The Hamburg Cell

[poliphilo]

Young men are very suggestible. They're fragile and they have a great need to belong. And so they're very easily roped into wars, sects, jihads and the like. If the war, sect or jihad is something that pisses Daddy off then so much the better.

I was watching Channel 4's drama about the 9/11 hijackers last night. They were rootless rich boys, most of them, adrift in a society that didn't give them enough respect. Al Quaeda offered them brotherhood, charismatic father figures, dogmatic certainty, a strong sense of purpose. As one of them said as he made his commitment to the Hamburg cell- "I want my life to count."

They weren't demons. At least, they weren't demons to begin with. At some point or other they crossed the line. And the scary thing is it was impossible to say exactly when that happened. When did imagination fail? When did they stop asking questions? We watched as noble idealists morphed into murderous fanatics and it was a smooth, unbroken process.

War on Terror? Bush was right the first time; it's unwinnable. Why? Because it's a war on human nature. So long as there are needy young men there will be recruits for Al Quaeda and the like.

Comments

[archyena.livejournal.com]

They're like overgrown youth gangs. My suspiscion is that if they had fully socialized in the West they'd probably have not gone back to the Middle East at all and Mohammed Atta would be just another engineer originally from Egypt or wherever. To a degree, the people of the West (not "The West" or even it's philosophical underpinnnings) are to blame in part for these specific hijackers. If they had been reached out to enough, pried out of the international student ghetto, brought into the real West and taught the defining value of modern Western culture--screw what everyone thinks about it--they might have broken that link and stopped letting their religion make them feel worthless and alone. I think that's where it lies in the end, they don't belong because they don't think they should and live a life of self-flagellation and self-fulfilling prophecy.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The film toyed with that idea. The central character, Ziad (I think he was the guy whose plane was brought down in Pennsylvania) had a westernized wife and drank beer (when Atta wasn't looking) and generally yo-yoed between the brotherhood and the culture of the "crusaders". It was never entirely clear why he finally came down on the side that he did.