Clockwork Orange Meets Salafism
Dominic Lawson conjures up an apt description of the sadistic murderers operating under the banner the Islamic State (IS), not so much a band of brave warriors as an out-of-control gang of bullying, religious thugs - Salafism meets Clockwork Orange.
These beheaders aren’t jihadists, they’re the cast of A Clockwork Orange
By Dominic Lawson - The Sunday Times
Terrorism is theatre. So it’s a five-star review for the producer of the show in which an Isis fighter clad entirely in black soliloquises before hacking off the head of the American journalist James Foley. The scene, disgustingly, is more than Grand Guignol. Foley has been forced into the role of the slaughtered actor: but this is the real thing.
For the apparently British man wielding the knife, this is the starring role he will have dreamt of. I imagine his only regret will be that self-protection demanded he keep his face and identity hidden. Still, for someone who had probably been a nonentity buried in obscurity among London’s teeming millions, this must have been the ego trip of a lifetime (a short one, we must hope).
Unfortunately, the nature of politics and the media — and, to be fair, natural horror at the victim’s plight — means that grotesquely undue significance is placed on this incident. So, for example, it has spurred the US defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, to declare that the group to which the murderer belongs is “an imminent threat to every interest we have, whether it’s in Iraq or anywhere else”.
That might seem like a characteristically American tendency to reduce everything to one big simple proposition; yet our own politicians — doubtless embarrassed by the nationality of Foley’s butcher — have also indulged in the language of “millennial threats” and the like. It is almost as if they have been sucked into emulating the inflated rhetoric of the jihadist movement, portraying the world as a Manichaean division between the forces of Islamism versus the rest.
Of course there is an ideological aspect to the indigenous jihadists in Iraq, bent on scrubbing out the borders of the Middle East created almost a century ago by the British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes and his French opposite number François Georges-Picot, in order to replace those spheres of interest with a single Islamic state. But I would be surprised if those hundreds of Britons who have joined the conflict possess more than the most rudimentary acquaintance with the history of imperial map-drawing.
It is even doubtful whether they have much more than a juvenile grasp of Islam, the ultimate cause for which they are notionally fighting. Their true nature was almost comically laid bare at the trial last month of the Birmingham duo Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed, seized by police after returning from Syria. It emerged that they had ordered two books from Amazon: Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies.
It was reminiscent of Chris Morris’s 2010 film Four Lions, about a group of young Britons aspiring to become suicide bombers. But the Birmingham pair were not simply a case of life imitating art. Morris, a most assiduous researcher, had based his dark comedy on three years of work interviewing police, imams and experts on terrorism.
Similarly, the Financial Times writer Gautam Malkani last week observed of the diatribe of Foley’s killer: “As recruitment material, video footage of beheadings seem tailor-made to lure the most unhinged of maniacs to the fray. And yet by labelling them ‘terrorists’ or ‘militants’ instead of ‘lunatics’ or ‘nutters’ we unduly dignify them. We also play to the vanity of many young militant Islamists. In the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, I interviewed a number of wannabe jihadist teenagers across the UK . . . it was clear back then that a lot of those kids had not given too much thought to their cause — they just lapped up the attention of journalists and cameras, enjoying the importance we were giving them. And the more they spat out their monologues, the more we listened to them.”
In this context, organisations such as Isis have much in common with the immensely violent street gangs of Los Angeles. It is not so much the ideology that acts as the pull, but the possibility of exercising power over the lives of others — preferably through sheer intimidation — of being part of a group that offers a sense of belonging and an identity appealing to the most testosterone-fuelled rage of young males.
This is seen with striking clarity in footage released in March by the Middle East Media Research Institute: it is of two American gang members, apparently Hispanic, shooting rounds in Syria against people they describe as “enemigos”. Their (profane) language is replete with references to “homies” — just like the man known as “Abu Kalashnikov” who this month tweeted a picture of himself holding up a severed head with the message: “Chillin’ with my homie — or what’s left of him.” It is a long, long way from the ornately pious rantings of the late Osama bin Laden.
Terrorism and mere criminality have long been associated: where one ends and the other begins can be hard to disentangle. Who knows whether the €100m (£80m) in ransom demanded by Foley’s kidnappers was just for the purpose of financing jihad? Somehow, I doubt it. We do know from the history of the IRA that racketeering and terror were often two sides of the same coin. This was one reason why Margaret Thatcher refused to accord “political status” to IRA prisoners, but insisted they be treated as common criminals.
I was reminded of this by a friend who had intelligence experience of Northern Ireland and then domestic “Islamic extremism”. He told me that those officially identified as being in this category “are much more reminiscent of the football gangs of the 1980s than anything else. They are disaffected and often criminalised young men who want to be in the biggest, meanest gang — and that now would mean Isis, just as it was al-Qaeda.” This is Clockwork Orange meets Salafism.
Thus, as he pointed out, the whole concept of “Islamic radicalisation” might be a misnomer. It also means the government’s strategy of trying to get respectable imams to tell these young men that what they are doing is un-Islamic is pointless. To use their own language (or something like it): Why would they give a toss what those old geezers say?
This does not mean, however, that we have no defence against what these young men do when they return (however depleted) from Syria or Iraq. Our intelligence services are highly proficient at monitoring these individuals, at least within the UK.
And, reassuringly, my friend who used to work in this field believes that the prospect of so-called radicalised Islamists performing dreadful acts of terrorism back in Blighty is much less than now being proclaimed by grandstanding politicians: “Most of those who came back from Chechnya, from Bosnia, from Afghanistan, had basically had enough of extreme danger and bloodshed. They just wanted the quiet life. I don’t think that those who are now in Iraq and Syria will be any different.”
