#21 Hadi And The Had Nots

June 24, 2014

Mohammed Hadi is the Coventry Kid who went from West Midlands to Middle East, where he joined the Sunni insurgents fighting to establish the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Eighteen-year-old Hadi has been nicknamed ‘Osama Bin Bieber’ because, in the only photo made available to the press, he is a picture of absolute innocence. But unlike Justin Bieber, this Berber is thin lipped and bespectacled (for the record: more like Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley wearing big bins; and even an eighties-style jacket).

Almost overnight, Hadi and a handful of fellow travellers such as Cardiff’s Reyaad Khan (20) and Nasser Muthana (20), have been built up as the biggest threat to Britain’s national security: they are Public Enemies No 1, 2, and 3, allegedly.

But these wee boys are pantomime villains. When Khan and Muthana appeared in their now infamous ISIS recruitment video, they seemed to be hamming it up in accents as affected as doing the pimp roll or wearing pulled-down pants.

Me and my Kalashnikov, Yo! From Bling to the burqa, Yo! Iraq is the new black, Yo!

Although there was fighting talk of selflessness and self-sacrifice (dying for the cause), they were really doing a selfie – more narcissist than terrorist. Yet what was uploaded by a handful of adolescent wannabes is now being floated at face value by the British government.

Well done, boys. The great and the good are queuing up to thumbs-down your YouTube appearance. What’s not to (not) ‘like’!

The threat of teenager bombers – inflated as a tech start-up in the days of the dot.com boom, is called to conjure up ‘the public’, though this big idea has long been blown away.

Compared to earlier prospects held out to bright young things of previous generations, anti-adolescent-terrorism is surely less than compelling (even if set to be compulsory under the terms of Prevent, the politico-police strategy for countering extremism amongthe young). read more

#20 Keeping up with the Kardashians

June 16, 2014

Palm trees behind a stucco wall, waving in the breeze; out front the middle aged man who’s flagged down a TV camera in order to get his retaliation in first.

That man is Tony Blair, so the fronds waving to television viewers are likely to be Levantine, i.e. somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, in accordance with the former UK prime minister’s recent role as a ‘Middle East peace envoy’.

To camera, Blair is fronting his preferred account of the dismemberment of Iraq, in which a country now cut into pieces is not the legacy of the Anglo-American, Blair-Bush invasion of 2003; more a continuation of the current civil war in neighbouring Syria underpinned by age-old enmity between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

In newly established refugee camps, families who fled Iraq’s second city, Mosul, following the incursion of Sunni forces fighting for the self-proclaimed Islamic State ofIraq and Syria (ISIS), introduce relics of their erstwhile middle-class existence – blow-up children’s mattresses in Disney-style designs – into the minimal, clinical interiors furnished by international aid.

Back in Iraq, one of many men shown with hands above heads, being led into the desert to be shot by ISIS troops, is wearing a Nasri football shirt. He won’t mind missing the World Cup, then, since his hero failed to make the French team.

Of course the probable execution of Nasri-fan-man is not something to be so flippant about. But how else to react, without indulging in the latest emotional frisson contained in covering civil war as the new Walking Dead?

Similarly, with Cameron’s currently fashionable caution as objectionable as Blair’s previously popular interventionism (more than a decade ago when ‘WMD’ spelled What we Must Do), there is no proper, progressive place in the current round of position mongering. read more

#19 All In A D-Day

June 9, 2014

During the BBC Radio 4 Today programme of 6^th June 2014, coverage of the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings appeared alongside the breaking story of dead babies shoved into the septic tank of a post-war home for fallen women (unmarried mothers) in rural Ireland.

How wide, I wonder, is the divide between these two sets of casualties – the infantile and adolescent? Both of them ended up in the slurry, dropped right in it to meet therequirements of the time; in accordance with the orders of the day.But even as I say this, I know I am slurring my words for polemical effect. Unlike undifferentiated baby waste, leaving no distinction between a child’s body and the contents of his nappy, the young soldiers forming the first wave of Operation Overlord were always marked out as heroes. Their hero status was as clear as the cocoa smeared on their faces – not faeces – for night time camouflage.

In the wartime broadcasts of BBC radio reporter Richard Dimbleby, even the waste products of their successful advance were duly honoured. Of the equipment left behind by the first Allied troops to land in Normandy, in his sing-song voice Dimbleby said: ‘Today the gliders and some of the discarded parachutes lie like crumpled flowers inthe wet wooded countryside north east of Caen.’

Catch the cadences in that!

Dimbleby’s prose is as sonorous as Dylan Thomas issuing his order to the wartime generation – ‘do not go gentle into that good night’. Thomas was writing not about thewar but for his dying father. Yet both the poet and the war reporter accorded the same high honour to human life and death.

Theirs is not an empty formality, but the proper use of form – to formulate what we are. As writers ordering experience as best they can, they order their readers and listeners to do the best we can.

Citing ‘parachutes..like crumpled flowers’, Dimbleby was already memorialising, only hours after ‘our airborne troops have successfully completed this, the first of their operations in the new battle of Europe’. Whether or not they lived to tell the tale, he was writing an elegy for this, their bravest action.

Seven decades later, the memories of the old boys who came flooding back to Normandy one last time, must now be imbued not only with the shades of fallen comrades but also with the ghosts of all they have and haven’t done with their lives inthe 70 years since that first landing.

Was D-Day what made them find their feet as grown men, or is it that the ground beneath them never seemed so solid again? Scanned by television cameras, their faces said both these things at the same time. read more

#18 Strange Fruit, Terrible Freedom

June 1, 2014

Strange fruit hanging from the mango tree. Villagers gathered in a circle around its bitter crop, congregating as if for Harvest Festival. In the front row a girl of seven or eight looks up, awestruck.

The awful thing that strikes me, looking down at a photograph of this scene in Northern India, is the beauty of the two human forms which the young girl is gazing up at. Dressed in colourful shalwar kameez (turquoise and crimson and purple), they float upon the breeze, heads bowed in a picture of modesty.But these are the corpses of the two teenage cousins of Katra, a remote village in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh; low caste Dalits who were gang raped, then hung until dead with ropes slung over the lower branches of a nearby tree – in a grove of mangoes only 250m from where they lived.

When the low caste girls were first reported missing on the night of 27 May, their plight was ignored by police officers who belong to the higher caste of Yadav. Even when they were found murdered, the police were slow to respond; hence the solemn vigil ofpoor villagers who would not allow the girls’ bodies to be cut down until their death was registered across the world.

Since then the authorities have been keen to be seen leaping into action. Arrests made, suspects displayed; two of them shown roped together – boyish, sheepish and unkempt; strung out by what is happening to them (but at least they have not been strung up).

In the cool of the evening, the girls had gone out into the fields to defecate. Not that Father was in the lavatory reading the News of the Screws. Pull the other one! In theplace they called home there simply is no sanitation.

Hours later they were swinging free of the trials and tribulations of rural poverty: no longer yoked to heat and dust; cut loose from the dumb repetition of agricultural toil.

Continually coercive drudgery, lives lived by a thousand and one degradations, punctuated by short and nasty episodes of brutal violence. This combination amounts to a whole way of being for millions of the rural poor.

Didn’t it kill the two teenagers of Katra as much as the criminals who kidnapped them?

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Monthly Archives: June 2014

#21 Hadi And The Had Nots

#20 Keeping up with the Kardashians

#19 All In A D-Day

#18 Strange Fruit, Terrible Freedom