by Melanie Phillips
Britain’s long-standing appeasement of Islamists is suicidal imbecility
The revelation that a senior Hamas official was living in Britain while plotting a major terrorist attack abroad is deeply shocking. To anyone who’s been paying attention, though, it’s not remotely surprising.
The problem is that hardly anyone has been paying attention.
The details that have emerged are extraordinary. Mr X, who cannot be named for legal reasons, served as a bodyguard for the former Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh. Mr X, who was the son of another senior Hamas official, had previously been arrested in Egypt for smuggling guns and gold through a tunnel into Gaza.
Despite these details being public knowledge, in 2015 Britain gave Mr X asylum and then citizenship. He changed his legal name more than once and reinvented himself as an IT consultant.
Now the Sunday Times has disclosed that he was an “essential” figure in a plot last October to attack Jewish and Israeli targets in Germany or Austria. He had used his British passport for routine trips to Qatar and Turkey — global hubs for Hamas — as well as to Egypt as he co-ordinated with terrorists in Europe.
The German indictment says he pre-recorded a video in which he appeared masked and armed in front of a Hamas flag, describing the planned attack as an act of retribution on behalf of its military wing, the Izzedine al Qassam Brigades.
People are asking in horror how Britain could have knowingly harboured such a man. Merely to ask the question is to answer it. Britain did so because it has long been in denial over the threat that predatory Islamism poses to Britain.