[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
(Trigger warning: extensive and unfortunately necessary descriptions of Islamic toilet practices.)
How many Islamic toilets is a Muslim terrorist entitled to? At least two.
That’s the ruling by a U.S. federal judge in the long running saga of a UK Muslim terror imam locked up in a Colorado prison who called for murdering non-Muslims and wants those same non-Muslims to tend to the ‘purity’ of his nether regions so he can properly pray to ‘Allah’.
And so begins the most disgusting article I ever had to write: in both the moral sense of how far backward we bent to cater to Muslim terrorists who hate us and on a grosser physical level.
The current Toilet Jihad began with a real Jihad that claimed at least four lives.
In 2007, after three years of legal wrangling, Imam Abu Hamza, an Egyptian Muslim cleric who headed a notorious UK terrorist mosque, was finally deported to the United States.
With the occasional eyepatch and a hook for a hand, a souvenir of his time working with the ‘Pakistani military’, the piratical looking cleric had preached terror at his Finsbury Park Mosque and his tawdry life and terror threats had long been a staple of British tabloid coverage.
Hamza’s involvement in the 1988 kidnapping of British tourists in Yemen, four of whom were killed, by an Al Qaeda affiliate, (the cleric explained that taking hostages was “a good thing” in Islam), his mosque, which had attracted such terror figures as the ‘twentieth hijacker’ and the ‘shoe bomber, his defenses of Al Qaeda (“Bin Laden is a good guy, everyone likes him in the Muslim world”), claim that 9/11 was “done in self-defense” and declaration that “the person who hinders Allah’s rule, this man must be eliminated” had made him the UK’s most notorious imam.
By the time the US asked for him, after he tried to set up an Al Qaeda training camp in Oregon, the UK was happy to send him off. Hamza’s lawyers however spent three years dragging out the case in the UK, claiming that sending him to America would violate his “human rights”.
In 2015, after eight more years of legal wrangling in federal courts, Hamza was sentenced to several life sentences, on charges of providing support to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, hostage taking and, as the judge put it, being “barbaric.” But Abu Hamza was just getting started.
After 11 years of lawfare and extraditions across three countries and continents, Abu Hamza had a lot of free time in prison. And he spent it waging lawfare against the United States.
Abu Hamza, now calling himself by his legal name of Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, filed lawsuits accusing the prison system of violating the First Amendment by denying him Halal food, participation in group Islamic prayers, communications with his son (unclear if it’s the one who was stripped of UK citizenship after becoming a Jihadist in Syria, the one who was convicted of money laundering, the one who stole a laptop through a kitchen window or any other sons.)
The terror imam also claimed that “his faith requires him to be provided with an electric toothbrush”, a hairbrush and prompt toenail clipping services at taxpayer expense.
`Mostly though, Abu Hamza aka Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, was obsessed with the toilet.
Muslims have detailed toilet protocols that Sharia requires them to follow. They must step into the bathroom with their left foot first. They may not have their backs to Mecca when they defecate. Men may not urinate while standing up. Muslims are required to wash their private parts with water after urinating or defecating. Muslim men then have a specific prescribed process for removing the remaining urine to ensure that they are ‘clean’ to pray to Allah.
Ideally, the less we know about all this the better, unfortunately having Muslim terrorists in prison, and specifically a Muslim terrorist with a hook for a hand and a lawyer on speed dial, and a lot of time in which to sue America, means that we have to deal with the ‘Toilet Jihad.’
What’s at stake here? (And feel free to skip this entire paragraph.) The website of the Grand Ayatollah of Iraq describes it as following: “the middle finger of the left hand is slid three times from the anus up to the scrotum; then, the thumb is placed on the penis and the forefinger is placed under the penis, and the thumb and forefinger are pulled three times along the penis up to the point of circumcision; finally, the end of the penis is pressed three times.”
This is not about hygiene, in the medical sense, but a religious practice from Sharia law.
All of this is serious business for a devout Muslim like Abu Hamza because while he believes 9/11 and taking hostages are good things, he is mindful of Mohammed’s warning that “most of the punishment of the grave will be because of urine” (Sunan al-Tirmidhī 348). While Hamza feels no guilt over the deaths of Ruth Williamson, Dr Peter Rowe, Margaret Whitehouse, and Andrew Thirsk in Yemen, he believes that if he prays while there’s urine still inside his organ, he will burn forever in Islamic hell without getting his 72 virgins.
(Questions as to why the cleric thinks hell would be more concerned with his bodily fluids than his role in the murder of a 34-year-old Scottish nurse are best addressed to the Islamic religion.)
Back when Abu Hamza was locked up in the UK, ”Mr Mostafa had someone to help him”. Colorado’s Supermax prison, unlike Belmarsh in the UK, “does not provide any inmates with personal attendants for the purpose of washing them after using the toilet” because that would “place a substantial burden on ADX staff or require additional staff at a substantial expense to the Bureau of Prisons.”
How Islamophobic. So Abu Hamza sued.
According to Abu Hamza’s lawsuits and complaints, Islamic law and the First Amendment entitle him to having someone properly clean him after using the toilet “essential for my 5 prayers daily.” The prison already went to the trouble of outfitting his two cells with showers with multiple showerheads, including a lower showerhead, and allowed the terrorist imam to run the water as long as he likes, but that wasn’t good enough. (Nothing turned out to be good enough.)
The prison tried accommodating his amoral, but bodily waste obsessed belief system, by giving him a brush. Hamza claimed that the “brush was ineffective” at achieving his spiritual goals of not being tormented by Satan in the afterlife for achieving less than totally clean nether parts.
Abu Hamza demanded a bidet. The prison argued that it does not provide bidets to anyone “regardless of religion” so it’s not discriminating against Islam. It’s just worried about items that can be used as weapons. Finally, it gave in and “requested funds” to install a bidet.
Because American taxpayers are paying for every last bit of this. Including the lawsuits.
But much like Hamas and every Islamic terrorist group, having gotten what he wanted, Abu Hamza denied that he ever wanted it and demanded more. Even though there’s documentary evidence of him saying that a bidet was enough, he denied ever agreeing to that, and demanded new prosthetics, despite apparently sabotaging several efforts to fit him with a new hook. The bottom line is that Hamza would like “attendants to help him complete ritual washing”.
That means having someone on standby several times a day to clean him up to Islamic standards each time he uses the bathroom. Not because he actually needs it for hygiene purposes, but because the same religion that made him murderous, demands it.
A federal judge agreed to consider “whether defendants have substantially burdened the exercise of Mr. Mostafa’s religion by limiting him to use a bidet to clean himself.” That same judge ruled that “Mr. Mostafa has demonstrated that forcing him to be housed in a cell where he lacks a means of ritually cleaning himself places a substantial burden on the exercise of his religion” and that the prison must install a bidet in both of Hamza’s prison cells, not just one.
Only two Muslim toilets will do. For now.
And then it’s only a matter of time until another judge rules that the taxpayers must pay for an attendant to clean Abu Hamza before he prays to Allah for their cruel deaths or it’s a burden on the exercise of his religion. Religious accommodation won’t be reached until the prison not only provides new prosthetics for Abu Hamza, but ones strong enough to let him behead infidels.
Meanwhile, six figures have likely been spent on legal battles involving Abu Hamza’s Toilet Jihad. All of this could have been averted by following another traditional Islamic practice.
The death penalty.