I watched the Boarding School Bomber programme on BBC3 last week. I found it very powerful and moving. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b017nghc/The_Boarding_School_Bomber/
It raises a number of questions about the way Al-Quaeda targets the young and vulnerable and also the difficult issue of how a friend or a community reacts when they see someone close to them getting into serious trouble.
I have a ‘theory’
that three Lifeplace* domains are central to this question of ‘ingrown-hatred’ on the one hand
and ‘intestinal-infortitude’ on the other:
1)diet
(descending from the compound alkaline/acidic balance of the human body’s innards,
evolutionarily needing to be 80/20 but, (at least in the Western civilised ‘world’) actually being 10/90: LHS being alkalising-foods, drinks, supplements; RHS being acidifyings);
2) individual human development (or lifeplace-personal education);
3) (socially) constitutional establishment of and ready, frequently-regular access to the Win-Win-Win** Cooperative Needs & Hows Problem Solving Method, at at least lower, middle and top ‘levels’, of a Nation/Community/Neighbourhood (School)(workplace).
———
* lifeplace = during the 75% timeframe ‘out-of-hours/off-duty’ timeframe
(but possibly these human-skills could also be cost-effectively applied within the 25% workplace timeframe, too).
** = Given only two Parties in the meeting, face to face as it were, they are required to be finding win-solutions for every other party not present in that meeting.as well as finding win-solutions for themselves – thus the final Solution must be win + win + (win x n).
They don’t only target the young. I endeavoured to learn Arabic in the 80s,
but got no further than the alphabet on account of an insistence that the best way was to go fight the Russians, having learnt Arabic first. The labour of love is to fight for the language, and by definition, the imperial/religious cause.
Is it any different for any neo-imperial organisation? A sub Saharan African still becomes a Christian or a Muslim for choice, and then may fight for the cause.
The worst example was the Anglicanism of Idi Amin, a travesty of religious meaning and conversion. We have an Archbishop from that country now; bless all his works.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions; the road to heaven with the best.
I see! I see! He went nowhere near any training school! It was all conceived in the mind and from his computer videos, a development from
childhood non-supervision of Pc/TV use.
The youngest of three keen on fitness regimes and computer games, beginning to hate everybody and everything.
As one very careful polic corresondent remarked quite a few chemistry students of 16-17 get interested in making bombs; it is a basic part of an a level chemistry course.
He would have got quite abit of ribbing, even from his physiognomy alone at an english boarding school, quite enough to drive him to distraction. Remember that Christians in Egypt, are the lowest of the low, even today.
The ratcatchers, the refuse collectors, and
almost outcaste, so what the thinking of an Egyptian father and an English mother can have been to send him to a drastically Reactionary Roman catholic boarding school is anybody’s guess. Scum of the earth that boy?
Basically a middle class psychotic, who is serving a prison sentence and not in an asylum.
If is his mother is saying that they knew nothing of all this, she is spinning an elaborate yarn for her own importance and pleasure.
She does at least read out the letter in which he enunciates, if that is not too fine a word to waste on him, the principle of
Forgiveness.
I was looking at the definition of “Hatred”
as provided by Wikipedia and that is marginally instructive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice
“Hatred” is the Vice of “love betrayed”
I was looking at it, curiously enough, on account of the LN inspired discussion of prostitution and drugs, and Dave H’s introduction of the idea of VICE as an integral part of the world of prostitution.
(It may be so in flesh pots but not elsewhere)
It would seem to me that, to draw a comparison, both terrorism hatred , and the carnal sins of prostitution have a similar
genesis, which may be explicable from the entry under “Idolatry” on the link I provide.
A psychiatrist might describe it as severe psychosis; a priest as a severe VICE.
I would be very interested to know why Clive thought it moving. I was quite unmoved .
Apologies and this too, which explains his mother’s problem, and his own.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatred
a question about Fatherland vs. Motherland came up that kind of had me wondering about the forces in culture that have me associating where I live with “father” and what I speak with “mother” — (the question arises in computer programming language too)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeland
It is actually about Mother TONGUE and Fatherland, (without getting bogged down in
second world war nonsense propaganda).
Ethnic minorities, with problems of cultural loss through language loss are very much concerned with it, and Clive, Lord Soley EXACTLY the same ethnic minority problems as
the Scandinavian bomber of the late Summer months*.
