#48 Take Three Girls

March 1, 2015

CCTV, Istanbul bus station, in transit, en route, On The Road. Maybe married off by now (10 days later), the three girls taken, taken in, ‘jihadi brides’ late of Bethnal Green.

Earlier, still at Gatwick, they present as modern girls in skinny jeans, retro-specs, hintof a headscarf. Three faces tilted down, either shy of being apprehended on videotape, or apprehensive at erasing their own previous life.

Precious life, your parents would say.

How to spend those hours at the bus station? Ticketed to ride another thousand to thecity nearest the Syrian border, Gaziantep – your giant step to IS.

Sunlight then strip light on white tiles and hard benches; but no smoking and furiously writing and falling in love with Mexican Girl, as Jack Kerouac just had to.

Still it might have been your existential moment – should I stay or should I throw it all away? Get back to East London or go, go Greyhound to the promised land?

Land of piety and devotion; land of godless barbarism.

Three girls taken, they’re on TV again this week.Take Three Girls was a BBC drama series, first broadcast in November 1969, set among the young women of Swinging London, single or separated, sharing a flat, making a meaningful life.

Young meteors who rose to the occasion, not always enjoying their independence but not having it any other way.

Flying light and airy above the grey squares of London, never having to touch down in old town because their freedom fuelled itself.

True to the spirit of their times, these fictional characters were younger sisters to Jake,the fittingly flittingly fulfillingly free spirit of Iris Murdoch’s Under The Net.

Bet the babes of Bethnal Green didn’t know these role models were there; still less theirs for the taking. How could they, with hardly a single freedom sign hereabouts? read more

#44 Hebdo Killers: Sont-Ils Charlie, Aussi?

January 15, 2015

Don’t I know you, Cherif and Said Kouachi? Your cropped hair and dead-eye stare seem familiar. And I think I know where you got that blank expression: not in the East, but west of Budapest.

Far from fundamentalist, the brutal story of the Brothers Kouachi is a parable of les temps modernes; from shooting the satirists (violent disaffection with graphic disillusion), to ‘death by cop’ – the only possible outcome of their shoot-out with les flics.

What could be more Left Bank than coming to life by reference to death? Compare theBrothers K to the chapter in Sartre’s Iron in the Soul where his alter ego Mathieu Delarue finds authenticity by firing on German soldiers: it’s a Paris match.

Agreed, the trappings are different. Yet the brothers’ actions were no more Islamic thanThe Mummy is Egyptian; instead of The Koran, more in keeping with Kenneth Anger’s disdain for America’s discredited dreamland. They wanted in on the new spectacle which contemptuously consumes Koran and Kardashians, Raskolnikov and kalashnikovs alike.

Rather than killing an Arab, this time the Arabs did the killing. Not that Islam made them do it – nor the new spectacle; more that the West failed to make them into anything else.

#41 In The Balance

November 30, 2014

On the one hand your new born baby – head flat against outstretched palm, its body pushing back onto your lower arm like a monkey on a bed of leaves.

In your other hand, the stock of an AK-47, barrel pointing upwards – a vertical axis to complement the horizontal infant.

Do they weigh about the same – these two things, each gravitating to the crook of a different arm? I would have guessed the gun was heavier than the baby….. but you look so well balanced.

As one offsets the other, there is no sign of strain in your arms or shoulders – it seems you could stand like this forever. Meanwhile the tiniest tilt of your head, the less-than-half-a-smile playing across your lips, indicate the internal equilibrium of a Mona Lisa.

News reports of 31-year-old Abu Rumaysah, who skipped bail (awaiting trial for ‘encouraging terrorism’), and boarded a bus from Victoria coach station to join theJihadis of Islamic State (dodging MI5 turned out to be as easy as taking the Victoria Line from his North London home), have pointed to the gross discrepancy between left and right: innocent infant on one hand, shoot to kill on the other; two handfuls co-starring in the selfie he posted to celebrate arriving in Syria and the arrival of his new born son.

There is more to the disparity. Rumaysah’s given name is Siddartha. Given to him by his Hindu mother long before he converted to Islam, it is also the birth name of theBuddha. How ironic that the latterday Siddartha turned from ways of peace into a man o’war (and not even a proper war, at that).

Yet there is no getting away from the poise in the picture.

Although his actions are utterly misguided, absurdly lop-sided, and – yes, let’s have another layer of irony – he may even end up doing the same work for IS (press releases and web design, if reports are to be believed) that he could have picked up in London’s ‘creative industries’, nonetheless for a moment at least this man has found his spirit level. read more

#34 If IS is ‘staggeringly brutal’, why?

September 28, 2014

On Friday 26 September British MPs voted by 524 votes to 43 to back UK government plans to bomb Islamic State (IS) on account of its ‘staggering brutality’.

A week earlier the wife of the British taxi driver held hostage by Islamic State had appealed to his captors to find it in their hearts to release him. Alan Henning remains on IS’s death row, facing the possibility of execution following the televised beheading oftwo Americans and one British citizen.

A few days after her appeal, Islamic State sent Barbara Henning a recording of her husband pleading for his life. Since she had only recently entered a heartfelt plea for mercy on his behalf, the IS response seems peculiarly heartless.

But if there is a staggering absence where you’d expect their hearts to grow, what is it that has led to such heartlessness among IS militants?

The staggering brutality of the West, is their answer; inflicted on (Sunni) Muslims everywhere to such an extent that their own form of staggering brutality is the only course of action left open to them.

But the West has been brutal to non-Western peoples for far more than a hundred years, promoting or suppressing them in its own interests, and not counting the cost (to them) – all this without often prompting such brutality in return.

On this account, the particular character of Islamic State remains unaccounted for.

Neither does the region’s natural environment offer a credible explanation. The desert sun was equally relentless seven thousand years ago as it shone down on ‘the cradleof civilisation’ in the territory now occupied by Islamic State. Likewise, the brutal heat ofthe midday sun may account for crucifixion as an ancient method of execution, but it does not explain why IS has only now set about resurrecting it.

Neither imperial history nor the forces of nature can explain the ‘staggering brutality’ of IS. read more

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Tag Archives: Islam

#48 Take Three Girls

#44 Hebdo Killers: Sont-Ils Charlie, Aussi?

#41 In The Balance

#34 If IS is ‘staggeringly brutal’, why?