanatical zealotry of men such as Mr Izzadeen raises the question of how effective the criminal law can be against them. In 2003, for instance, Abdullah el-Faisal was tried and found guilty of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred. His views and objectives were similar to those of the "Saviour Sect": the establishment of Sharia law and an Islamic state in Britain. He advocated the murder of Jews and the use of chemical weapons to "exterminate non-believers".
El-Faisal was given nine years in prison, a sentence that shocked many civil libertarians, who thought that all he had done was to "exercise his right to free speech". His lawyers appealed: they managed to get his sentence reduced to seven years. But el-Faisal's time in jail will soon be up. Under the Government's regulations, every prisoner is entitled to be considered for early release halfway through his sentence. Given the time he spent on remand awaiting trial, el-Faisal has now reached that point.
The Home Office is expected to have to release him soon. Yet does anyone seriously believe that he has moderated his views in any way? Or that he will be any less devoted to what he has said is his "Islamic duty": the destruction of secular democracy in Britain, and its replacement by an Islamic state under Sharia law? Men such as el-Faisal are not just the cheerleaders of terrorism: they are its midwives. He is believed to have had a powerful influence on Jermaine Lindsay, the 19-year-old who murdered 26 people when he blew himself up on the underground train at King's Cross on 7/7.
The Government is aware that the criminal law is not fully equipped to deal with the threat we face from men such as el-Faisal. That is why Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, stated last week that the law should be changed to make evidence from wire-taps admissable in court. The change is long overdue. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, is said to oppose it on the grounds that it would expose her service's methods, with the result that criminals and terrorists would stop using the telephone, or at least switch to mobiles that are harder to trace.
The experience of other jurisdictions in which eavesdropping evidence is used regularly, however, does not support that contention: members of the mafia in the United States, for instance, have not stopped using the telephone since John Gotti was convicted more than a decade ago, largely on the evidence of what he said on the phone. In Britain, television provides a constant reminder of the effectiveness of hidden tape-recorders and cameras: almost every week, there is a programme that involves their use to expose, or allege, wrongdoing. It does not stop criminals falling for the same trick over and over again.
Lord Goldsmith emphasised that if the law is altered to make wire-tapping evidence admissable in court, there also need to be provisions that prevent the security service's techniques from being revealed, and which stop the organisation from being overwhelmed by requests for "disclosure" from defence lawyers. It is harder than it sounds to achieve those goals while preserving the right to a fair trial. It was partly the difficulty in crafting legislation to have that effect which persuaded the Americans that the criminal law could not be effective in dealing with Islamic terrorists.
Andy McCarthy, who prosecuted Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in 1995 for their part in the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre, notes bitterly that he discovered during the trial that "when there is any dispute about whether a sensitive piece of information needs to be disclosed, the decision is made by a judge on the basis of what a fair trial dictates, rather than on the basis of what public safety demands". Mr McCarthy was obliged to provide the defence with a list of 200 people whom the US Government thought were involved in the bomb plot, but had insufficient evidence to charge. "Within days of my having sent [that list]," states Mr McCarthy, "it was in the hands of Osama bin Laden." Mr McCarthy's letter turned up as evidence in the trial of those who bombed the US embassies in Africa: a copy had somehow found its way to al-Qaeda in Sudan.
Soon after 9/11, lawyers in the Bush administration reached the conclusion that terrorists are best viewed not as criminals, but as enemies who see themselves as fighters engaged in a war. That is why the Bush administration says it will try the senior al-Qaeda figures in its custody, such as Khaled Sheik Mohammed, the man who planned 9/11, according to military tribunals, and not according to the ordinary civilian law.
That decision has attracted a great deal of opprobium, much of it emanating from members of the British Government. Yet the American example is one which the British Government may, in time, find it has to follow. British judges have demonstrated that they do not think that human rights should be outweighed by considerations of state security. Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice, famously replied, when asked if he and his colleagues would see the balance of human rights against state security differently in the light of 7/7, that "the judges will not see anything differently".
When it attempts to change the law to allow wire-tap evidence, the Government is likely to discover that the principles of the criminal law and the requirements of national security run straight into each other. If so, it will not be the first time that ministers have been reminded that the criminal law is not designed to deal with terrorists who want to replace democracy with Sharia law. The criminal law was developed to interrogate and convict criminals, not terrorists. It is difficult to deal with someone when there is no common ground on the basic principles of justice as John Humphrys discovered. 
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