Terrorism Seen as 'Satanic' Cultism
[A friend sent along the following review (below) from the WSJ to which I am not a subscriber, so that I cannot simply post the website. Its report of both fictional and real recruiting of terrorists reminded me of the experiences of several of my students who were briefly snatched by various types of exploitative cult groups.
Some years back one of my orthodox Jewish students went happily off to law school only to reappear later that year as a passionate convert by the Moonies. He had been a somewhat shy person, most likely made nervous by the intensity of the first year of legal studies and, thus, ripe material for the intense virtually sleepless weekend that had hooked him. Fortunately he broke loose from the group and shifted his field of studies to graduate religion.
Another of my students had been orphaned by the death of her parents in a car crash, leaving her with a modest estate. She was discovered by a group of which I have not heard recently known as the EASTERN (not to be confused with Western) Farm Workers. They sent an attractive group of students to solicit on our campus. It turned out that this was a pure scam operation. My student had been persuaded to sign over her inheritance to it and was in the process of suing to regain it. Again, intense pressures brought on a younger person living through a traumatic time of in her life had been exploited by a cadre of 'experts' on conversion tactics.
Cults are nothing new to the world's religions. And suicide inducements are a not uncommon drive by them which can appeal to the depressed and misguided -- note the strong religious prohibitions developed against suicide by the major religions.
The bottom line here is that such appeals ought to be addressed by deprogramming of the cult message rather than 'wars' that precisely play into the hands of those manipulating the unwary. Wars are fought between nations and only induce religious fanatics to sacrifice themselves in the service of their 'Satanic' demons. Terrorism is not a new phenomenon. It is as old as the world's religions and a perverse, deviant offshoot from them that must be dealt with as such. Let us not forget that there was actually a Nazi Christian Church -- bereft of the Hebrew Bible -- during that terrible era. http://www.nobeliefs.com/speeches.htm Even the devil can quote scripture! Ed Kent]
...................................................................
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112362640242009134,00.html
The Wall Street Journal
August 10, 2005
London Terrorists' Mindset Is an Open Book
By SALIL TRIPATHI
August 10, 2005; Page D12
London
Shahid Hasan was born of Muslim parents from Pakistan in Kent near London; he immersed himself in rock music and post colonial literature at a young age. He went to study in London, where he drifted into an affair with his lecturer DeeDee Osgood, who also introduced him to the sensual experiences of drug-induced hallucinations. His trance-like universe of moral relativism was disturbed when he met a group of his co-religionists who promised him answers and certainties, if only he renounced his wayward path and became a true believer. Shahid felt their austerity was more virtuous than the shameless hedonism that DeeDee pursued. London was Jahiliyya, the pre-Islamic city of ignorance and decadence; the clarity of the Book would wipe away those cobwebs, he thought.
Farid, born in Bradford in northern England, surprised his family by suddenly giving up his passions -- cricket, pop music and designer labels. He then broke off his engagement with Madelaine Fingerhut, the white daughter of a senior police officer, much to the disappointment of his Pakistani father, a taxi driver called Parvez, for whom the imminent wedding was like winning the lottery. Farid told his father: "In the end, our cultures cannot be mixed....[T]hey say, integrate, but they live in pornography and filth, and tell us how backward we are." Like many other British Muslims of the second generation, feeling estranged from their parents, he found the polite sermons of older imams dull. He preferred the radical messages of a conservative imam from Pakistan who had moved to Bradford. Encouraged by these words, Farid campaigned against prostitution. When Parvez confronted him, Farid left home
-- with a backpack.
The experiences of Shahid and Farid -- particularly the eerie departure with a backpack -- are remarkably similar to the transformations in the lives of Shehzad Tanveer, Hasib Hussain and Siddique Khan, three of the four bombers who killed 56 people, including themselves, in the London bomb blasts of July 7. But there is one key difference: Shahid and Farid are fictional. They are characters the British author Hanif Kureishi created.
Mr. Kureishi has been writing for several years about the dangers of radical Islam in Britain with remarkable prescience. Farid appeared in Udayan Prasad's 1997 film, "My Son the Fanatic," based on Mr. Kureishi's story that had earlier appeared in The New Yorker magazine. And Shahid was the protagonist of his 1995 novel, "The Black Album." While Farid's fate remains uncertain at the conclusion of "My Son the Fanatic," "The Black Album" had a life-affirming end. When Shahid's Islamic friends decided to burn a book by an author Shahid admired (a clear reference to Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel, "The Satanic Verses"), and even as opportunistic leftists cheered the Islamists, Shahid left them, rushing to DeeDee, who had opposed the burning, and together they fled London.
