IT WAS SPRING 2003. I almost felt guilty when the woman I was interviewing in the East End told me that the Jews controlled the media, and that not only was Rupert Murdoch a Jew — he was also the son of Robert Maxwell. She was the wife of the radical Muslim cleric Abdullah al-Faisal, just recently jailed for incitement to race hatred. So I had a sort of argument with the producer that I was working with. Were Faisal and his wife — the fringe de la fringe — really important enough to include in the film we were making? I thought not. The producer won.
Just over three years later, and I returned from India on Thursday to find two new books sent to me by their publishers. The first was The Suicide Factory by my Times colleagues Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory, dealing with the story of Abu Hamza al-Masri and the Finsbury Park mosque. On page 272 the authors tell how Faisal — before he was sent down —visited the Beeston area of Leeds on three occasions. In his audience was Mohammad Siddique Khan, the “exemplary” young man who was almost certainly the ringleader of the 7/7 bombers. “Witnesses,” write O’Neill and McGrory, “remember Khan peppering (Faisal) with questions”.
The second book was written by a survivor of 7/7, John Tulloch, a professor at Brunel University. One Day in July is interesting in two main ways: first as an account of being blown up; and second as a demonstration of a certain type of attitude. As Tulloch commented in an interview: “Far more than feeling angry with the bombers or angry about what has happened to me, I feel angry with the political leaders.” Mostly for invading Iraq.
True to these sentiments, the book is infinitely more scathing about Tony Blair than it is about Siddique Khan, who was the man who blew up Tulloch’s Underground carriage, killing six people. Blair is a liar and a poseur, whereas Khan is, if anything, a rather misguided but essentially good man, driven crazy by (Tulloch seems to extrapolate) “oppressive social, economic, educational, housing and identity issues . . .”
The book ends with a “letter” to Siddique Khan. Khan, Tulloch suggests, is analytically right in that, “much of your brothers’ blood has been spilled by and in the West over many years”. But tactically very wrong. “I don’t need you to tell me,” he says indignantly, “. . . that what you call my Government (which, by the way, I didn’t vote for) has been complicit in atrocities against your people and others in different parts of the world.”
Look what’s being bought here. Tulloch’s West is so defined as to do nothing other than kill and mistreat Muslims. Notice too that Muslim deaths only count in the demonology if the West can be said to have caused them. But Khan was listening to Faisal’s “kill the unbelievers” stuff long before Iraq. His farewell statement makes no mention of Iraq, and has almost perfect elasticity. His casi belli could be and are Chechnya, Palestine, Bosnia, Iraq, Kashmir, maybe even the south Philippines or East Timor. “I pray to Allah,” Khan concluded, “to raise me amongst those whom I love like the prophets . . . like our beloved Sheikh Osama bin Laden, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi . . .” Ah yes, al-Zarqawi, that great lover of Shia Muslims.
It is hard to steer these days between the Scylla of Tullochism (just don’t invade them and they’ll go away) and the Charybdis of the currently fashionable Londonistan paranoia. Tulloch may have been through hell, but that doesn’t make him right when he agrees to that same notion of unique Muslim victimhood that Khan was so desperate to assume. And the mirror image of the Islamic world containing a unique villainy is in the same way both an analytical error and a political one.
The admixture of victimhood and religious extremism leads to violence, even if it sounds initially ridiculous. I also once thought Abu Hamza purely comic. But Khan had heard Abu Hamza speak in Beeston, had gone to Finsbury Park and stayed over in 2002. When Abu Hamza was finally sentenced this year, the judge, Mr Justice Hughes, said that the absurd cleric had “helped to create an atmosphere in which to kill has become regarded by some as . . . a moral and religious duty”.
We dismiss zealots at our peril. Suppose they had atomic weapons. Though I am not in favour of any military action against Iran, I’m not in favour of complacency either. It has become the habit of some media Tullochs to play down the significance of the utterances of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. Jonathan Steele in The Guardian was keen last week to tell readers that the “wiped off the map” stuff was wilfully mistaken. “The remarks are not out of context,” he wrote. “They are wrong, pure and simple. Ahmadinejad never said them. Farsi speakers have pointed out that he was mistranslated.” He was just repeating some old stuff from Khomeini; he didn’t mean like, right now; Iran never invades anyone anyway; in any case he’s only one among many competing forces in Iran. So back off.
The problem with Steele’s analysis is that the official Iranian translations of President A’s words refer to “wiping Israel away” (a distinction here between “away” and “off the map” seems unimportant). Ahmadinejad has also said that Israel is a “stain” that must be erased, that Israel is a “rotten tree” that would be destroyed by a coming “storm” and suggested that “Germany and Austria can provide the . . . (Zionist) regime with two or three provinces . . . and the issue will be resolved”. Finally.
The Iranian President has famously described the Holocaust as a “myth” peddled by Zionists, has cracked down on dissidents, bloggers, improperly dressed women, feminists, satellite TV and student activists. In April it was reported that a group calling itself the Committee for the Commemoration of Martyrs of the Global Islamic Campaign was openly recruiting in Tehran for jihadis who would fight in Palestine, struggle against British and American forces, or just kill Salman Rushdie.
In this context it is hardly comforting to know that Ahmadinejad believes that he is directly guided by God, that “a new Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution . . . will, if God wills, cut off the roots of injustice in the world . . . The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world.”
Of course, it could all just be nonsense, as it wasn’t with al-Faisal and Abu Hamza. But it does remind me of these words from David Edgar’s play Albert Speer. The dead Hitler is reproving the dying Speer. “Why,” he demands, “did you insist that anti-Semitism was ‘a vulgar incidental’? I said it — clearly time and time again. I didn’t say ‘resettlement’ or ‘cleaning efforts’. I did not speak of ‘special handling’. And yet you all insist that when I said the Jews must be destroyed, I only meant ‘defeated’. That when I said ‘eliminate’ I didn’t mean ‘exterminate’, I only meant ‘exclude’. That when I said ‘purge’ and ‘perish’ and ‘annihilate’ it was, of course, a metaphor. Why was I cursed with never being taken literally? How could the world have been so blind? And how could you?” Well?
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