Chapter One: A Semi-Detached Ayatollah It was a balmy Saturday afternoon in Trafalgar Square in the summertime, and Omar Bakri Mohammed was declaring Holy War on Britain. He stood on a podium at the front of Nelson's Column and announced that he would not rest until he saw the Black Flag of Islam flying over Downing Street. There was much cheering. The space had been rented out to him by Westminster Council.
The Newsroom South-East TV reporter talked the afternoon's events up with a hard, fast, urgent but cool-headed voice. She was a Muslim. In his speech, Omar Bakri referred to people like her as Chocolate Muslims. A Chocolate Muslim is an Uncle Tom.
(The next day, the Daily Mail would run a photograph of a cold-eyed Omar Bakri on their inside front page under the headline, Is This the Most Dangerous Man in Britain? From his cold eyes, he looked as if he could be.)
There were maybe 5,000 of Omar Bakri's followers there in Trafalgar Square. After his speech, their plan was to release thousands of black balloons, carrying the call to war on little attached postcards. The balloons would fly high into the London sky, painting it black and then falling across London and the Home Counties. The balloons were being stored in a net, underneath the podium from which Omar Bakri was outlining his post-Jihad vision for the U.K.
He who practiced homosexuality, adultery, fornication, or bestiality would be stoned to death (or thrown from the highest mountain). Christmas decorations and store-window dummies would be outlawed. There would be no free mixing between the sexes. Pubs would be closed down. The landlords would be offered alternative employment in something more befitting an Islamic society, like a library, and if they refused to comply they would be arrested. Pictures of ladies' legs on pantyhose packaging would be banned. We would still be able to purchase pantyhose, but they would be advertised simply with the word "pantyhose."
I very much wanted to meet Omar Bakri and spend time with him while he attempted to overthrow democracy and transform Britain into an Islamic nation.
I visited Yacob Zaki, a Muslim fundamentalist who often shared a platform with him.
Yacob Zaki is white and Scottish, a former Presbyterian who converted to Islam when he was a teenager. He lives in Greenock, a port near Glasgow. He is Greenock's only militant Muslim convert. He said he had suffered much bullying at school as a result of his conversion, but it was well worth it.
"Do you think that Omar Bakri might succeed in overthrowing the Western way of life?" I asked him.
"Well," said Yacob, "Omar is our best hope at this time."
"Why him?"
"Charisma," said Yacob. "He's the most popular leader of the disaffected youth. People queue around the block to see him talk. Although we disagree on some matters."
"Like what?"
"Well," said Yacob, "one time I wanted to release a swarm of mice into the United Nations headquarters. Women hate mice, you know. I thought it was a brilliantly simple idea. One swarm of mice would have crushed the whole UN process, don't you think?"
"Women standing on chairs," I agreed.
"But Omar said no," said Yacob. "He said it was a stupid idea."
"What other disagreements have you had with Omar Bakri?" I asked Yacob.
"Well," he said, "Omar got very angry with me when I announced that Hillary Clinton was a lesbian. But I have the proof."
Yacob and I spent the day together. It was that afternoon I first heard about the Bilderberg Group, the secret rulers of the world, a tiny group of pernicious men and one or two pernicious women who meet in a secret room and determine the course of world events. It is they who start the wars, Yacob said, own the media, and destroy -- by covert violence or propaganda -- anyone who gets too close to the truth.
"One mysterious case," said Yacob, "is that of the peanut farmer who attended a Bilderberg meeting and overnight became the most powerful man in the world. Yes. I'm speaking of Jimmy Carter. So you can see that they are extremely secretive and powerful."
I didn't really take it in. I stared blankly at Yacob. I didn't realize that the people Yacob spoke of would come to occupy -- in the most unpleasant ways -- a tremendous part of the next five years of my life.
Yacob looked at his watch. He wanted our meeting to end. He had a tip on where he could purchase Hitler's binoculars, and he didn't want another collector to beat him to it. He gave me Omar Bakri's address. I got his telephone number from the phone book.
It turned out that Omar Bakri lived a couple of miles away from me, in Edmonton, north London, in a small semi-detached house at the end of a modern, fawn-colored council-built cul-de-sac. His offices were at the Finsbury Park Mosque, at the end of my street, not far from the Highbury football field.
I wrote to ask him if I could follow him around for a year or so while he attempted to transform Britain into an Islamic nation. He called back right away. There were so many anti-Muslim lies, he said, generated by the Jewish-controlled media. So much misinformation, in the newspapers and the movies. Perhaps this would be an opportunity for the record to be set straight. So, yes. I was welcome to join him in his struggle against the infidels. And then he added, "I am actually very nice, you know."
"Are you?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," said Omar Bakri, "I am delightful."
At 9 A.M. the next morning I sat in Omar's living room while Omar played with his baby daughter.
"What's your daughter's name?" I asked him.
"It is a difficult name for you to understand," said Omar.
"Does it have an English translation?" I asked.
"Yes," said Omar, "it translates into English as 'the Black Flag of Islam.'"
"Really?" I said. "Your daughter's name is the Black Flag of Islam?"
"Yes," said Omar.
"Really?" I said.
There was a small pause.
"You see," said Omar, "why our cultures can never integrate?"
The Lion King was playing on the VCR. We watched the scene where the warthog sings "Hakuna Matata," the song about how wonderful it is to have problem-free philosophies and no worries. Omar sang along, bouncing the baby on his knee.
"We always watch The Lion King," he said. "It's the only way I can relax. You know, they call me the Lion. That's right. They call me the Lion. They call me the great warrior. The great fighter."
Omar showed me his photo album. His teenage photographs make him look like a matinee idol. He came from a family of twenty-eight brothers and sisters. His father had made a fortune selling sheep and pigs and cows. They had chauffeurs and servants and palaces in Syria, Turkey, and Beirut. Omar escaped Saudi Arabia in 1985. He had heard that he was to be arrested for preaching the Jihad on university campuses. So he ran away. He escaped to Britain. Now he is a big man with a big beard.
"I was thin because I always worried," he said. "I was always on the run. Now I live in Britain, I never worry. What's going to happen to me here? Ha ha! So I got fat. A leader must be big in stature. The bigger the body, the bigger the leader. Who wants a little scrawny leader?"
Omar's plan for the morning was to distribute leaflets outside the Holborn underground station entitled "Homosexuality, Lesbianism, Adultery, Fornication, and Bestiality: the deadly diseases." He said he'd planned to travel by public transportation, but he couldn't help but notice my car in his driveway, so perhaps I would give him a lift instead?
"OK," I said.
I dropped him off near the tube station. I went to park the car. Ten minutes later, I found him standing in the middle of the pavement with a stack of leaflets in his hand.
"How's it going, Omar?" I asked.
"Oh, very good," he smiled. "The message is getting across