Fiction writers have that sixth sense of being able to discern subtle
undercurrents and cast light on the larger truth that policy makers miss. Graham Greene did that with his 1955 novel "The Quiet American," published only a year after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which ended the French supremacy in Indochina. The novel centers on a cynical journalist who is horrified to discover the misguided utopian plans of an idealistic American sent there to promote democracy by creating a third force. What turn would the Vietnam War have taken had the Kennedy administration paid attention to Greene?
In the same vein, several British Asian novelists have been writing about the turbulence within Britain's Muslim community. But while they have been honored, their warnings have gone unheeded. Mr. Kureishi has won the Whitbread Award for "The Buddha of Suburbia." Many of Mr. Rushdie's novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize, which he won in 1982 for "Midnight's Children." Monica Ali was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2003, for "Brick Lane." Nadeem Aslam won the Encore Award this year in London for "Maps for Lost Lovers." (In June he also won an American award, the Kiriyama Prize, which is given to enhance the West's understanding of the East.)
If those novels were read carefully, then the composite picture that emerges today -- of disaffected youth finding a new meaning through faith, joining religious groups and following foreign-born preachers, as well as of subterranean misogyny and ostracizing, and even killing those who leave the community by marrying outside the faith -- should not have surprised anyone.
Britain's multiculturalism rests on political correctness. This means the mediator becomes more important than the message. Minority writers get a disproportionate amount of space on the bookshelves, but what is being said is seemingly willfully neglected. That partly explains why so many -- including their neighbors and much of the British establishment -- were surprised to find that three home-grown British Pakistanis became suicide bombers. Many in Britain think -- smugly -- that they know how to handle multiethnic relations. After all, chicken tikka masala had been crowned the country's favorite dish; the whole of Britain cheered when boxer Amir Khan won a silver medal at the Athens Olympics in 2004; until recently Nasser Hussain led the English cricket team; and British courts had allowed Muslim schoolgirls not only the right to wear headscarves, but also the jilbab, an outfit that covers their entire body. How could things go wrong?
To understand that, let us go back to the book that started it all, Mr.
Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses." It dealt with Britain's Faustian bargain with overseas radicals, allowing them space to preach incendiary messages, provided they promised not to contaminate Britain. In the novel, a Khomeini-like "bearded and turbaned imam" lived in London, a "loathed exile [hoping to] return in triumph" to his homeland.
Perceptively, Mr. Rushdie called the microcosm of immigrants "a city visible but unseen." The ferment in that invisible city was ignored, even though more novelists continued to point out the ugly reality. In "Brick Lane," Ms. Ali wrote about an 18-year-old Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen, arriving in London to join 40-year-old Chanu, for an arranged marriage. She does not speak English, and Chanu doesn't think she needs to. As she leads her quotidian life of stitching clothes, around her housing project young boys in Nike warmups and young girls in headscarves form a group called the Bengal Tigers, which debates whether to engage in global jihad. And in "Maps for Lost Lovers," a Pakistani community tries in vain to live by the eighth-century code of life
derived from Sharia law in the midst of a gray, snow-bound town similar to Dewsbury. A couple that defies the norm is killed.
For too long Britain has allowed these communities to remain "visible but unseen." When Muslims in Bradford burned "The Satanic Verses," the government initially protected Mr. Rushdie's right to free speech and pandered to those who claimed to have been offended that the government's backing wasn't strong enough. This sort of political correctness has even driven Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, to welcome the Qatari-based cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who regularly offers religious justification for beating women, insulting Jews and gays, and praising suicide bombers.
Heinrich Heine had warned in his 1821 play, "Almansor": "They who start by burning books will end by burning men." Modern Britain is not Nazi-era Germany, but in 1989, in England's northern cities, Muslim activists burned copies of "The Satanic Verses" -- a chilling reminder of the massive book burnings undertaken by the Nazis in May 1933. Sixteen years later, young men from those English towns carried bombs in their backpacks and exploded them, burning -- and killing -- themselves and 52 other people.
