Barbarians at the gate

“Behead all those who insult the prophet” is a curiously worded slogan. It says Mohammed is a figure so holy that even the mildest rebuke should be greeted by severing that person’s arteries at the throat.  It is a common punishment for trivial matters in hard-line Wahhabist regimes such as Saudi Arabia.  One such trivial matter lies behind the latest calls for such barbarism, a "clumsily overdubbed and haphazardly-edited” low budget film with no production values.  Its US-Egyptian maker Nakoula Bassely Nakoula could well be the Ed Wood of the 21^st century. But because his film contains “insults to the prophet”,  it is capable of causing world-wide riots, multiple deaths including a US ambassador  and the banning of youtube in Afghanistan. 

Yesterday's protest in Sydney was the first Australian attempt to normalise such an extreme response. It was a deliberate affront to the norms of western culture and the live and let live philosophy of multiculturalism. Saturday shoppers on Pitt Street would have been bewildered to reads signs that told them  "Our dead are in paradise, your dead are in hell''.  It was so far outside their life experience as to be surreal. But they would have noticed the anger was real enough.

It was worse in other parts of the world where protesters were taking active steps to behead the insulters. Urged on by opportunist Salafi political leaders they lashed out at whatever target was convenient. But it was contrived.  In Libya and Egypt, it was Al Qaeda-affiliated groups preaching to the disaffecting. In Yemen, it was former president Salah undermining the current administration. And behind the scenes across the region it was Iran flexing its muscles.  There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet, but it was politicians pulling the strings.

As usual, the West had no idea how to react. The protests were cloaked in wrath so righteous, it dared not be criticised. Far easier to criticise the target of the wrath, as western countries did in the past, blaming Salman Rushdie or the Danish cartoons for antagonising Muslims, not the protesters themselves for their over-the-top response or their leaders for their cynical manipulations. It is easier to retreat into pious homilies that attack the proximate rather than political causes. Then-US president George HW Bush refused to condemn the fatwa on Salman Rushdie with a non-committal “no American interests are involved” while the British deplored his fight with a great religion.

Now the American can’t look away any longer when a work of no artistic value causes international murder and mayhem. Nakoula had every right to make a film that took Mohammed’s life to pieces and portrayed him as a flawed man, not as a flawless “prophet”.  If that was humiliating and offensive to some, then so be it. That is their problem and they could have dealt with it by ignoring it. But the Innocence of Muslims is not only a rubbish film, it is not even honest rubbish. Nakoula lied to his cast and crew about its intentions .   

Under an assumed name of Sam Bacile, Nakoula pretended he was making a “historical desert drama” called Desert Warriors.  His lead character was Master George, a philanderer and husband of multiple wives, one as young as seven. The references to Mohammed and Islam were thrown in later in the absurdly bad editing process. When one of the cast rang Bacile/Nakoula to talk about his deception, he replied, “I'm tired of radical Islamists killing each other. Let other actors know it's not their fault.”

Nakoula may have wanted to light a flame but it was up to others to burn the house down with it. Former Iranian Hezbollah leader Massoud Dehnamaki gives a clue as to how others would use the spark. Dehnamaki told the Daily Beast it was up to the US to “prove” it was not involved  The US government had to prosecute the filmmakers, he said. “Westerners see their own freedom in the ability to insult others,” Dehnamaki said. “They see freedom as a one-way freeway that moves in the direction of their demands. They don’t respect other people’s beliefs.”  

And indeed there were pictures in the news today of Nakoula being arrested. Though it was not well explained by media, his crime was not blasphemy or even deception but simply a breach of probation conditions. When he was done for a fraud crime in 2010, Nakoula was not allowed a computer or the Internet without permission for five years.  

But there is no crime in his film, except against taste. It was not as the White House said  “reprehensible and disgusting”, but the response was. Bad films don’t kill people, people kill people. No one wants to take the side of a convicted fraudster who deceived his crew and set out to deliberately offend with a ham-fisted film.  But that is what we must do.

Freedom is not a one-way freeway as Dehnamaki calls it. It is an 18^th century enlightenment value that understands complex societies need a certain tolerance of difference to survive.  No longer tied to the dictatorial value-system of any one church, some leeway of live and let live is needed to ensure a peaceful life.  It is why blasphemy was mostly wiped off the books in the west in the 20^th century but it is also why it is creeping back in the 21^st in the form of legislated race hate crimes.  

