Mohammed Hamid’s daughter Yasmin Cass was one of the speakers at IRPSG/Brent LRC meeting on 28th February 28 at Conway Hall.

He is one of the many victims of Britain’ s ‘war on terror’ languishing in prison. He was arrested, along with fourteen other men, in the wake of the 2005 London bombings and charged with ‘providing terrorist training’. On 26th February 2008 Hamid was found guilty of ‘providing terrorist training’ and ‘soliciting murder’ and sentenced to an ‘indeterminate sentence for public protection’ with a tariff (minimum term) of seven years, after which he will only be released if the Parole Board declares he is sufficiently low risk to be freed. The trial was based on the same ‘principle’ that now has Stephen Murney in jail – both have never committed any crime and are not charged with committing a crime – it was all based a speculation on what his listeners took from what he said.

These two are in essence charged with political sympathy for the AIMS of those who have adopted methods of individual terrorism. That is they, like us, are in political sympathy with all those who are anti-Imperialist, including those who adopt these methods to fight imperialism with which we may strongly disagree but nevertheless we are all anti-Imperialist as so we must defend everyone’s civil rights in order to maintain our own rights to fight Imperialism with our own methods of mass revolutionary mobilisation.

The Birmingham 6 were all Republicans (unlike the Guildford 4) and it was on the basis of their politics they were wrongly convicted on what was never a miscarriage of justice but as political hostages to frighten the rest of the Irish community – their innocence was clear to all Irish republican sympathisers and the Irish community in general – jailing innocent people on a political campaign whipped up by the pro-Imperialist mass media had the intended effect of terrorising and making illegal political support for a united Ireland and getting Britain out of the occupied six north-eastern counties. The big demonstrations in supports of the struggle in Ireland stopped immediately after the 1974 bombings in England.

The case of the Guildford 4 was in some ways worse – both groups spend 16 years in jail for crimes of which they were wholly innocent – but the Birmingham 6 were ‘guilty’ of Republicanism – the Guildford 4 were not even Republicans, they just came from the wrong place and they knew Republicans – you could scarcely come from the nationalist six counties without knowing Republicans. No, convicting random victims – and it was important to the British state that the whole Irish community knew both groups to be innocent – had the effect of spreading even greater terror in the whole community than the case of Birmingham.

It was the same method the Nazis used in Lidice, that small village in Czechoslovakia 1942 in reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942. It was on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer- SS Heinrich Himmler that it was completely destroyed by German forces. On 10 June 1942, all 173 men over 16 years of age from the village were executed, all the rest of the men were executed when found … After the war ended, only 153 women and 17 children returned. This is the BBC’s account of the Mohamed Hamid’s trial:

Hamid was not himself part of Muktar Ibrahim’ s 21/7 bomb plot. But investigators say he played a critical role in the radicalisation of the men who carried the devices.
The pair and another man were arrested in October 2004 in a row over their preaching stall in Oxford Street. Hamid allegedly told the arresting officer that his name was “Osama bin London” and “I’ve got a bomb and I’m going to blow you all up”.

David Farrell QC, prosecuting, told the court the true intention behind Hamid’s camps and talks were clear.
They were nothing short of “a grooming mechanism for disaffected Muslim men, slowly and sometimes subtly, preparing them and radicalising for jihad.”

So to take the analogy a bit further, all those who are Irish Republicans or who support the aims of Irish Republicans are politically as guilty as Stephen Murney and Mohamed Hamid and, if the political situation requires, could expect a knock on the door in the middle of the night with charges with “having material that supports terrorism”, i.e. the political aims of expelling Imperialism from Ireland or the Middle East or anywhere else and defeating their war aims of subordinating all economies and all our lives to the neo-liberal needs of Wall Street and the City of London and their allied multi-national companies.

And to take the analogy to its clear conclusion – civil liberties and political and democratic rights are indivisible, we cannot demand it for ourselves whilst at the same time denying it to those who are opposed to British Imperialism in Ireland or the Middle East or anywhere else.

In the immortal words of Pastor Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Catholic.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me