The Sleeping House

Liberty and laxity are opposites, though the careless take them for the same thing. Freedom lives only where the law is certain, equal, and enforced without fear. Where a society grows too polite to enforce its own rules, it does not become more free. It hands its streets to whoever is least polite.

The Preacher in the Road

For a year and a half in 2003 and 2004, Londoners who passed along St. Thomas's Road on a Friday afternoon could watch a remarkable scene.

In the middle of the street, on mats laid over the tarmac, several hundred men knelt in rows. In front of them stood a heavyset preacher with one eye and a steel hook where a hand had been. His name was Abu Hamza al-Masri. He had come to Britain from Egypt as a young man, worked as a nightclub doorman, found religion, and gone to Afghanistan, where an explosion cost him both hands and an eye. Since 1997 he had been the dominant voice at the Finsbury Park Mosque, a few yards from where he now stood.

His sermons were not ambiguous. He told his listeners that killing unbelievers was permitted and that it was a duty to bleed the enemies of God. Men who sat at his feet went on to try to blow up airliners. A shoe bomber and one of the conspirators of September 2001 had passed through his mosque. When the police finally raided the building, in January 2003, they found forged passports, knives, and chemical protection suits.

They closed the mosque. They did not arrest the preacher. So every Friday he held his congregation in the road outside, and every Friday a line of London policemen stood along the pavement to keep the traffic away and protect his right to do so.

This went on for sixteen months. He was arrested only when the United States asked for his extradition, and it took eight more years of appeals to put him on an airplane. An American court eventually sentenced him to life.

The intelligence services of France, watching all this from across the Channel, had a name for the British capital in those years. They called it Londonistan.