Monday, January 04, 2016 

Please let it be Rebel Ringo.

Yes, it's the game currently being played in newspaper offices across the country, it's the what do we call the apparent replacement for Jihadi John jamboree!  Now you too can join in, so long as you have no qualms whatsoever with coming up with an alliterative title for a masked killer who is merely a propaganda tool and has no wider significance within Islamic State whatsoever!  

Will his moniker be:

Rebel Ringo?
Genocidal George?
Plundering Paul?
Fundie Fred?
Militant Maurice?
Terrorist Terrence?
Attacker Arnold?
Salafist Samuel?
Evil Ernie?
Killer Karl?
Islamist Ian?
Balaclava Bill?
Decapitating Donald?
Headlopping Harold?
Neckcutting Nicholas?
The White Widower?
Continuity Corbyn?
Jihadi John (again)?
Hanoi Jane?
Benedict Arnold?

(That's enough silly names. Ed.)

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1/04/2016 06:32:00 pm | |

Friday, November 13, 2015 

If he hadn't existed, we would have invented him. Oh, we did anyway.

I've just heard that Jihadi John is dead.  Had his head taken off by a golf ball.  Tragic, tragic!

Or at least that's the way Basil Fawlty might have put it.  Frankly, it would have been preferable to David Cameron's statement.  You can understand President Obama announcing to the world the death of Osama bin Laden; when David Cameron feels the need to put out a lectern in Downing Street and starts explaining how killing Mohammed Emwazi is "a strike at the heart of Isil", it's time for a drink.

Mohammed Emwazi was a nobody, and he ought to have remained a nobody.  The only slightly interesting thing about him is how he came to be radicalised, and then it remains only slightly interesting.  He had no real position of authority or command in Islamic State; he became notable only because he was chosen from any one of however many Western recruits to be the organisation's face to the West.  David Cameron called him Islamic State's chief executioner, which is arguably true, in that he was the one who murdered the group's Western hostages.  By comparison to any number of Islamic State's ordinary cadres however, he almost certainly killed far fewer than many of his fellow fighters.  Once the Western hostages apart from John Cantlie were murdered, he returned to the shadows, both because there was little further use for him and because the Western media and politicians had conspired to make him Islamic State, far more than Islamic State's actual leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ever has been.

Killing Emwazi proves we have a long reach, said Cameron.  Well yes, it certainly is a long reach, so long that it took months after he stopped being a direct threat to us or our citizens to pick him up, or in this case obliterate via drone.  In this instance there probably wasn't any alternative: dropping special forces into Raqqa and expecting them to get out alive or without potentially being captured themselves was a risk few would be willing to take.  Killing Emwazi in such a way raises fewer questions than the previous extrajudicial strike against Reyaad Khan did, not least because Emwazi's crimes were filmed, not merely alleged plots, and it was an American rather than a British operation.  With no other possible way to capture him, and without anything to suggest he would leave Syria except in a body bag, there is an arguable case that doing so was in "self-defence" as Cameron claimed.  That's all it remains, arguable.

As Jeremy Corbyn has said (and of course as soon as the news came through Emwazi had been killed our great political journalists began to speculate on how terrorist lover Corbo would equivocate), it appears as if he has been held to account for his crimes.  That's the best that can be said though, as killing someone, however vile and however brutal their crimes is not a substitute for a trial, nor will it ever be.

David Cameron finished his statement by saying his thoughts were with those who Emwazi so cruelly murdered, and their families.  They would be remembered long after the killers of Isil had been forgotten, he insisted.

Except, sadly, they won't.  We remember the murderers, not the victims.  We know of Jack the Ripper, of Peter Sutcliffe, of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, while the names of those whose lives they ended are firmly in the background, if that.  When the prime minister has to refer to Emwazi by his tabloid nickname, it's clear who will be remembered in 10, 20 years time, and it won't be Alan Henning, David Haines, James Foley, Steven Sotloff or Abdul-Rahman (Peter) Kassig, let alone Haruna Yukawa, Kenji Goto or the unnamed and unknown Syrian officer Emwazi was also filmed beheading, without any cutaways as was the case with the Westerners.

