Right, but there were a few times when you were in a position to do something -- and you didn't. At the end of your year with Omar Bakri, for example, he asks you to watch the money he's been collecting throughout the year -- money for Hamas that, as you say, "will go to kill Jews in Israel" -- and you think about taking the money.
Well, that was obviously a really difficult thing. When I was writing the chapter, I thought, This is an uncomfortable truth about what happens with this kind of journalism -- when a journalist gets too close to his subject. It was a moment about journalism more than anything else. But now, after Sept. 11, I can't help think that we're in the kind of climate where you'd actually want me to take the money. If I had taken the money I probably would be selling more books here in America.
But not in Britain?
No, people back home don't realize why there is this kind of need for heroes in America at the moment. People in Britain don't really understand what's going on here. They don't understand why Camp X-ray exists. There's a massive rift of understanding right now between Britain and America. And it's only when you're here, you think you understand why America is the way it is right now.
Your book is incredibly timely. How did you become interested in Bakri and the other extremists?
At first, I did stories on people who were maybe just eccentric. Omar was a natural progression from that. Here was somebody living among us [in London] who was trying to overthrow our way of life. It was inevitable that he was going to use our system to do it. I thought that was an interesting paradox. It wasn't the fact that he was an Islamic fundamentalist. It was that he was trying to destroy us from within.
It sounds like the events of Sept. 11 have made you rethink your experiences with the extremists. Have they made you view your subjects differently? Did you have an inkling that something like the attacks was going to happen?
I did feel like they were telling me that something like that was going to happen. Not specifically -- not that planes were going to be flown into the World Trade Center or anything like that -- but in the general sense. You know, it's a paranoid book. For me, it's kind of all summed up in that David Icke chapter -- about the lizards -- because that whole episode gives you the sense that there really is a kind of cold war. There's a sort of escalating paranoia on both sides -- the extremist side and the secular liberal side (our side) -- and that it was going to blow.
Of course, I didn't recognize any of this at the time. I wasn't in any way a kind of soothsayer or not surprised when Sept. 11 happened. I was absolutely shocked. But in retrospect it does feel a bit like the book reflects a burgeoning pressure, a kind of pressure cooker situation, which comes to a head in the David Icke chapter -- which is great since it's such a kind of burlesque, absurdist chapter but at the same time that is what it's about: The extremists are getting crazier; so are our responses toward them; how is this all going to end?
In that chapter, you profile not just David Icke, but also his followers as well as a Vancouver anti-racist coalition, which believes that when Icke talks about lizards, he's really talking about Jews. You regard the anti-racists with intense skepticism, but in the end, it turns out that they may be right. You overhear one of Icke's followers refer to the anti-racists as "fat Jews." So, is Icke a racist or does he really believe that lizards rule the earth?
Well, I was conscious of the fact that I was critically chronicling both sides and I really wanted to give the anti-racists the last word. I didn't want people to think that just because the anti-racists came off as kind of silly, that they were wrong. So I thought it was important to put that line in at the end. Even if people on the liberal side are getting crazier -- and the Anti-Defamation League does sometimes get it wrong -- don't forget that people like David Icke and his followers do sometimes use code words. That's why I put that line in.
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