A NEO-NAZI whose ideas were said to be the inspiration for the man who let off a nail bomb in Central London in 1999 has converted to an extremist form of Islam.

David Myatt, a founder of the hardline British National Socialist Movement (NSM) who has been jailed for racist attacks, has changed his name to Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt. David Copeland, who is serving six life sentences after three people died in his Soho bomb attacks, was a member of the NSM.

Myatt is reportedly the author of a fascist terrorist handbook and a former leader of the violent far-right group Combat 18. But now — in his mid-50s and sporting a red, bushy beard — he subscribes to radical Islamist views.

In an internet essay entitled From Neo-Nazi to Muslim, Myatt asks: “How was it that I, a Westerner with a history of over 25 years of political involvement in extreme right-wing organisations, a former leader of the political wing of the neo-Nazi group Combat 18, came to be standing outside a mosque with a sincere desire to go inside and convert to Islam? “These were the people who I had been fighting on the streets, I had swore (sic) at and had used violence against — indeed, one of my terms of imprisonment was a result of me leading a gang of skinheads in a fight against ‘Pakis’.”

In a later interview, Myatt supports the killing of any Muslim who breaks his oath of loyalty to Islam, and the setting up of a Muslim superstate. He describes himself as having been “staunchly opposed to non-white immigration into Britain and twice jailed for violence in pursuit of my political aims”.

He added: “I spent several decades of my life fighting for what I regarded as my people, my race and my nation, and endured two terms of imprisonment arising out of my political activities.”

But his belief is now that: “The pure authentic Islam of the revival, which recognises practical jihad (holy war) as a duty, is the only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the dishonour, the arrogance, the materialism of the West . . . For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust, and the idols which the West and its lackeys worship, or pretend to worship, such as democracy.

“They want, and demand, that we abandon the purity of authentic Islam and either bow down before them and their idols, or accept the tame, secularised, so-called Islam which they and their apostate lackeys have created.

“This may well be a long war, of decades or more — and we Muslims have to plan accordingly. We must affirm practical jihad — to take part in the fight to free our lands from the kuffar (unbelievers). Jihad is our duty.”

Myatt, who briefly became a monk after his second spell in prison, said that he became a Muslim while working long hours alone on a farm. He grew up in Africa, moved to Britain in 1967 and spent time living in Worcestershire. In July 2000 Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, described him as “the most ideologically-driven Nazi in Britain, preaching race war and terrorism”.

Myatt was the architect of the NSM and was involved in the leadership of Combat 18. He issued a statement in response to the Soho nail bombings saying: “Neither myself nor anyone else connected to the NSM can be held responsible for these bombs in any way. That responsibility lies with the person who constructed them, planted them and caused them to explode. Only that person, and God, know the motive behind the attacks.”

Myatt said that “all bombs are terrible and barbaric”, whether detonated by lone bombers, Western governments in Iraq or Zionists in Palestine.

“The NSM considered the creation of a revolutionary situation in this country as necessary since it wished to build an entirely new society, based upon personal honour, and believed this could only be done by destroying the dishonourable and corrupt society of the present.

“However, the NSM neither preached, nor sought to incite, what is called ‘racial hatred’. Instead, it strove to propagate the warrior values of honour, loyalty and duty, and make the British people aware of, and come to value, their ancestral warrior culture and warrior heritage.”

Myatt said recently that he had given up hope of a breakthrough by the far Right and believed that Muslims were the best hope for combating Zionism and the West. “There will not be an uprising, a revolution, in any Western nation, by nationalists, racial nationalists, or National Socialists — because these people lack the desire, the motivation, the ethos, to do this and because they do not have the support of even a large minority of their own folk,” he said.

“If these nationalists, or some of them, desire to aid us, to help us . . . they can do the right thing, the honourable thing, and convert, revert, to Islam — accepting the superiority of Islam over and above each and every way of the West.”

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