Killing Emwazi is not even the cutting of a head off the Hydra.  It's the equivalent of cutting off the head of the Hydra's spokesman.

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11/13/2015 02:58:00 pm | |

Tuesday, March 10, 2015 

The ladies dost protest too much.

Let's be honest.  Good as most of us are at dishing out criticism, few of us take it quite as kindly.  At least if your self-hatred is off the charts one of the, perhaps the only benefit is there's very little going to be thrown your way you haven't already thought yourself, accurate or not.

If there's one quality I can't then abide, it's how those who should know better try and make the most out of something vaguely insulting when they're not averse to the odd bit of directing their own mob.  Witness the very much non-shrinking violets around the fringes of the Scottish independence campaign pretend to be offended by yesterday's Steve Bell cartoon in the Graun, the very same people whom just 2 weeks ago were not, emphasis not trying to get a nurse sacked for appearing on Labour's campaign material.  Indeed, if she did ended up getting sacked it would be the fault of Labour's hatred of the SNP and not those complaining about an NHS worker breaching some unlikely to be well known rules on such activities.

The way politicians and their hangers-on react to criticism can at times be even more enlightening.  You might have thought a government confident in the security services would for instance have just ignored the mostly absurd rhetoric from the charity Cage about our good friend Mohammed Emwazi, which only garnered such coverage in the first place as the media was desperate to immediately know all they could about him.  When someone describes a serial murderer as a "beautiful man", apparently a shy and retiring type until he was made into a fanatical killer by the merest of interactions with MI5, it's the kind of silliness that doesn't really merit a response.

Except of course we have both a media and political establishment that can't just stand by as slander is spoken of those brave guys and gals at Thames House.  The Mail on the Saturday after Emwazi's unveiling had as many pieces on the apologists from Cage as it did alongside the obligatory profiles of the man himself.  Asim Qureshi, Cage's director, has since been given a ritual dunking by among others, Andrew Neil and Andrew Gilligan, as though anyone hadn't been tipped off by Cage's website about their combining of genuine examples of state overreach, such as the continuing imprisonment of Shaker Aamer at Guantanamo, with their general insistence that many other convicted Islamists are in fact gentle sorts.

Cage had been approached by the Washington Post during their investigation into Emwazi, hence why they were able within a matter of hours after his naming to hold a press conference attended by the salivating media.  That Qureshi and Cerie Bullivant didn't expressly condemn the man who had previously complained to them about being harassed, something that would normally be taken as read when it comes to someone filmed beheading aid workers was enough to set in motion what has occurred since.  Cage's bank accounts had previously been closed with the arrest and charging of Moazzam Begg, since released after MI5 "remembered" they hadn't raised any objection to his travelling to Syria.  The charity's other main backers, the Roddick Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust have since put an end to their funding.

Whether they should have supported the group in the first place is a question worth asking.  It does however seem odd at this remove for the defence secretary Philip Hammond to make such a bizarre assertion as a "huge burden of responsibility also lies with those who act as apologists for them [Islamic State et al]", as he did in his speech to RUSI today.  Does it really?  You can hold Cage accountable for not being fussy over those they choose to back, but to say they have a burden of responsibility themselves is a nonsense.  Even if you take the Gilligan line that Cage have significant traction with those who forever see themselves as victims, looking either to conspiracy theories or putting the blame on a persecuting, oppressive state which operates a foreign policy that is itself a radicalising force, then it still doesn't confer responsibility on them.  They might be irresponsible yes, but that isn't the same thing by any stretch.

It's difficult not to wonder if this shooting of the messenger isn't meant precisely as distraction.  Absurd as Cage's claims are that Emwazi's interactions with MI5 turned him into the person in IS's propaganda, there are questions to be asked of the intelligence agencies, not least made clear by Hammond elsewhere in his speech.  As he put it "Not all those countries with whom we might like to share information in the interests of our national security adhere to the same high standards".  Well quite, and we never had any definitive answers over how Michael Adebolajo, one of the two men convicted of the murder of Lee Rigby, was treated while in Kenya by an anti-terrorist squad in part funded by the UK government.  We haven't been given anything close to a defence of the seeming chief tactic of MI5 when it comes to interviewing those suspected of involvement on the fringes of involvement in terrorism of trying to recruit them, nor have they offered an answer as to why it is those in the circle around Emwazi all went abroad to various places without being stopped.

