So we all now know that Jihadi John, the infamous master of
masked ceremonies, is Mohammed Emwazi - a Kuwaiti-born West Londoner with ‘…anger-management issues.’
The revealing of his identity precipitated an intense debate around how he should be viewed: as a villain or a victim? For some, it must be said,
he is but a hero: the ultimate expression of Muslim manhood; a diamond among false stones. Side-stepping that constituency, a more interesting tension lies
between those who see him as the distilled manifestation of Islamo-fascism, and others who insist he is a victim, a reluctant fundamentalist: a
one-time ‘beautiful young man', turned by the heavy hand of fate
(i.e. MI5).
Stepping back from the heat surrounding present debates, one
notes the historic precedent for different groups viewing the same figure,
through polar lenses. William Wallace, a leader during the wars of Scottish
Independence, is someone who can still divide opinion. After his capture in
1305, the English tried and convicted him on charges of treason and, in an eerie echo that resonates through to the present with Alan Henning, ‘…for atrocities against
civilians that spared neither age nor sex, monk or nun.’
Back to Emwazi, and the consensus
that he is a brainwashed extremist - one whose innate violence was given a
homecoming within the corpus of Islam, and thus for whom there can be no remorse, no
mitigation. Fine. Now let’s switch focus to Chris Kyle, the decorated Navy Seal
and veteran of the Iraq War, whose life story was made into
the hugely successful film, American Sniper. In his autobiography,
he wrote:
Clearly he bought into a popular
narrative, but even a cursory look into history makes this admittedly neat
perspective, seem ridiculous. Here’s an executive summary of recent Anglo-American/Iraqi
relations:
Following the 1991 Gulf War to ‘liberate Kuwait’ after Saddam Hussein's invasion,
decade-long sanctions were imposed that, according to UNICEF, resulted
in the deaths of half a million Iraqi children. Then in 2003, the
US and UK initiated Gulf War II after successfully peddling what
transpired to be a deliberately manufactured lie about weapons of mass destruction. According to Iraq Body Count, the invasion
led to 112,000 violent civilian deaths. A group of US, Canadian and Iraqi University researchers reported a figure of 500,000. And due to the use of depleted uranium, doctors have since observed a massive spike in cancers and congenital deformities. All of which,
for Chris Kyle, got collapsed down to ‘…they hated us cause we weren’t Muslim.’
It must be noted that Kyle
loved his job – he delighted in killing Iraqis, and moreover, saw himself as a
religious warrior:
The question that now surfaces is this: what is the
difference between Jihadi John and Chris Kyle?
In both cases they willingly killed, their conscience
cossetted by seductive fantasies: on the one hand, Jihad and al-Baghdadi’s
Islamic State, and on the other, holy war and '...they hate us cause we're not Muslim'. Indeed the
similarities are so striking, it would be easy to re-cast the eponymous
American Sniper as a brainwashed fanatic: the sort of individual deserving
execution, imprisonment, or at the very least, compulsory registration onto
some de-radicalisation programme.
And the parallels continue - just as Western governments are
concerned about shady figures radicalising young, impressionable minds via grainy videos of Jihadis and martyrs, Muslims are aghast at the effects of the
West’s propaganda machinery - a.k.a Hollywood – on Western youngsters:
There is, however, one arresting difference: there is currently
a vigorous and free-ranging debate among Muslims about Emwazi, and all that
his very existence entails. In stark contrast, there is no mainstream discourse concerning
Chris Kyle, and whether he deserves his heroic status. Indeed the very
suggestion of the same would, in much of Pax Americana, be met by a brick wall.
A recent article suggested that ‘…terrorist ideologies
would only be stopped when young people are taught to think for themselves.’ It’s
a good point. However, boxed-in thinking and the export of terror may, in
reality, be more deeply woven into the Western world, than the Muslim world.
How’s that for irony?
