What do you call a country that harbours Islamic terrorists, that gives them citizenship, that lends them a base from which to plot jihad against infidels and Jews in other countries? Move over Afghanistan and Qatar – Britain might just be giving you a run for your money.

Meet Mr X – the anonymous Hamas operative who was arrested in central London last November over his alleged involvement in plotting to attack Jewish community centres, Israeli diplomats and pro-Israel demonstrations in Germany and Austria. He is awaiting trial and, if convicted, faces extradition to Germany.

X came to the UK more than a decade ago. He was granted asylum, then indefinite leave to remain, then full-blown citizenship – despite the fact he was a former bodyguard of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, was the son of a Hamas official, and had previously been arrested in Egypt for allegedly smuggling guns into Gaza. As The Sunday Times points out in its staggering exposé, this was all ‘public knowledge’ when he settled here.

Welcome to Britain, where a tweet about trans people could scupper your next DBS check, but a well-documented history of jihadism is no barrier to being granted citizenship. Whatever comes of X’s trial, the wilful, maddening naivete of the British state where Islamism is concerned is now plain for all to see.

Had it not been foiled, the Hamas-led plot in Germany and Austria could have been the worst attack inflicted on European Jewry since the war. After Israeli and German intelligence got wind of the plans, Berlin worked in tandem with Austria, Denmark and the UK to nab seven suspects and recover weapons, including an AK-47.

X stands accused of transporting handguns and ammunition to a storage depot in Vienna. Security sources told The Sunday Times he was an ‘essential’ part of the plot, which was being ‘overseen by senior figures in Hamas’. He even recorded a pre-massacre video, masked and armed, in front of a Hamas flag.

And he did all this while living in Britain, where he was posing as a humble suburban IT consultant when he wasn’t scuttling off to Turkey and Qatar – Hamas’s two main international bases. Damningly, The Sunday Times notes he was ‘not thought to have been a priority for the British security services as he began coordinating with Hamas terrorists on the continent [of Europe]’.

This obscene story speaks to officialdom’s remarkable complacency regarding Islamism in general and Hamas in particular. Hamas’s military wing was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in 2001, but this was not extended to its political wing until 2021, when the authorities finally realised this was a meaningless distinction. In that time, Britain became a destination of choice for leaders of Hamas and its parent party, the Muslim Brotherhood, with many of them citing persecution at the hands of the Egyptian state as grounds to claim asylum here.

X wasn’t the only one to take advantage of our suicidal hospitality. Muhammad Sawalha, a leader of Hamas in the West Bank, arrived in the 1990s. The scumbag is still here, despite a US indictment in 2004 alleging he never stopped working for Hamas, was involved in ‘secret talks about “revitalising” terrorist acts’ in Israel, and helped to launder money for military operations.

There’s more. Sawalha was one of the founders of the Muslim Association of Britain, one of the groups behind the anti-Israel hate marches. And the chef’s kiss? He lives in a council house in Colindale, north London, which he bought at a tidy discount under the Right to Buy scheme. No doubt we’ll soon find out he’s been coining it in from PIP too, such is the ease with which Islamofascists have been taking this country for mugs.

Mere incompetence does not explain this. It wouldn’t have taken much intel to realise Sawalha or Mr X should never have been allowed into Britain at all, let alone to make a life here. The same goes, by the way, for the Abedis, a family of Libyan Islamists who claimed asylum in the UK in the 1990s, only for son Salman to say thank you by blowing up young girls at the Manchester Arena.

The British state struggles to take Islamist ideology at its word. Hamas’s founding charter committed it to the annihilation of Israel and the murder of Jews in 1988. And yet it took the UK another 30 years to proscribe the organisation fully. Meanwhile, Sawalha was allowed to settle in the London borough of Barnet, which has the highest Jewish population of any area in Britain.

For far too long, the government has been making these insane decisions and evading any scrutiny. Remarkably, Mr X was originally granted anonymity for 100 years, meaning journalists wouldn’t be able to name him until 2125, until The Sunday Times challenged it. (The public will now learn his name once legal proceedings are concluded.) Who would have benefitted from this, other than X himself and the cretins at the Home Office who let him into our country? Thank God for the free press.

Now, let’s have a reckoning. A Britain that rolls out the red carpet to barbarians who want to kill Jews and destroy Western civilisation cannot expect to survive. The people of Europe are being forced to pay the price – some of them, the ultimate price – for decades of Islamist appeasement. If the story of Mr X – with his British passport, his Hamas flag and his guns – doesn’t rouse our elites from their moral slumber, nothing will.