Hammond's speech was all the more remarkable for just how matter of fact it was.  He mentions just what promises the coalition did keep about reform of the intelligence agencies, but for some reason forgot about the inquiry into alleged complicity in torture, cancelled in the face of new allegations concerning Libya.  Apparently intelligence has played a key role in "providing the information to check ISIL’s murderous advance", a statement so patently absurd you wonder how Hammond delivered it with a straight face.  We did everything we could to draw Russia into the rules-based international system, you know, the one where you don't invade sovereign nations on the basis of, err, faulty intelligence, or invoke the "responsibility to protect" then use it to enforce regime change.  This was in a spirit of openness, generosity and partnership, all for our good intentions to be rebuffed.  The Paris attacks are evidence of the dangers of lone wolves, despite the links the killers had to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and Islamic State.  GCHQ must be allowed to intercept bulk communications data, which they have been and still are.  The debate over such things cannot be allowed to continue forever, although seeing as the Cabinet Secretary told the Guardian the debate was over nearly two years ago now, Hammond seems late to the party.

MI5 is one of those organisations that can't win.  Its major successes only emerge years or decades later if at all, while the failures are immediately glaring.  Such a reality though comes with the territory.  Just as it should be taken as apparent that you aren't supportive of pin ups of the caliphate, so it should be obvious to be critical of the intelligence agencies is not to be against them completely.  One correspondingly obvious conclusion to be reached over how the angle grinder of government and media has been taken to Cage is a whole lot of people are protesting way too much.

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3/10/2015 11:59:00 pm | |

Monday, March 02, 2015 

Of Savile and Emwazi: the "monsters" in our midst.

There are times when it's difficult to judge how flippant, snarky and blasé to be about the everyday horrors of the news.  Comments which to a friend are made in the context of a shared antipathy to the routine stupidity of the media look awful when shorn of it, as they can on a blog to someone unfamiliar with its general style.  Ripping on coverage or the often self-appointed voices of the voiceless can easily fall into being criticism of those who are seeking justice, or most certainly ends up looking that way.

With that in mind, I honestly can't think of a few days of media coverage so utterly lacking in apparent wider awareness as the ones we've just been through.  It's a toss-up as to the most evil person to have ever lived: is it Jimmy Savile, apparently the most prolific and depraved sex offender of all time, and whom despite his proclivities being so widely known, whether by hospital staff, journalists who couldn't get their exposes past lawyers or just through rumours, managed to escape justice? Or is it "Jihadi John" (the last time I am ever going to refer to him as such), aka Mohammed Emwazi, Islamic State's propaganda executioner de jour, at last unmasked so we can know every last detail of his utterly banal life and attempt to pinpoint just when it was he decided he wanted to behead aid workers for a living as opposed to continue his career in IT?

The weight of evidence against Savile being an abuser at places where he was in a position of authority is overwhelming, as proved by the report into his activities at Stoke Mandeville hospital.  What has most certainly not been proved is that he acted the same way wherever he went, as documented by Anna Raccoon bothering to read all the other reports produced by various NHS trusts, and which the media have bunched together as being similarly damning.  Even taking into consideration how faulty memory is, not least when the events under investigation took place anything up to 50 years ago, the lack of almost anything turned up by the various people behind the reports suggests Savile was a very ordinary sex offender, just one given extraordinary opportunities by his fame, charity work and patronage by politicians and royals among other powerful figures.  He attacked the vulnerable when he was certain of not being caught, or when he knew others would cover for him, in the exact same way as the vast majority of sex offenders have and always will.

Clearly though such findings aren't what's required when Savile has been worked up to be the monster to end all monsters.  The Stoke Mandeville report shamefully reproduces the rumours about Savile not just being content with the living but also going after the dead, as obviously such a man with access to the mortuary couldn't have a simple fascination with death as opposed to wanting something else.  His reported time spent with his mother's corpse could similarly only be about one thing.  The Guardian, in what has to be one of the most ridiculous editorials the paper has ever published, reflects it is "difficult to comprehend the existence of such a completely unrestrained id".  Well yes, it might be if half of what has been written or claimed is true, as opposed to the febrile imaginations of journalists taking the already shocking and deciding the ante has to be upped.