 

It makes it harder to get criticism into the public domain while doing nothing to address the root cause of the hatred.  And it is the thin edge of the wedge. There are more serious works than Nakoula's at stake. Only this week, British television canned a serious historical program that casts doubt on the authenticity of Muslim traditions. Filmmaker Tom Holland said his "Islam: The Untold Story" was a “a legitimate subject of historical inquiry”. But it was cancelled on “security advice”. British audiences should slam Channel Four’s cowardice and demand they show it. This is not war of civilisations, it is test of strength.  We must stand up for free speech. Unless we are happy for western countries to imitate the Saudis, those who demand beheading need to be disarmed. 

Salman Rushdie: From Bradford’s Fahrenheit 451 to the memoirs of Joseph Anton.

I haven’t yet laid my hands on a copy of Salman Rushdie’s new book, but it is an anticipated pleasure.  “Joseph Anton: A Memoir” tells his own story of being forced underground with armed surveillance after Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him over The Satanic Verses. Acton was the name Rushdie used while incognito during the time when he was most in danger.  The fatwa remains current, as the only man who can lift it – Khomeini – inconveniently died a few months after the pronouncement. However Rushdie is beginning to rebuild his life in the open 24 years after the publication of that fateful book.

The best explanation for the fatwa and how it directly inspired the likes of London’s 7/7 are to be found in Kenan Malik’s “From Fatwa to Jihad”.  English writer Malik tells how in February 1989 he witnessed a profound event: the first burning of The Satanic Verses in public.  A thousand Muslims gathered in Bradford, Yorkshire with copies of Rushdie’s book and burned it in front of a police station.  It wasn’t quite Kristallnacht but it was calculated to shock and to offend.

Like Rushdie, Malik was born of an Indian Muslim family. He grew up in Britain in an Islamic culture which was deeply embedded but not “all consuming”.   He became a radical leftist in the 1980s, and did not think of himself as Muslim but black.  Malik quotes secular writer Fay Weldon who said the Qu’ran offered no food for thought. “It forbids change, interpretation, self-knowledge, even art for fear of treading on Allah’s creative toes,” Weldon said.

Malik didn’t mind treading on Allah’s toes. He was self-consciously secular and militant. Black for Malik was a political badge which stood for refusing to put up with the discrimination dished out to the previous generation.  The whites called them Asians but they were no more Asian than the Brits were Europeans.  Malik said it was much later they became “Muslims” and that for political reasons.  Rushdie came from a similar background to Malik and his early writings had done more than most to humanise the experience of immigrant Muslims. 

Rushdie was used to having his books banned if not burned. His first novel Midnight’s Children was banned in India and Indira Ghandi successfully sued for libel in a British court.  In the second novel Shame, Rushdie’s description of Benazir Bhutto as the Virgin Ironpants caused outrage in Pakistan and another ban.  Rushdie laughed it off as he won prize after prize for his great writing. The third book took his mockery to the next level. It would be no less than a fable about the origins of Islam. 

Written over 12 years before 9/11, The Satanic Verses opens with an exploding airline.  The magical events that happen to the two survivors of the explosion are used to discuss how God’s revelation to the prophet Mahound brings a new religion called Submission (the English translation of “Islam”) to a city in the sand called Jahilia (“Ignorance” – where Arabs lived prior to Islam).  A second tale in the book is a caricature of Ayatollah Khomeini and the third is based the true story of an Indian pied piper who leads all her Indian village on the Haj and then into the sea to drown.

In one book, Rushdie was attacking Islam’s history, one of its major political leader and one of its five pillars of behaviour. He might have expected some resistance, yet the immediate reaction wasn’t huge. Rushdie’s book was so obtuse and so difficult to follow in its non-narrative form it was almost impossible to understand in a single reading and almost threatened to go under the radar. 

Then Sher Azam stepped in. Azam was the president of Bradford’s Council of Mosques.  Azam wasn’t the first Muslim critic of the book.  That honour belongs to philosopher Shabbir Akhtar who called it an inferior piece of literature. But Azam was one of the earliest to realise how Rushdie could be a rallying cry for Muslim identity.  Azam had not read the book but read reviews of it.  He knew religious scholars had declared it blasphemous and he took on the task of writing to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Azam compared it to the Spycatcher affair and asked for it to be banned. He got no reply.  

Azam told Malik Christians don’t mind about what people say about their God because they no longer believe in “Him”.  But look what it means, he told Malik. “It means a country where the values have gone. People drink, take drugs, have sex like dogs.” Azam said those problems would disappear if people believed in God.  Azam tapped into a new consciousness among young radicals. These people were moving away from the radical secularism preferred by Malik to a radical religiosity that could be firmly rooted across the Muslim world.

