'Why do they hate us?'

"When you deny justice to people, which you have been doing for several decades in Palestine, and they are intelligent, sensitive people, they are going to find something to do," warns Haider. "They might take shelter in Islam, in fatalism, and some will come to despise you."

Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, the radical Muslim cleric who runs a mosque in a shabby district of north London, has certainly come to despise America.

Abu Hamza says he used to admire the West when he was a young man - so much so that he dropped out of university in his native Alexandria, Egypt, to study in Britain. And he clearly had nothing against the British government when he took a job as a civil engineer at Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point, after he graduated.

But as he immersed himself more and more in religious studies, and came into contact with more and more Arab mujahideen, who had travelled from the mountains of Afghanistan to England for medical treatment, he began to change his outlook.

"When you see how happy they are, how anxious to just have a new limb so they can run again and fight again, not thinking of retiring, their main ambition is to get killed in the cause of God ... you see another dimension in the verses of the Koran," says Abu Hamza.

Inspired by their example, he took his family to Afghanistan in 1990, to work there as a civil engineer, building roads, tunnels, and "anything I could do." And he also fought with the mujahideen against Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah (seen as a Russian stand-in supported by the Soviets), until he blew both his hands off and lost the sight in his left eye, in a mine explosion.

What transformed him and his comrades-in-arms from anti-Soviet to anti-American militants, he says, was the way Washington abandoned them at the end of the war in Afghanistan, and sought to disarm and disperse them.

"It was when the Americans took the knife out of the Russians and stabbed it in our back, it's as simple as that," says Abu Hamza. "It was a natural turn, not a theoretical one.

"In the meantime, they were bombarding Iraq and occupying the [Arabian] peninsula," he says, referring to the US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War, "and then with the witch-hunt against the mujahideen, all of it came together, that was a full-scale war, it was very clear."

Abu Hamza would rather see Islamic militants fight corrupt or secular Arab governments before they take on America (indeed, the Yemeni government has sought his extradition from Britain for plotting to overthrow the government in Sana). But he is in no doubt that the American government brought the events of Sept. 11 on its own head.

"The Americans wanted to fight the Russians with Muslim blood, and they could only justify that by triggering the word 'jihad,' " he argues. "Unfortunately for everybody except the Muslims, when that button is pushed, it does not come back that easy. It only keeps going on and on until the Muslim empire swallows every empire existing."

Can he understand the motivation behind the assault on New York and Washington? "The motivation is everywhere," he says, with the current US administration. "When a president stands up before the planet and says an American comes first, he is only preaching hatred. When a president stands up and says we don't honor our missile treaty with the Russians, he is only preaching arrogance. When he refuses to condemn what's happening in Palestine, he is only preaching tyranny.

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