And so the editorial goes on, in what can be taken as being the general tenor of much of the coverage.  The writer manages to weave in the exhumation of the judges who condemned Charles the II's father to death, obviously primitive behaviour to us now "but the savage, theatrical desecration captures and discharges something of the rage that Savile’s wickedness inspires today", before moving on to mention Pol Pot, who oblivion is also too good for.  One way of addressing the need for closure or something like it robbed of us by Savile's death could be a "public ceremony of what used to be called commination, a ritual expression of public condemnation and disgust".  Or we could just let the nation's hacks carry on as they have been and leave it at that.

From a larger than life monster we move to one previously identifiable only by his gravelly London accent.  If making Savile out to be evil incarnate is daft or rather distraction, when no one seems to really want to inquire into how it was Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles were taken in by his charms, especially curious when the likes of Leon Brittan are cast to the dogs without a scintilla of evidence being presented against them, then the frotting of Emwazi, as that's what it's been, has been jaw dropping in its stupidity.  In the space of four days nearly every aspect of Emwazi's life prior to his joining Islamic State has been set out, no detail being too slight to be ignored.  He went to school with Tulisa, didn't have any social media accounts, worked in Kuwait where he was a model employee, was a "beautiful man", had a collision with a goal post, played Duke Nukem, joined a gang, was bullied, had bad breath, "borderline stalked" a girl he was supposedly infatuated with, used both drink and drugs, was "painfully shy", has a Chelsea tattoo on the back of his neck, was allegedly choked by an MI5 officer, played five-a-side football, got a second from the University of Westminster, and took anger management courses as a teenager.

That I've only made one of the above things up is testament to how unrestrained by any notion of well, sanity the detailing of Emwazi's past has been.  Some of it has no doubt been prompted by how up till now he has been the face of Islamic State, and the obvious shock that comes from someone who grew up in Britain killing on camera out of political-cum-religious motivation, but all the same.  Emwazi is not the Islamic State; he most probably is not even above a middle ranking position in the organisation; he's a propaganda prop, utterly disposable, and that's it.  He's a tool (in more ways than one), just as the cadres of extremist organisations in the past have carried out the orders of their leaders.  Making him out to be something more is to fall completely into the gaping trap of turning him into a hero for bedroom jihadis and other fellow travellers, which is of course precisely what IS wants.  It's why he was the centrepoint of the mass beheading of Syrian officers, with other foreign fighters at his side, why the camera zoomed on his face as he carried out the act.  What the media hasn't reported is the fear in those eyes, instead of the defiance and belligerence they were meant to convey.

There is next to no need to understand how he came to be Islamic State's chief prop.  Perhaps there's something in the stories of his time at school, but equally perhaps there's not.  The important facts are the all too familiar ones: he was part of a wider group of extremists who no doubt reinforced each other's beliefs; they were known to the security services; they had some contact with him; he ended up going to Syria.  Exactly how he came to be radicalised is of slight interest, but only slight.  Maybe it somewhat happened at university, perhaps he was already going down that path.  Perhaps the bull in a china shop actions of MI5 had some influence on his decisions, perhaps they didn't.  If there are questions deserving answers, it's on just how serious MI5 is when it suggests to those it encounters they become informants, as it does seem to have been offered to almost every individual who has subsequently launched an attack.  Does it ever work?  How does MI5 know it isn't being played?  Has it really, honestly, prevented attacks?

All too predictably with the election coming, much hay is being made by all parties over just who can best protect the nation from such people.  The Tories say they know better than universities who should and shouldn't be allowed to speak on campus, the Lib Dems say no, they do, and Labour says control orders should be brought back, as they were just as big a success as TPIMs.  The reality is no one has the first fucking idea on how we can stop more Emwazis, only they're a massive threat and something ought to be done.  Instead it's easier to detail Emwazi's life up to now in much the same vein as a MTV "behind the music" docu would, only in this instance everyone's looking "behind the terror".  Because it couldn't be there just isn't anything to find, could it?

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3/02/2015 10:16:00 pm | |

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