The Muslims who burned the book in Bradford felt an immense power in their action. Applauded as it was across the umma, they felt tuned in to a philosophy much bigger than themselves. It gave them a giddy sense of power they had never had before in their lives. A few days later on February 13, Khomeini called on “all zealous Muslims” to execute anyone involved in the publication of the book, and Iran offered $3m for Rushdie’s death ( or a knock-down $1m if the assassin was non-Muslim). 

It didn’t matter that Khomeini issued the fatwa primarily as a marker in his battle with the Saudis for supremacy in the Muslim world. His intervention had made it an event of global consequence. That day Rushdie attended a memorial service for writer Bruce Chatwin who had just died. Paul Theroux came up to him and said “we’ll be back here next week for you.” Rushdie said it wasn’t the funniest joke he’d ever heard.  By the following morning, Scotland Yard had given him grade one protection and spirited him away to a safe house.  Joseph Acton was born.

But so was jihadism in Britain, according to Malik. He argues Britain and many other Governments formed pacts with religious movements because they thought they would be easier to control than the left. This was a miscalculation and it was made worse in the UK by Government policies that outsourced “Muslim issues” to Muslim organisations. In the wake of the London Bombings of 2005, Muslim leaders lashed Prime Minister Tony Blair for ignoring the warning signs that led to 7/7.  Blair hit back criticising moderate Muslims for not doing enough. “Governments cannot go and root out the extremism in these communities,” he said.  That was your job, it implied but no one asked Blair why he felt so helpless rooting them out. 

Under the guise of multiculturalism, Britain divested all its decisions on Muslim issues to the Muslim Council of Mosques. Radicalism fermented in these organisations. Six of the 7/7 plotters were trainee doctors.  The Satanic Verses furore was a catalyst for a more confident Islamic identity which educated young professionals could endorse. But it was not an identity recognised by most Muslims.  Islamism was not an expression of ancient faith but a modernist reaction against the loss of belonging in complex societies comforted by a literal belief in the Qu’ran. Rushdie, one of the most nuanced of Muslim culture writers, had no chance against the power of this certainty.

Saving the Sufi Saints of Timbuktu

The Sankore Mosque in Timbuktu (UNESCO/WHC)

Tucked away at the bottom end of the Sahara, Timbuktu has long been the perfect metaphor for a mythological exotic other.  In 1510 Moorish author Leo Africanus saw Timbuktu’s fabulous wealth at the height of the Songhai Empire – one of the largest Islamic kingdoms in history. In The History and Description of Africa, Africanus said the ritual in the court in Timbuktu was “exact and magnificent”.  The city's wealth and power came from its position as the southern terminus of a key trans-Saharan trade route. Merchants sold slaves and bought gold and the city was far enough away from everywhere to maintain autonomy. Some 333 Sufi saints are said to be buried in tombs and mausoleums across the city.

If ancient Timbuktu was a fabled place, the reality of modern Timbuktu is more prosaic. Over the centuries, its trade diminished as Atlantic vessels replaced the ships of the desert.  It became more isolated due to local squabbles and changed hands many times. In 1884 a decision in faraway Berlin brought Timbuktu under colonial ownership.  Sited north of a line between Say in Niger to Barou on Lake Chad, European bureaucrats deemed Timbuktu French territory not British. Locals were oblivious to the line on the map until nine years later when a small group of French soldiers annexed the city to the new French Sudan.

Timbuktu was bequeathed to the newly independent state of Mali in 1968. The corruption of Mali’s one party state coincided with the desertification and drought of Timbuktu.  Northern Mali was dying while government in far-away capital Bamako did nothing to avert the crisis. Tuareg independence fighters from the north had long been active in the region and many returned to Mali this year battle-hardened after the Libyan civil war to depose Gadafi.   

They were behind the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad to liberate northern Mali. Helped by a coup d’etat in Bamako in March , the NMLA combined with an Islamist group called Ansar Dine to quickly took over the three biggest cities in the region – including Timbuktu. Ideological differences quickly spread between the two factions. While NMLA was Tuareg nationalist, Ansar Dine was Islamist with links to Mauretanian-based Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

It was Ansar Dine who wanted to impose Sharia Law on Timbuktu. The former allies clashed at the battle of Gao  in June. The Islamist faction won a decisive victory and took revenge on recalcitrant locals by destroying Timbuktu’s World Heritage listed old city. On June 30, the BBC reported Islamist fighters damaged the shrines in the city including the mausoleum of Sidi Mahmoud, one of the revered 333 Sufi saints. While UNESCO hissed over the destruction of one its treasures, an Ansar Dine spokesman unapologetically said all the shrines would be destroyed. "God is unique,” he said. “All of this is haram (forbidden in Islam). We are all Muslims. Unesco is what?"