Mr. Tripathi is a writer based in London.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112362640242009134,00.html
Copyright 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp
Some years back one of my orthodox Jewish students went happily off to law school only to reappear later that year as a passionate convert by the Moonies. He had been a somewhat shy person, most likely made nervous by the intensity of the first year of legal studies and, thus, ripe material for the intense virtually sleepless weekend that had hooked him. Fortunately he broke loose from the group and shifted his field of studies to graduate religion.
Another of my students had been orphaned by the death of her parents in a car crash, leaving her with a modest estate. She was discovered by a group of which I have not heard recently known as the EASTERN (not to be confused with Western) Farm Workers. They sent an attractive group of students to solicit on our campus. It turned out that this was a pure scam operation. My student had been persuaded to sign over her inheritance to it and was in the process of suing to regain it. Again, intense pressures brought on a younger person living through a traumatic time of in her life had been exploited by a cadre of 'experts' on conversion tactics.
Cults are nothing new to the world's religions. And suicide inducements are a not uncommon drive by them which can appeal to the depressed and misguided -- note the strong religious prohibitions developed against suicide by the major religions.
The bottom line here is that such appeals ought to be addressed by deprogramming of the cult message rather than 'wars' that precisely play into the hands of those manipulating the unwary. Wars are fought between nations and only induce religious fanatics to sacrifice themselves in the service of their 'Satanic' demons. Terrorism is not a new phenomenon. It is as old as the world's religions and a perverse, deviant offshoot from them that must be dealt with as such. Let us not forget that there was actually a Nazi Christian Church -- bereft of the Hebrew Bible -- during that terrible era. http://www.nobeliefs.com/speeches.htm Even the devil can quote scripture! Ed Kent]
...................................................................
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112362640242009134,00.html
The Wall Street Journal
August 10, 2005
London Terrorists' Mindset Is an Open Book
By SALIL TRIPATHI
August 10, 2005; Page D12
London
Shahid Hasan was born of Muslim parents from Pakistan in Kent near London; he immersed himself in rock music and post colonial literature at a young age. He went to study in London, where he drifted into an affair with his lecturer DeeDee Osgood, who also introduced him to the sensual experiences of drug-induced hallucinations. His trance-like universe of moral relativism was disturbed when he met a group of his co-religionists who promised him answers and certainties, if only he renounced his wayward path and became a true believer. Shahid felt their austerity was more virtuous than the shameless hedonism that DeeDee pursued. London was Jahiliyya, the pre-Islamic city of ignorance and decadence; the clarity of the Book would wipe away those cobwebs, he thought.
Farid, born in Bradford in northern England, surprised his family by suddenly giving up his passions -- cricket, pop music and designer labels. He then broke off his engagement with Madelaine Fingerhut, the white daughter of a senior police officer, much to the disappointment of his Pakistani father, a taxi driver called Parvez, for whom the imminent wedding was like winning the lottery. Farid told his father: "In the end, our cultures cannot be mixed....[T]hey say, integrate, but they live in pornography and filth, and tell us how backward we are." Like many other British Muslims of the second generation, feeling estranged from their parents, he found the polite sermons of older imams dull. He preferred the radical messages of a conservative imam from Pakistan who had moved to Bradford. Encouraged by these words, Farid campaigned against prostitution. When Parvez confronted him, Farid left home
-- with a backpack.
The experiences of Shahid and Farid -- particularly the eerie departure with a backpack -- are remarkably similar to the transformations in the lives of Shehzad Tanveer, Hasib Hussain and Siddique Khan, three of the four bombers who killed 56 people, including themselves, in the London bomb blasts of July 7. But there is one key difference: Shahid and Farid are fictional. They are characters the British author Hanif Kureishi created.
Mr. Kureishi has been writing for several years about the dangers of radical Islam in Britain with remarkable prescience. Farid appeared in Udayan Prasad's 1997 film, "My Son the Fanatic," based on Mr. Kureishi's story that had earlier appeared in The New Yorker magazine. And Shahid was the protagonist of his 1995 novel, "The Black Album." While Farid's fate remains uncertain at the conclusion of "My Son the Fanatic," "The Black Album" had a life-affirming end. When Shahid's Islamic friends decided to burn a book by an author Shahid admired (a clear reference to Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel, "The Satanic Verses"), and even as opportunistic leftists cheered the Islamists, Shahid left them, rushing to DeeDee, who had opposed the burning, and together they fled London.
