:sl:
interesting read i must say, for the sheikh who brands other sheikhs munafiqs and kaafirs...read on...
We finally ran him to ground not in the frontline of the jihad, but as he left a luxury hotel in a mountain resort high above eastern Beirut.
Eight months after being barred from returning to Britain for teaching hate and murder, the exiled Tottenham Ayatollah's familiar portly figure strained against a trademark white dishdash as he waddled to Friday prayers in Aley.
There is no rogue like an old rogue and Syrian-born Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed had particular reason to be pleased with himself. Amid a catastrophic war, the radical cleric had made himself headline news.
Bakri, now living in Lebanon, had claimed that he had gone to Beirut port and the British embassy to ask for a place on board one of the fleet of ships evacuating thousands of foreign nationals to Cyprus.
He had been refused passage, he said. It was an outrage, he declared. Why shouldn't he be allowed to go to Cyprus - or even back to the UK for a month or two?
For the record, the British embassy denies having any contact with him since the crisis began, save for a fax sent late on Thursday night, long after Bakri's London spokesman had alerted the world to his 'plight'.
Some might think it odd that a man who built a reputation on firebreathing sermons calling for international jihad should make it known he wanted to run from the fight.
But publicity is the oxygen of every fundamentalist preacher. And even if the infidel press damn you as a coward, then so be it. It shows they consider you to be important.
Yesterday the theme of his diatribe was "British intolerance". "I wanted to show the world what it is really like," he fulminated. "If you are British then you are treated as a human being. But if you are not then you are treated as an animal.
"I have six children and they are all British and living in the UK. They are worried about the situation here and want me to join them. They have a right to see me.
"Are you going to show them the hate you show their father? Or are you going to show this traditional tolerance, which is just propaganda, of course."
Intolerant?
Dry your tears for poor Bakri, 48, and consider that this is a man who had been granted indefinite leave to remain in Britain after being kicked out of Saudi Arabia for extremism.
The Lebanese passport holder then raised a large family on British state handouts for more than 20 years.
During that time he preached war and carnage across the world, formed the now proscribed extremist Al-Muhajiroun organisation, sent at least two young Britons to their deaths in suicide bombings in Israel, and described the 9/11 bombers as "the magnificent 19".
But, as he argued with me yesterday, he was never once charged with an offence.
"British tolerance" only snapped when he blamed the July 7 London bombings, in which 52 people were killed and more than 700 injured, on the British Government and people.
While he was visiting family in Lebanon, Bakri was finally declared "undesirable" and his leave to remain was withdrawn.
And here he has stayed.
Yesterday I was invited by Bakri to take tea with him at his new apartment home in the pretty village of Harat al Naame, on the coast south of Beirut.
Would he not care to stay in Lebanon and martyr himself in this new jihad against the cursed Jews, as he had persuaded so many others to do, I asked.
He assumed a saintly expression of pure hypocrisy. "I would like a ceasefire and for people to live in peace. What has this conflict to do with me?"
Nothing, it would seem, now he was on the frontline and not safe thousands of miles away.
In London Bakri's wife claimed Tony Blair would have "blood on his hands" if he blocked the cleric's return to Britain.
Hanan Fostok, 43, said: "My children and I, every time we watch television, we cry. We cannot imagine my husband in this situation."
A British embassy spokesman said: "The Home Secretary made the decision to exclude Sheik Omar Bakri from the UK on the grounds that his presence was not conducive to the public good.
"He is refused entry to the UK on that basis. Therefore clearly we would refuse him permission to join the evacuation."
He added: "He is not a British national, for all his media appearances."
As we drove down from Aley through the sweet mountain air we could see the southern suburbs of Beirut burning below.
This is the sum of the hatred and intolerance spread by people like Bakri.
Long may he linger in the Lebanon, so far away from "intolerant Britain".
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