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Sheikhs on a Plane
Aug. 10th, 2006 04:32 pmI’ll be honest: I was getting a little jittery. The only sign of activity recently had been the anniversary release of a tape of Shehzad Tanweer, another of the 7 July bombers, regurgitating the usual blah about why God wanted him to pull the ripcord, this time with a director’s commentary by Al Qaeda’s own Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who mentioned Tanweer’s “enthusiasm for PE and sport”. Nothing else on the radar, though. To give the cliché its due, it really was too quiet.
And it looks as if that was precisely because something was brewing. Recent intelligence-led operations have left us feeling understandably sceptical about what we’re told, but I really don’t think the security services have precipitated all this just to get attention. (Again with the passenger jets—is there a verse where God condemns flying? 29. The wrong-doers leap into the air, and rejoice (that) they do so. We will strike them down, for the air is Satan’s domain. Note to v.29: According to the Prophet, “in the air” is classified as “anything taller than me”.)
Credit where it appears to be due; I spend enough time on here berating the security services when they get it wrong and then take cover from any comeback behind the words “national security”. (It’s the second part that grates even more than the first, in truth; I strongly believe, not least because of its frequent application to my own life, that “it’s not the fucking up, it’s the making good”. Though, that said, I’ve never actually shot a Brazilian man in the face, and I’m not about to try—after all, who could live with the omnipresent threat of being prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive?) So: the police seem to have genuinely stopped in its tracks an advanced plan to detonate a bunch of airliners, possibly over cities, for the glorification of an apparently psychotic God. If they have, they’ve done a great job, but of course we won’t know the truth behind this craziness for months.
I’m quite pleased that the arresting and cordoning-off isn’t going on around me this time, but again East London is in the thick of it. I lived in Leytonstone in the late 1990s, and given that your late teens and early twenties is the perfect time for your brain to be diverted towards one-track idiot radicalism—religious, political, even artistic—I wonder how many of the kids I used to pass in the street back then have since become would-be martyrs and “good Muslims”. I also wonder how difficult it is not to get sucked into that mindset if all around you many of your peers are becoming radicalised. Distrustful, heavy-handed police on one side, and on the other fervent nutters with the gleam of God in their eye: I wouldn’t be an ethnic Asian Muslim teenager in London right now for all the sultanas in heaven.
And it looks as if that was precisely because something was brewing. Recent intelligence-led operations have left us feeling understandably sceptical about what we’re told, but I really don’t think the security services have precipitated all this just to get attention. (Again with the passenger jets—is there a verse where God condemns flying? 29. The wrong-doers leap into the air, and rejoice (that) they do so. We will strike them down, for the air is Satan’s domain. Note to v.29: According to the Prophet, “in the air” is classified as “anything taller than me”.)
Credit where it appears to be due; I spend enough time on here berating the security services when they get it wrong and then take cover from any comeback behind the words “national security”. (It’s the second part that grates even more than the first, in truth; I strongly believe, not least because of its frequent application to my own life, that “it’s not the fucking up, it’s the making good”. Though, that said, I’ve never actually shot a Brazilian man in the face, and I’m not about to try—after all, who could live with the omnipresent threat of being prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive?) So: the police seem to have genuinely stopped in its tracks an advanced plan to detonate a bunch of airliners, possibly over cities, for the glorification of an apparently psychotic God. If they have, they’ve done a great job, but of course we won’t know the truth behind this craziness for months.
I’m quite pleased that the arresting and cordoning-off isn’t going on around me this time, but again East London is in the thick of it. I lived in Leytonstone in the late 1990s, and given that your late teens and early twenties is the perfect time for your brain to be diverted towards one-track idiot radicalism—religious, political, even artistic—I wonder how many of the kids I used to pass in the street back then have since become would-be martyrs and “good Muslims”. I also wonder how difficult it is not to get sucked into that mindset if all around you many of your peers are becoming radicalised. Distrustful, heavy-handed police on one side, and on the other fervent nutters with the gleam of God in their eye: I wouldn’t be an ethnic Asian Muslim teenager in London right now for all the sultanas in heaven.
