Word: muhajiroun
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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Choudary and Yahya belong to the extremist Islamic group al-Muhajiroun, and though they speak for only a tiny fraction of Britain's 2 million Muslims, their views received grim publicity last week with the news that three British-born Muslims had been killed in Kabul--allegedly in a U.S. bombing raid on a Taliban compound--after volunteering for the jihad...
Many Muslims in Britain, however, are loudly anti-American and highly critical of the bombing in Afghanistan. Al-Muhajiroun is capitalizing on this anger. The group had been saying for weeks that Britons were flocking to the bin Laden cause, much as Jewish youths went to Tel Aviv in 1967 to fight in the Arab-Israeli war. In Lahore, Pakistan, last week a spokesman--British university graduate Abu Ibrahim--put the numbers at between 600 and 700. British authorities, however, speculated that volunteers probably amounted to a few dozen. Conservative peer Norman Tebbit suggested that it would be treason...
British police also opened an investigation into the activities of Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Syrian-born judge who has preached militancy since arrriving in Britain in 1986. He founded the group al-Muhajiroun, which he claims has 7,000 members, and is dedicated to establishing a worldwide Islamic state with, in the words of an aide, "the black flag of Islam flying over Downing Street...
Bakri, who has raised funds for Hamas and Hizballah, was banned from university campuses but otherwise left undisturbed. In the days after Sept. 11, al-Muhajiroun issued leaflets welcoming the attacks, but interviewed last week at his office in a modern north London business park, Bakri was moderate in tone. He condemned the terrorist attacks and said he had never met bin Laden, and did not even always agree with his views...