Fiction writers have that sixth sense of being able to discern subtle
undercurrents and cast light on the larger truth that policy makers miss. Graham Greene did that with his 1955 novel "The Quiet American," published only a year after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which ended the French supremacy in Indochina. The novel centers on a cynical journalist who is horrified to discover the misguided utopian plans of an idealistic American sent there to promote democracy by creating a third force. What turn would the Vietnam War have taken had the Kennedy administration paid attention to Greene?
In the same vein, several British Asian novelists have been writing about the turbulence within Britain's Muslim community. But while they have been honored, their warnings have gone unheeded. Mr. Kureishi has won the Whitbread Award for "The Buddha of Suburbia." Many of Mr. Rushdie's novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize, which he won in 1982 for "Midnight's Children." Monica Ali was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2003, for "Brick Lane." Nadeem Aslam won the Encore Award this year in London for "Maps for Lost Lovers." (In June he also won an American award, the Kiriyama Prize, which is given to enhance the West's understanding of the East.)
If those novels were read carefully, then the composite picture that emerges today -- of disaffected youth finding a new meaning through faith, joining religious groups and following foreign-born preachers, as well as of subterranean misogyny and ostracizing, and even killing those who leave the community by marrying outside the faith -- should not have surprised anyone.
Britain's multiculturalism rests on political correctness. This means the mediator becomes more important than the message. Minority writers get a disproportionate amount of space on the bookshelves, but what is being said is seemingly willfully neglected. That partly explains why so many -- including their neighbors and much of the British establishment -- were surprised to find that three home-grown British Pakistanis became suicide bombers. Many in Britain think -- smugly -- that they know how to handle multiethnic relations. After all, chicken tikka masala had been crowned the country's favorite dish; the whole of Britain cheered when boxer Amir Khan won a silver medal at the Athens Olympics in 2004; until recently Nasser Hussain led the English cricket team; and British courts had allowed Muslim schoolgirls not only the right to wear headscarves, but also the jilbab, an outfit that covers their entire body. How could things go wrong?
To understand that, let us go back to the book that started it all, Mr.
Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses." It dealt with Britain's Faustian bargain with overseas radicals, allowing them space to preach incendiary messages, provided they promised not to contaminate Britain. In the novel, a Khomeini-like "bearded and turbaned imam" lived in London, a "loathed exile [hoping to] return in triumph" to his homeland.
Perceptively, Mr. Rushdie called the microcosm of immigrants "a city visible but unseen." The ferment in that invisible city was ignored, even though more novelists continued to point out the ugly reality. In "Brick Lane," Ms. Ali wrote about an 18-year-old Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen, arriving in London to join 40-year-old Chanu, for an arranged marriage. She does not speak English, and Chanu doesn't think she needs to. As she leads her quotidian life of stitching clothes, around her housing project young boys in Nike warmups and young girls in headscarves form a group called the Bengal Tigers, which debates whether to engage in global jihad. And in "Maps for Lost Lovers," a Pakistani community tries in vain to live by the eighth-century code of life
derived from Sharia law in the midst of a gray, snow-bound town similar to Dewsbury. A couple that defies the norm is killed.
For too long Britain has allowed these communities to remain "visible but unseen." When Muslims in Bradford burned "The Satanic Verses," the government initially protected Mr. Rushdie's right to free speech and pandered to those who claimed to have been offended that the government's backing wasn't strong enough. This sort of political correctness has even driven Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, to welcome the Qatari-based cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who regularly offers religious justification for beating women, insulting Jews and gays, and praising suicide bombers.
Heinrich Heine had warned in his 1821 play, "Almansor": "They who start by burning books will end by burning men." Modern Britain is not Nazi-era Germany, but in 1989, in England's northern cities, Muslim activists burned copies of "The Satanic Verses" -- a chilling reminder of the massive book burnings undertaken by the Nazis in May 1933. Sixteen years later, young men from those English towns carried bombs in their backpacks and exploded them, burning -- and killing -- themselves and 52 other people.
Mr. Tripathi is a writer based in London.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112362640242009134,00.html
Copyright 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp
posted by Ed Kent at 8:08 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home