In the case of this individual, who may have learned his FATHER’S tongue without learning it from his father, for obvious reasons,fathers don’t generally teach their sons or daughters their mother’s tongue,as a foreign one, in the case of this individual
I presume he has learnt Egyptian Arabic Cairenian,the most finely spoken Arabic.
“He” said he had learnt it at the end of the
show.
This may be a genus of the study of psycho-linguistics of foreign languages, rather than
of speech malformation, or damage, in an existing one.
There is probably a university department in the UK, Leeds perhaps,concerned with the effects of Muslim/Christian, or Arabic/BritishEnglish
unions on the linguistic skills of children, and the above problem of identity with the mother tongue and the Father’s home land.
I can understand somebody wanting to learn another language when the Mother’s tongue seems so idiotic and domineering, in a deeply Roman catholic sense.
Get me out of here!!!
“We knew nothing at all about it, and no doubt knew nothing at all about the violent computer game and Sylvester Stallonism of his younger days! A deliberate glamorising neglect of the youngest son of a family with apparently two intelligent professional people for older siblings.
If that is so, I repeat, an idiot with the morals of a chimpanzee.
* The Norwegian bomber came from a much smaller ethnic minority, such that the Norwegians are not even prepared to acknowledge their existence. The population of that nation state is sufficiently small to
(2.5m) not to need to talk about even smaller ethnic minorities within it.
A man who is making his choices between Arabic and Urdu, and probably chose Arabic,
is in rather a more companionable position than somebody who belongs to a language culture which is almost extinct.
I felt and feel so sad for this mother. Who clearly felt as if she is somehow culpable here. She should not, as this is a complex issue, humans being are diverse and often strange. All without a moment of input by society or home life background or class. In other words, we are all born different.
And what I mean by that is. In every family one child is quite different from another. From the start it either leans toward the culture or personalty of one side of the family or another. And input from surroundings or a particular relative has no impact at all. He’s like his Grandfather, or his Uncle Timmy. She is so close to Great Aunt Flora, how did she get that way, as she never met her? Flora died before she was born. And so on.
From what I saw in this documentary this child was different from his nearest family at the off. He didn’t feel as if he fit. The father was obscure so whether he had an affinity with him, is unknown.
What is clear though, is that no matter how much he tried he did not fit in with his Western surroundings. And this was long before boarding school. His brother on the other hand, was comfortable with himself in the social fit he had found for himself. This young man one had difficulty. And nothing his mother could have done would have changed that.
He felt at odds with himself. And the mixed family background had nothing to do with it either. In same cultural family groups this happens all the time. One sibling, or, the only sibling, does not identify with his given family or social group. There can be many reasons for that. Genetics being on eof them.
The easiest example to give is transexual groups. They don’t fit with what they were given. And this bomber was the same in his sense of self. He did not fit anywhere. Even once he become close into his Muslim culture. They also didn’t quite suit his sense of being. He was a misfit.
And this is a dreadful place to be. He felt rejected by every group, and had done so all his life, by the sound of this video.
I feel that had he continued to pursue his life within the Islamic society he would have been rejected there as well, as he would not have been able to contain his sense of disunity ad his obvious disillusion. And he would, most likely, have been diagnosed as schizophrenic at some juncture.
It was terribly sad for his family. And will never leave them. And I am sure, life for him was also torturous.
It had nothing at all to do with boarding school or anything else in this or his Egyptian culture or society. It was in him at the offset. Not murder, but, disaffection.
And I don’t feel it was hatred, as the hatred had more to do with his internal dysfunction than of anyone or anything specific. Although it was aggravated by war and killing, which gave him the sense that to kill was acceptable if satisfaction was perceived, which is the general message of politics. As this was something he could cling to for reason or motivation that made him feel ‘normal.’ It’s the ‘off with their head,’ syndrome. If you kill the offenders, then you will be perfection and accepted.
How to be aware of this tendency prior to the action he took is a fine line between the rights of the human being to freedom, and the awareness of those around him that were not of his family. Those closest to a person are often unable to see that which they find inconceivable in their own precious people.
I hope his mother and his family find peace.
With the honourable exception of Maude the comments come over as gross, insensitive and ill informed. I have deleted the gratuitous insult to the mother by Gareth.
I totally agree. It was a very hard hitting programme that was very well made.
I wrote a blog about it on my site http://elliotgonzalez.blogspot.com/2011/11/boarding-school-bomber.html feel free to take a look and comment.