Western Resistance

The following article extract was originally in London's evening newspaper, the Evening Standard, but has since been moved from its online location. Dated February 5, a copy was found in Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch.

Winston emerges menacingly from the kitchen, a meat cleaver in one hand and a kitchen knife with an eight-inch blade in the other. "I love knives," he says, his eyes gleaming as he begins to slash the air inches from my face.

"Guns make a f***ing noise, but knives go in," he pauses, " silentlike, easy." He begins stabbing the wall and hacking the plaster, and then, just as suddenly, stops, seemingly sated, like an addict who has had his fix.

He holds up his blades to inspect them. "F***ing quality," he says, and deposits them unceremoniously his trousers. Winston, 21, black and from south London, licks his teeth as he paces around the stripped-bare flat on a Peckham estate that serves as one of his gang's many secret hideouts. He speaks in his gang's uniquely coded lingo.

"Knives is f***-all. Later, my bruvs will be back from their robberies with our skengelengs [guns] and cream [money]. Later there be MACinside-10s [sub-machine guns] all over the floor, laid wall to wall. And moolah! We count it - 10 grand, 20 grand. Then, after midnight," he adds, matter-of-factly, "me and my bruvs go to mosque to pray."

Winston's casual depiction of a lifestyle of crime tightly bound up with religious observance would normally be regarded as paradoxical, but in his case it is what defines him. For Winston is a member of the Muslim Boys, a gang, the black community says, unlike any that has operated before in south London....

The Muslim Boys, they say, are notorious for intimidating imams into opening their mosques in the early hours of the morning so that they can pray, often right after committing crimes, and for their "forced conversions", carried out at gunpoint, of black youths to Islam. At least one local young man, Adrian Marriott, thought to have resisted such a conversion, is believed to have been murdered "as an example to others"....

Last month, the Brixton and Stockwell mosques moved to publicly distance themselves from the gang, saying - without actually naming the Muslim Boys - that there are "criminals masquerading as Muslims" who threaten the good name of their religion.

Abdul Haqq Baker, chairman of Brixton mosque, said: "What we are seeing is a new phenomenon that I have not seen in my 15 years as a Muslim." He added that TV scenes of militant uprisings in the Middle East are presenting a distorted view of Islam that appeals to criminals. "Keep away from our mosques," he pleaded....

Last June, the imam had to step in personally after Adrian Marriott - having been hounded by the gang to convert with bullying visits to his home - was found shot several times in the head, in parkland off Barrington Road, Brixton.

"I had to approach the family of the murdered boy and assure them that these criminals have nothing to do with real Islam, or with our mosque," he says. Three men in their early twenties have been charged with Adrian Marriott's murder....

When I ask Winston whether he believes in Islam, he prevaricates. "Sort of," he says. "I converted when I was in prison. I found it relaxing, we got better food. Now we all go to mosque together. If I refuse, they blow [shoot] me, innit. I pray twice a day: before I do crime, and after. I ask Allah for a blessing when I'm out on the street. Afterwards, I apologise to Allah for what I done."

Winston becomes angry when I show him the Brixton mosque's denunciation of his crew as "bogus Muslims", crushing their statement in his fist. "F***ing cheek!" he says. "Mocking us. There be retribution for this!"...

One final question, I say. Where does your money go? "To the f***ing laundry, innit," he says, licking his teeth. Is there any connection between your gang and al Qaeda? He glares at me. "That's a deep piece of info. I support Bin Laden. I wouldn't ask that question, bruv - it's rude, it's dangerous, it's ..."