Anjem Choudary has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 28 years for directing Al Muhajiroun, which the British government has designated a terrorist organisation.
Choudary, 57, from Ilford in east London, was found guilty last week of directing Al Muhajiroun and encouraging support for it through online meetings.
The sentence means that Choudary cannot seek to leave jail on licence until he is more than 85 years old.
Mr Justice Wall said Choudary’s group was a radical organisation that intended to spread Shari’ah law, by violent means, to as much of the world as possible.
The 57-year-old’s imprisonment relates to his attempts to redevelop the network in 2021, after his release from a five-and-a-half year prison sentence for inviting his followers to support the Islamic State fighters in Syria.
Once freed of that sentence, Choudary began holding online lectures with followers in North America.
But he did not realise that his online talks had been infiltrated by undercover officers from Canadian and U.S. security services.
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Police in Britain, the US and Canada had been running separate investigations as they became concerned that Choudary was seeking to recruit a new generation of younger followers.
Mr Justice Wall said that in approximately 30 lectures Choudary had encouraged members of the “Islamic Thinkers Society” into confrontational street preaching and acts of violence.
“You thinly disguised these exhortations as lessons in Islamic theology,” said the judge, adding that Choudary knew members of the organisation would carry out acts of violence, whether or not he was personally involved.
“Organisations such as yours normalise violence in pursuit of an ideological cause,” said the judge. “They drive wedges between people who would otherwise live together in peaceful co-existence. Your behaviour was of the highest culpability.”
Earlier in the hearing, Paul Hynes KC, for Choudary, argued that whatever the jury’s verdict, Al Muhajiroun was nothing like Al Qaeda or Islamic State.
“We are left with dense theological lectures which are not particularly accessible,” he said. “We do not see that the court is in a position… to conclude that Mr Choudary was gathering the masses. It was a failed organisation.”
But Commander Dominic Murphy, the head of Scotland Yard’s Counter-Terrorism Command, said: “For over 30 years Anjem Choudary has been a pretty constant presence in counter-terrorism.
“His influence as a radicaliser is well known but the reality of that impact around the world is that there are individuals who have conducted terrorist attacks or travelled for terrorist purposes as a result of Anjem Choudary’s radicalising effect on them.”
The state’s case against Choudary centres around the people he is linked to.
Authorities say that members of Al Muhajiroon have been linked to at least 21 different terrorist plots and senior members travelled to Syria, where Siddhartha Dhar and Reza Haque joined an ISIS execution squad.
They says that Choudary himself was an associate of Woolwich killer Michael Adebolajo, London Bridge terrorist Khuram Butt, and Fishmongers’ Hall attacker Usman Khan.
He celebrated the 9/11 attacks as a “towering day in history” and Omar Bakri Muhammad, the group’s leader, labelled the 7/7 attackers the “fantastic four” before he fled the UK in August 2005, claiming he had shut down the organisation nine months earlier.
When Bakri was jailed in Lebanon in May 2014, Choudary took over as leader but was arrested and jailed himself four months later, for encouraging support for ISIS.
His licence conditions expired in July 2021 and he began trying to rebuild the organisation, delivering over 40 lectures in one year to audiences of up to 150 across the world and communicating directly with recruits as young as 14 on WhatsApp and Telegram.
