YESTERDAY LUNCHTIME found me engaging in my most recent hobby: acting as one half of the debate on whether the London bombings were the result of the Iraq war. But the truth was that I wasn’t really interested in this parroted meme. What I wanted to hear a discussion about was the much bigger question of why these particular young men did what they did where they did — why a teenager from Leeds should kill young women from Poland with a bomb in a London train.
The early guff, as ever, failed to fit the boys whose identity we now know. The bombers weren’t mostly poor, they weren’t mostly uneducated; some of them, with trips round the House with the local MP and in-laws attending Buck House garden parties, were considerably less “marginalised” than your average bloke. But we should have expected this; their profiles were very similar to the last lot of home-grown suicide bombers from Britain, the ones who went to Israel.
Same again with the protestation by friends and families, not of their normality, but of their hyper-normality. An anonymous cousin of Shehzad Tanweer said that he was “remembered by his family and friends as a gentle, loving boy who always had a smile on his face. I cannot recall the last time I heard him even raise his voice.” Jermaine Lindsay, the convert who lived in Aylesbury, was, according to his relatives, “a good and loving husband and a brilliant father.” Mohammad Sidique Khan was “a kind and caring member of our family”.
Ditto the Tel Aviv bombers two years ago. Of Asif Hanif, filmed before death in the Hamas colours clutching a Kalashnikov, his brother recalled: “Anyone who knew him would tell you. He was just a big teddy bear — that’s what people said about him.”
And perhaps I’d say the same thing. Mass murder, however, with your own slaughter centre stage, is a pretty extreme act. It is an act of such narcissistic destructiveness, displaying such an incapacity to empathise (you have to be there in the carriage with the Polish girls), that you’d imagine some warning signs, if only you could recognise them. I find it significant that the attacks were carried out in London by non-Londoners — people who could dissociate from those surrounding them at the moment of immolation.
It was also, in a psychological sense, a perverted act. The boys will have known (don’t the relatives remind us?) something of the wrongness of what they did, just as the Columbine school killers did. For whatever reason, however, the pleasure of contemplating the act was greater than the knowledge of its error.
No wonder that the relatives go into denial. Look at the language. Tanweer’s cousin speaks of people having “to face the atrocities his name has been linked to”. Khan’s family extend their sympathies to “all the innocent victims and their families and friends affected by this horrific and evil act”. Sorry, and I realise this sounds awful, but not “linked to”; not “this act”. Khan and Tanweer killed the Polish girls.
Who knew? Someone may have had an inkling. Last year there was a trial involving Omar Khan Sharif’s wife, brother and sister, who were charged with foreknowledge of his suicide mission. The wife was acquitted, and the retrial of the other two begins in September. In the light of London it will be well worth examining the evidence.
Shortly before his death Sharif wrote to his brother: “Please take care of yourselves. Difficult times may lay ahead for you and the family in the next few weeks and months . . . Plan now and get rid of any material you may consider problematic.” His sister e-mailed him back. “We all have to be firm and focused . . . there is really no time to be weak and emotions . . . Don’t worry about Tahira and the kids. She is strong and focused . . . May Allah take care of us all and join us all soon.”
The jury must make what it will of these and other facts, but they throw some light on the circumstances of the “nice, polite” Omar. What seems obvious is that the explosive power of adolescent narcissism somehow met up with a detonating ideology. That ideology, I believe, was not Islam per se. Islam is too big, too decentralised, too diffuse, too open to millions of different interpretations to be blamed for the actions of a few men. Islam is only responsible insofar as it constructed — as most religions do — an idealised afterlife for these boys, who in reality have ended their existences as hated lumps of blood and bone.
Rather, I blame the ideology and the psychology of Grievance — the pleasurable, destructive business of imagining that “they” are being bad to “you”, and of therefore calculating every event on that basis. We call it “nursing” a grudge for a reason. We take this aspect of existence and add to it, almost lovingly.
So, last weekend, Azzam Tamimi, of the Muslim Association of Britain, told a rally in London: “My heart bleeds, I condemn it, yes, but I did not make those boys angry. I did not send those bombs to Iraq. I do not keep people locked in Guantanamo Bay and I do not have anything to do with Abu Ghraib, except to denounce it. Politicians, see what you have done to this world.” It’s not me, it’s not us, it’s them. They keep doing bad things to us.
This was brilliantly, if somewhat inadvertently, expressed in The Guardian by Madeleine Bunting. She pointed out the Kashmiri links of most British Muslims, and added: “One of the things they brought with them was the perception of a long history of dispossession and marginalisation.” This “narrative of dispossession” was made worse in the recessions of the Seventies and Eighties. And then, she added: “The more recent oppression and humiliation of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan would have resonated powerfully with these collective memories of Yorkshire Muslims . . .”
Note how the “more recent oppression” is supposed just to be a fact. And we know to whom it refers and to whom it doesn’t. The elected Government in Iraq, the Shia majority, the new fact of Kurdish rights in that country, don’t count. All these peoples are de-Muslimified for the purposes of victimology. And that happens because they simply don’t fit the narrative. The Sunnis of Iraq are imagined to be “us”, but the Shia and the Kurds aren’t. The bombed villagers of Afghanistan are “us”, the liberated women aren’t. The Kosovan Muslims aren’t, either, though you can bet they would have been had Nato not intervened to save them. As it is, they too have disappeared from Muslimhood.
This is not some kind of rhetorical point I’m making. It simply is not an accident — in psychological terms — that anything that conflicts with the Grievance is discounted, and anything that contributes to it is emphasised. Consider the narrative of Saddam. There were basically three options. One, do business with him. That equals propping up un-Islamic tyrants. Two, use sanctions against him. That equals murdering Muslim children. And three, topple him. Ditto plus. All options, bar none, are added to the Grievance.
All populist right-wing movements, inciters to violence and hatred, are adept in the language of Grievance. The only way to fight it ultimately is to argue — again and again and again — that it just ain’t so.
david.aaronovitch@thetimes.co.uk
