Anatomy of a bomber: well-off, educated and incoherent

‘ONE MAN’S terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ is a truism that served us well during the twentieth century, an era that saw national liberation movements as well as US- and Soviet-backed proxy wars on almost every continent. It would be convenient to see the phrase as containing an essential truth that still holds true today – unfortunately all it tells us about today’s terrorism is the bland and meaningless fact that there will always be people who support it.

Today, a new understanding of political violence is called for. In the case of contemporary militant Islam, one man’s terrorist is another man’s humanitarian aid worker. As bizarre as it sounds, militant Islamists see themselves as closer to Amnesty International than what they are: murderers of civilians.

On one level the West created the Islamist jihad – everyone knows the Afghan mujahideen was supported by the US and Britain as an anti-Soviet cat’s paw. What is less widely understood is that the Islamist militants came of age in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who in 2008 confessed to planning the September 11 attacks, worked in Bosnia in 1995 – literally as a humanitarian aid worker.

The links don’t end with Sheikh Mohammed, however. In fact the Bosnian war in particular was the cradle for the intellectual development of modern Islamism. Foreign mujahideen arrived in Bosnia as early as 1992 and by 1993 were engaged alongside the Bosnian army in the three-way conflict with Croatian and Yugoslav (Serbian) forces. By 1995 multinational groups had assumed control of around 80 per cent of the terrorist cells in Bosnia and it was at this point that the ‘jihad’ was declared to be a global initiative. From their perspective, the Islamists were not terrorists and secessionists but a multinational intervention force. Indeed, this very same language of liberation was used by the West in its interventions in Yugoslavia, including when supporting the Bosnian Muslims.

Western commentators and journalists have performed little analysis of this connection, in part because it undermines the idea of the West as a disinterested peacekeeper in the Yugoslav wars, but also it fails to fit into the simplistic Cold War-infused narrative of the ‘War of Terror’. Both supporters and critics of American foreign policy have a tendency to view all conflicts through the prism of US actions in the post-War era, the key difference being one side sees the US as fostering freedom while the other denounces it for imperialism.

But militant Islam simply cannot be understood in terms of the third world liberation struggles of the past. National liberation movements, often backed by the left, struggled against colonial occupiers in the name of creating representative democracies. In this sense they were carrying out the traditional role of the national bourgeoisie: creating the nation. Much has been made of how Islamism is multinational rather than nationalist in nature but few commentators have noted how depoliticised and incoherent the militants are.

Indeed, the reason the Nepalese uprising against the monarchy and declaration of a Republic in 2008 seems so unusual to us is that it is precisely the kind of national liberation struggle that we have seen so little of in recent years: nationalist, republican and the subject of widespread local support, the deposing of the Nepal’s autocratic aristocratic class was an expressly political act with clearly identified aims and objectives and was performed largely by the Nepalese without the aid of foreign states or NGOs. By contrast, both Western-sponsored ‘state-building’ initiatives such as in Kosovo and the global Islamic jihad are politically incoherent, enjoy weak local support at best, are reliant on outside forces and produce necessarily unstable results. Both the West and the jihadists act in the manner of deus ex machina, intervening in foreign conflicts in the name of those they see as oppressed.

This depoliticisation goes a long way to explaining the class composition of Western Islamist terrorists. Rather than being immigrants from dirt poor families in the third world, today’s Islamic militants are successful, educated and middle class. In the case of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the millionaire scion of a Nigerian government official, who attempted to blow-up a plane en-route to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 there is the clearest indication yet that the typical bomber is not a poverty-stricken Palestinian with nothing to lose, but rather a well-to-do, educated and Westernised individual with muddled politics and a chip on his shoulder.

The September 11 hijackers were largely well-off and educated individuals – for instance, Ziad Samir Jarrah was a Catholic-educated student of aerospace engineering, Majed Moqed was a former law student and Mohamed Atta al Sayed had studied at the Technical University of Hamburg. The foiled attacks on Glasgow airport were led by a medical doctor and a doctor of computational fluid dynamics. Likewise, the 2005 London bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were university educated while Hasib Hussain held a diploma in business studies. Of the four, only Germaine Lindsay had a suspect background (as a drug dealer, something that, again, does not fit the profile of a liberationist).

In the vast majority of cases there is no direct link to Al-Qaeda – why would there be? A typical Islamist bomber is influenced by alienated rage, not a clearly thought-out programme for social, economic and political reform.

Indeed, the London bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan’s statement reads more a howl of anguish than a political statement: “Your democratically elected governments continually perpetrate atrocities against my people all over the world. Your support makes you directly responsible. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.”

Sidique Khan’s narcissistic and solipsistic rage was inspired by the same kind of feelings that motivated many in the West to support intervention in Yugoslavia – the misplaced desire to bring about the ‘liberation’ of others on their behalf. But only the most degraded of politics could view intervention as liberation – liberation cannot come from without, it is necessarily possible only from within: people have to liberate themselves. Despite his seething hatred for the West, Kahn’s rant echoed the so-called ‘humanitarian’ case for war first developed by the West in Yugoslavia and then promoted in both Afghanistan and Iraq. This is not the language of solidarity, in fact it is barely the language of politics. Instead, it is the self-aggrandising attachment of oneself to a wider cause, but that cause need not be Kahn’s chosen one – in fact, it could be anything.

Similarly, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s failed attempt to claim for himself the self-appointed position as martyr for Islam is not a reflection of political ideology as much as it is of identity – a media-obsessed and emotional response to Western self-loathing.

Islamist hatred for modernity is driven by the same Western self-hatred that informs the likes of conservative ideologue John Gray and the more extreme forms of anti-modern environmentalist catastrophism that have so much purchase in contemporary political dialogue. If we want to see an end to suicide bombers boarding planes we won’t find the answer in the caves of Tora Bora or the slums of Gaza. The bombers don’t come from there, they come from among us and are merely the most extreme form of our own contemporary neuroses and failures. The best thing we can do is get over our nihilism and get back to belief in progress.