Still, complacency can be as dangerous as alarmism in the field of intelligence: and it is natural that politicians will utter such warnings, if only to avoid being destroyed by public outrage at lack of foresight if a returning jihadist does blow up a British train or aeroplane.
But the overriding truth is that poor James Foley took enormous risks in pursuit of the noble cause of war reporting — he had been kidnapped in Libya as well as in Iraq. For us, the horror show is merely vicarious.
For the apparently British man wielding the knife, this is the starring role he will have dreamt of. I imagine his only regret will be that self-protection demanded he keep his face and identity hidden. Still, for someone who had probably been a nonentity buried in obscurity among London’s teeming millions, this must have been the ego trip of a lifetime (a short one, we must hope).
Unfortunately, the nature of politics and the media — and, to be fair, natural horror at the victim’s plight — means that grotesquely undue significance is placed on this incident. So, for example, it has spurred the US defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, to declare that the group to which the murderer belongs is “an imminent threat to every interest we have, whether it’s in Iraq or anywhere else”.
That might seem like a characteristically American tendency to reduce everything to one big simple proposition; yet our own politicians — doubtless embarrassed by the nationality of Foley’s butcher — have also indulged in the language of “millennial threats” and the like. It is almost as if they have been sucked into emulating the inflated rhetoric of the jihadist movement, portraying the world as a Manichaean division between the forces of Islamism versus the rest.
Of course there is an ideological aspect to the indigenous jihadists in Iraq, bent on scrubbing out the borders of the Middle East created almost a century ago by the British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes and his French opposite number François Georges-Picot, in order to replace those spheres of interest with a single Islamic state. But I would be surprised if those hundreds of Britons who have joined the conflict possess more than the most rudimentary acquaintance with the history of imperial map-drawing.
It is even doubtful whether they have much more than a juvenile grasp of Islam, the ultimate cause for which they are notionally fighting. Their true nature was almost comically laid bare at the trial last month of the Birmingham duo Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed, seized by police after returning from Syria. It emerged that they had ordered two books from Amazon: Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies.
It was reminiscent of Chris Morris’s 2010 film Four Lions, about a group of young Britons aspiring to become suicide bombers. But the Birmingham pair were not simply a case of life imitating art. Morris, a most assiduous researcher, had based his dark comedy on three years of work interviewing police, imams and experts on terrorism.
Similarly, the Financial Times writer Gautam Malkani last week observed of the diatribe of Foley’s killer: “As recruitment material, video footage of beheadings seem tailor-made to lure the most unhinged of maniacs to the fray. And yet by labelling them ‘terrorists’ or ‘militants’ instead of ‘lunatics’ or ‘nutters’ we unduly dignify them. We also play to the vanity of many young militant Islamists. In the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, I interviewed a number of wannabe jihadist teenagers across the UK . . . it was clear back then that a lot of those kids had not given too much thought to their cause — they just lapped up the attention of journalists and cameras, enjoying the importance we were giving them. And the more they spat out their monologues, the more we listened to them.”
In this context, organisations such as Isis have much in common with the immensely violent street gangs of Los Angeles. It is not so much the ideology that acts as the pull, but the possibility of exercising power over the lives of others — preferably through sheer intimidation — of being part of a group that offers a sense of belonging and an identity appealing to the most testosterone-fuelled rage of young males.
This is seen with striking clarity in footage released in March by the Middle East Media Research Institute: it is of two American gang members, apparently Hispanic, shooting rounds in Syria against people they describe as “enemigos”. Their (profane) language is replete with references to “homies” — just like the man known as “Abu Kalashnikov” who this month tweeted a picture of himself holding up a severed head with the message: “Chillin’ with my homie — or what’s left of him.” It is a long, long way from the ornately pious rantings of the late Osama bin Laden.
Terrorism and mere criminality have long been associated: where one ends and the other begins can be hard to disentangle. Who knows whether the €100m (£80m) in ransom demanded by Foley’s kidnappers was just for the purpose of financing jihad? Somehow, I doubt it. We do know from the history of the IRA that racketeering and terror were often two sides of the same coin. This was one reason why Margaret Thatcher refused to accord “political status” to IRA prisoners, but insisted they be treated as common criminals.
I was reminded of this by a friend who had intelligence experience of Northern Ireland and then domestic “Islamic extremism”. He told me that those officially identified as being in this category “are much more reminiscent of the football gangs of the 1980s than anything else. They are disaffected and often criminalised young men who want to be in the biggest, meanest gang — and that now would mean Isis, just as it was al-Qaeda.” This is Clockwork Orange meets Salafism.
Thus, as he pointed out, the whole concept of “Islamic radicalisation” might be a misnomer. It also means the government’s strategy of trying to get respectable imams to tell these young men that what they are doing is un-Islamic is pointless. To use their own language (or something like it): Why would they give a toss what those old geezers say?
This does not mean, however, that we have no defence against what these young men do when they return (however depleted) from Syria or Iraq. Our intelligence services are highly proficient at monitoring these individuals, at least within the UK.
And, reassuringly, my friend who used to work in this field believes that the prospect of so-called radicalised Islamists performing dreadful acts of terrorism back in Blighty is much less than now being proclaimed by grandstanding politicians: “Most of those who came back from Chechnya, from Bosnia, from Afghanistan, had basically had enough of extreme danger and bloodshed. They just wanted the quiet life. I don’t think that those who are now in Iraq and Syria will be any different.”
Still, complacency can be as dangerous as alarmism in the field of intelligence: and it is natural that politicians will utter such warnings, if only to avoid being destroyed by public outrage at lack of foresight if a returning jihadist does blow up a British train or aeroplane.
But the overriding truth is that poor James Foley took enormous risks in pursuit of the noble cause of war reporting — he had been kidnapped in Libya as well as in Iraq. For us, the horror show is merely vicarious.
