So you want to be a suicide bomber

A convict tells Dalrymple of his wish to kill innocents. He is

more hate-filled than any man I have ever met.

The offspring of a broken marriage between a Muslim man and a female convert, he

has followed the trajectory of many young men in his area: sex and drugs and rock-and-roll. Violent and aggressive by nature, intolerant of the slightest frustration to his will and frequently suicidal, he experienced taunting during his childhood because of his mixed parentage. After a vicious rape for which he went to prison, he converted to a Salafist form of Islam and has become convinced that any system of justice that takes the word of a mere woman over his own is irredeemably corrupt.

The underlying emotion is hatred

Dalrymple notices one day that his mood has greatly improved.

He is communicative and almost jovial, which he has never been before. I ask him what has changed in his life for the better. He has made his decision, he says. Everything is resolved. He is not going to kill himself in an isolated way, as he previously intended. Suicide is a mortal sin, according to the tenets of the Islamic faith. No, when he gets out of prison he will not kill himself; he will make himself a martyr, and be rewarded eternally, by making himself into a bomb and taking as many enemies with him as he can.

Enemies, Dalrymple asks; what enemies? How can he know that the people he kills at random will be enemies?

They are enemies, he says, because they live happily in our rotten and unjust society. By definition, they are enemies—enemies in the objective sense, as Stalin might have put it—and hence are legitimate targets.

Dalrymple asks him whether he thinks that, in order to deter him from his course of action, it would be right for the state to threaten to kill his mother and his brothers and sisters—and to carry out this threat if he carried out his, in order to deter others like him.

The idea appalls him, not because it is yet another example of the wickedness of a Western democratic state, but because he cannot conceive of such a state acting in this unprincipled way. In other words, he assumes a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wants to attack and destroy.

Circuses

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, 1863-83. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Circuses, writes Dalrymple, are now what Britain ‘is really about, even in the eyes of a publication destined for the upper 20th of intellectual interest and perhaps accomplishment. This would not have been so only two or three decades ago’.

 

The outlook for France is grim

Église Saint-Étienne

And not just for France, of course. Dalrymple identifies the factors which, he writes,

ensure fertile ground for the recruitment of further Mohammedan ‘martyrs’ for years to come.

These are:

• a highly secularised Muslim population whose men nevertheless wish to maintain their dominance over women and need a justification for doing so
• the hurtful experience of disdain or rejection from the surrounding society
• the bitter disappointment of a frustrated materialism and a seemingly perpetual inferior status in the economic hierarchy
• the extreme insufficiency and unattractiveness of modern popular culture that is without value
• the readiness to hand of an ideological and religious solution that is flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all-sufficient, and yet in unavoidable conflict with a large element of each individual’s identity
• an oscillation between feelings of inferiority and superiority, between humiliation about that which is Western and that which is non-Western in the self
• the grotesque inflation of the importance of personal existential problems that is typical of modern individualism

Islamism is as nonsensical and malevolent as Marxism

Islamism, writes Dalrymple,

is so stupid, preposterous, intellectually nugatory and appallingly catastrophic in its effects that it makes one almost nostalgic for the days of Marxism.

Almost.

The classless society: of this earth only

At least Marxism

had a patina of rationality, and most of its adherents (in the West at any rate), while not averse to violence in the abstract, were willing to postpone the final, extremely violent apocalypse to some future date and did not believe that by blowing themselves up or cutting people’s throats they would ascend directly to the classless society or meet Marx in his pantheon.

You could be a martyr in the Marxist cause,

Richard Sorge was hanged in Japan in 1944. He became a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964

but only on the understanding that death was final. The best you could hope for was that, after the final victory of the proletarian revolution, you would have a postage stamp issued in your memory.

This does not have quite the same attraction as

an everlasting orgy in a cool desert oasis while everyone else is roasting eternally in Gehenna. (No bliss is quite complete without someone else’s agony.)

Fertile ground for Muslim ‘martyrs’

The outlook in France and the rest of the West is grim, says Dalrymple. He identifies the factors which, he writes,

ensure fertile ground for the recruitment of further ‘martyrs’ for years to come.

These are:

• a highly secularised Muslim population whose men nevertheless wish to maintain their dominance over women and need a justification for doing so
• the hurtful experience of disdain or rejection from the surrounding society
• the bitter disappointment of a frustrated materialism and a seemingly perpetual inferior status in the economic hierarchy
• the extreme insufficiency and unattractiveness of modern popular culture that is without value
• the readiness to hand of an ideological and religious solution that is flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all-sufficient, and yet in unavoidable conflict with a large element of each individual’s identity
• an oscillation between feelings of inferiority and superiority, between humiliation about that which is Western and that which is non-Western in the self
• the grotesque inflation of the importance of personal existential problems that is typical of modern individualism