Neither Immunity Nor Impunity

Mustafa Kamel Mustafa was an engineering student when he moved to Britain in the 1970s.  He once worked as a doorman at London discos.  He was married to a British woman.  In the 1980s he travelled to Afghanistan to become a mujahideen, fighting against the Soviet Union.  He claims he was carrying out humanitarian work. 

It's where he lost both his hands.  His humanitarian work likely included bomb-making.

A crowd of roughly one hundred people protested loudly outside London High Court that ruled on Friday that Islamist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, aka Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, be extradited as soon as possible to the United States.  Despite the man's pleas that he was handicapped, required special assistance, compassion with respect to his plight.

"Free Abu Hamza" the crowd shouted, holding aloft banners reading "Stop extraditions", along with "Democracy hypocrisy", more than adequately demonstrating that the man and all he stands for, the hateful ideology he preached and the desperately vicious attacks he encouraged are not held as dismaying evidence of a horribly psychotic mind by some who approve of his actions.

His future does look rather dim.  The prospect of spending the rest of one's life in a maximum security jail would not appeal to many.  Even those who exhorted recruits to plan deadly suicide attacks to slaughter as many of the kuffar as possible.  Even those who become involved in kidnapping, in plotting training camps for militants, for spewing unbridled hatred for others.

"Extradition may proceed immediately.  It is unacceptable that extradition proceedings should take more than a relatively short time, to be measured in months, not years."

Good to their word, fed up entirely with the strung-out legal appeals, the long intervals between hearings and the clever enough use of Britain's human rights laws and obligations, the London High Court had the last word.  And, amazingly, the imam who preached hatred for far too long at the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London, inciting murder and racial hatred, is now in the United States.

To his credit as a jihadist par excellence is his having inspired the most virulent jihadists of the like of Zacarias Moussaoui of the September 11 conspiracy.  The potential sentence he now faces is judged to be likely around - give or take a few years - a century in length.  That should give him more than ample time to brood on the injustice of the British legal system and international conspiracies.