Islamic Religious Instruction, Combat Training And Hezbollah Sympathies. Welcome To The Peak District's Spiritual Warrior Camp.
Sayed Hussain Makke ran his Spiritual Warrior camp again this month. Same location, Darwin Lake in the Peak District. A camp built around Islamic religious instruction, evidently aimed at young Muslim men, combining wrestling and combat training with theology sold under the language of God-centric masculinity and brotherhood. A year ago a 16-year-old who attended said it felt like Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's late leader, was with us again.
Makke has mourned Hezbollah fighters, including a British friend who died serving the proscribed group, and has also glorified senior figures in Iran's Revolutionary Guard. He attended Nasrallah's funeral and praised the size of the crowd as proof the resistance was alive and well. Hezbollah's military wing has been proscribed in Britain since 2008, its political wing since 2019. Supporting a proscribed organisation carries up to 14 years in prison.
Alicia Kearns, former chair of the foreign affairs select committee, has been reporting Makke to counter-terror police for months. This week he flew back into the country. Nothing happened. Her message to the Home Office was blunt. Months ago she handed the Government evidence about Hussain Makke. This week he walked into Britain unchallenged. If that is what stopping at nothing looks like, the Government's promises to Britain's Jewish community aren't worth the paper they're written on.
Counter Terrorism Policing London's response was a sentence built entirely out of conditional clauses. Reports get reviewed. Reviews get passed on. Nothing closes the loop.
When journalists reported on the camp, Makke's response, issued through a legal group, did not deny attending Nasrallah's funeral. It accused the Jewish Chronicle of being an asset of a hostile foreign regime and said British authorities should instead focus on tracking, capturing and imprisoning home-grown Jewish extremists who have served in the genocidal Israeli military. That statement was made by a man about to run a residential camp for teenagers, for the second year running, without having been arrested.
And there's a dimension to this that gets lost when every story involving an Islamic preacher gets filed under one heading. Makke is a Shia cleric trained at a seminary in Lebanon under Hezbollah influence, now based in an area of southern Lebanon with a significant Hezbollah presence. He is not representative of British Muslims generally, the large majority of whom are Sunni and have no connection to this. But what he is building, year on year, looks exactly like the organised, identity-based recruitment that has reshaped local politics in towns like Kirklees: discipline, cohesion, a shared sense of grievance and mission, instilled early and reinforced annually. Whatever you think of that model, it works. The institutions meant to be watching for it are, by their own account, still reviewing.
That asymmetry is the real story. A man with an open paper trail of pro-Hezbollah statements, openly hostile to British Jews in writing, runs annual camps for teenagers while an MP's repeated referrals sit in a queue. Henry Nowak's case showed what happens when officers are trained to treat a racism accusation as the primary fact requiring response. This is the same reflex from a different angle. A fear of how acting might look appears to carry more weight than a documented paper trail of supporting a proscribed terrorist organisation. Kearns has handed over the evidence. The question, asked directly, is whether anyone will open the file.
"Makke has mourned Hezbollah fighters, including a British friend who died serving the proscribed group, and has also glorified senior figures in Iran's Revolutionary Guard."