#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

#46 In Brief

February 8, 2015

Glissando More accurately, glissssaaaaando. The sound of Prince Charles sliding and gliding around his words as he has been obliged to step around the everlasting presence of his mother, our Queen. Bending, benighted, bewildered.

Good Life U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden, on the podium at the Munich ‘peace conference’, pink-cheeked and aglow with the good life. Never has losing looked so healthy – losing ground to Russia’s Putin, giving ground to France and Germany, gaining ground in health and wellbeing. (Perhaps not the best-ever trade off.)

Good to talk Not caged before burning like the Jordanian pilot murdered by IS, condemned prisoners of Britain’s forgotten religious wars were staked to the ground and consumed by fire (Thomas Cranmer), or drowned in a rising tide of seawater (Wigtown Martyrs). Between two sets of victims, Tudor and Stuart, Shakespeare found a form of words for opposing interests: his Globe, London’s first public sphere. Even now we can hear his joy in staging conflicts in blank verse instead of grisly executions; also his recurring fear of the world struck dumb again, condemned to death screams instead of humanising dialogue.

#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

#36 Three Circles of Hell

October 19, 2014

1) The Abyss of Nothing

‘Whiteout’, said one survivor. ‘Blackout conditions’, said another. A third man reported stumbling through ‘an abyss of nothing.’

These are escapees from the shoulder-high snow and flattening winds which hit theAnnapurna mountain trail unexpectedly last week, at the height of Nepal’s tourist trekking season.

Nearly 40 bodies have been recovered so far; but hundreds have survived – either snatched out of the snow by keen-eyed, sharp-clawed helicopter pilots, or straggling down the mountainside as best they could, clutching at straws which turned out to be guide poles trailing the way down to safety.

Down to the non-descript place where patches of snow give way to blotches of warm earth; and queues of bedraggled survivors look like they’re waiting for the Night Bus home.

Messy.

Yet how splendid it must have been to come down in the world; to re-enter a lower realm of relative comfort, largely as you left it.

When the trekkers went up, however, weren’t they saying goodbye to all that? Pristine, surely, is what they were after. Above the snow line: the absence of things; and theend of men.

‘Blizzard conditions where the ground became the same as the sky and it was difficult to see which way was up and which way was down’, as one survivor described them, are also the preconditions for the Inhuman Being which tourist-trekkies are sort of, kind of looking for – aren’t they?

They may not admit it, and perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it – safer to have said they were searching for the Abominable Snowman.

Whoever he is, they only wanted to touch the hem of his garment; but when the Nepalese weather turned unexpectedly absolute, last week’s search party found themselves draped and dying in it.

2) The Abyss of Everything

A hospital waiting room where there’s no need to wait – surely no such thing. But now there is, in Dallas. Patients have fled the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital after one man died there and two of his nurses contracted the Ebola virus. 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

#24 Public Record, Private Lamentation

July 14, 2014

Young enough to be my son, a man cradles the corpse of his 10-year-old boy.

The man looks tenderly upon the boy’s body, which he is about to wash. Behind him, other family members are distraught; their noisy distress renders them incapable; he can hear how useless they are.But you are still with me while I do this in remembrance of you, the man might be saying.

Except he would not say it, could only think it. Except he cannot think of it, dare not address himself to what happened – and who even knows how it did? He can only do what – yes, really – what a man has to do.

In Baghdad the city morgue is full to capacity: bags of bodies stuffed into freezers, temperatures in the streets outside nudging 50 degrees; mortuary staff carrying on withthe stifling work of listing and labelling. Wherever possible, reconciling recent images – broken faces, busted bodies – with earlier photos of missing persons.

Sometimes the remains cannot be released to relatives until a DNA test has proved positive.

The woman in charge doesn’t know the numbers, although in reply to the reporter’s question she concedes there are many more sectarian killings than a year ago. She laughs but not out of cynicism or defiance or nervousness; it is only funny that someone would need to ask.

Otherwise untimely, in these extraordinary circumstances her laughter is appealing. It carries the half-thought – why would she need to think it through? – that carrying on is what she does in remembrance of normality.

Doing what she has to, Our Lady of the Morgue is proof positive of that public virtue – bureaucracy. She bags bodies because life unrecorded might never have been; except for family, there is nothing to say, either way.

Public and private, official records and a father’s grief. In the open valuation of human life, each of these matters as much as the other.

#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

Westgate: What A Carry On

October 6, 2013

Kenyan policeman running into Westgate Shopping Mall, automatic rifle in hand. Shaft of sunlight catches him on the arm. He’s caught again a few minutes later: bullet in the belly.

But the scene is more loopy than Looper. People are dying……in episodes of Trollied or outtakes from Carry On films.

Fugitives running for their lives through Westgate’s ‘first world interior’. What an engorged mouthful Carry On‘s Kenneth Williams would have made of ‘in-teeer-ior’. Up your first world interior, Julian. Pad-Pad-Pad their feet on the hard wearing, non-staining floor tiles as seen in shopping malls the whole world over (Westgate’s could have come from Manchester’s original Arndale Centre, the one the IRA blew up). Rat-Tat-Tat sounds like a door knocker on Come Dine With Me; but they’re slithering to the floor with fatal gunshot wounds. Splayed out on the hard-wearing, non-staining floor tiles – just wipe away blood in seconds; while stocks last. Whereas 9/11 remains apocalyptic – always en vogue, Westgate Mall was banal. To maintain the aesthetic standards of the September issue, you sad, sick terrorists must recruit your own Anna Wintour. Without a white witch acting as editor in chief, instead of carrying on the terror you’ll find yourselves appearing in Carry On Terrorism. Ha-Ha-Ha.

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