This sweeping certainty of the Islamists is in stark contrast to the views of most Muslims. Ansar Dine enjoys little support among locals and rules by fear. Mali is 97 percent Islamic but the vast majority want nothing to do with the cult of Islamism. Ansar Dine follows not in the path of Mohammed but invented traditions of the twentieth century drawing on fundamentalist icon Sayyid Qutb. Their spokesman was wrong: nothing in the magnificent mausoleums of Timbuktu are haram. 

Where this leaves the city and the rest of Northern Mali, depends on the strength of the new unity government in Bamako, announced overnight.  Imposed by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) it relies on army and civilian leaders to overcome their suspicion of each other and work together.  Next door Niger is alarmed about the dangers of Islamic radicalism in northern Mali. Ansar Dine’s links to AQIM will ensure Western support for the new government.  Financial support for a desperately poor city is imperative. But the fate of Timbuktu and its 333 Sufi saints will ultimately rely on the solidarity of its people to resist the medieval modernist barbarism of the Islamists.

Death of Coptic Pope Shenouda III

The one time I went to Egypt back in 1988, I did the regulation tourism things: the pyramids, the Nile, the temples and the Red Sea. But the one thing I regret was the thing I did not do which was to take up an offer. It was at Aswan where a Coptic taxi driver befriended me. I cannot remember his name but I do remember he asked would I go home and meet his family. I turned him down either out of suspicion or because I wanted to spend more time at the poolside bar (Photo:AP).

It was a shame because I would have learned a lot more about Copts and their ancient form of Orthodox Christianity inherited from the Pharaonic Egyptians. I had blithely assumed Egypt, or officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, was a Muslim country but as my taxi driver reminded me, 10 percent were not. He also told me the leader of that 10 percent, some eight million Copts, was a Pope, just like the more famous one in St Peter's.

The leader then was Pope Shenouda III and he died on Saturday in Cairo after 40 years on throne, aged 88. Shenouda will be buried at St Bishoy Monastery of Wadi al-Natrun in the Nile Delta, where he spent time in exile. President Anwar Sadat banished Shenouda to the Monastery in 1981 after he criticised the Sadat government one too many times. Shenouda was an outspoken critic of Sadat and a thorn in his side who berated him over his handling of an Islamic insurgency in the 1970s and Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel.

Shenouda was the 117th pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. Tradition says the Church was founded by St Mark but its independent history is traced back to the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The 'Chalcedonian Definition' defined Jesus as having a separate manhood and godhood. Still central canon to the Catholics and most Orthodox Churches, it was rejected by Alexandria. It was also in Alexandria where the concept of a “pope” first developed, long before Rome stole the idea. Deriving from the Greek word πάππας (pappas), the first man to carry the title was Patriarch of Alexandria, Pope Heracleus who died in 249.

In 451, the entire Egyptian population followed Pope Dioscorus in rejecting Chalcedon and the Coptic Church was born. Coptic was the language they spoke, grammatically closely akin to the hieroglyphic Late Egyptian. The Copts were hated by the Byzantines who saw them as heretics. There was a brief interregnum of Persian conquest by the Sassanids before the Muslims conquered Egypt in 642. The religion was left undisturbed on condition they pay Jizya to the new rulers. The new tax slowly took its toll though the conversion to Sunni Islam would take three centuries.

Copts survived but would remain second class citizens suffering petty discrimination in their own country until the 19th dynasty of Albanian Muhammad Ali Pasha. Ali abolished Jizya and saw their value as an administrative caste. In this, Ali emulated the British divide and conquer strategy of raising the profile of a despised minority. The Copts thrived and started their own schools of education. A 20th century Diaspora took the faith to every continent.

Nazeer Gayed Roufail was born into the faith on 3 August 1923, the youngest of eight children. He grew up in the ancient Nile settlement of Asyut, the Egyptian city with the highest Coptic concentration. Here, a traveller in 1918 wrote, “the wealthy Christian families have built themselves palaces and made gardens by the river side - The domes of the Coptic Cathedral and the minarets of the Mosques may be seen in the distance”.

Roufail was active in Sunday School and went to Cairo University, graduating in history and later the Coptic Theological Seminary. Roufail retreated to the Nitrian Desert where he joined the ascetic life of the Syrian Monastery under a new name of Father Antonios el-Syriani. The Monastery had already supplied one Coptic Pope in the 15th century and from the early days el-Syriani was marked out as a special candidate to repeat the feat. For six years he lived as a hermit before being ordained as a priest.

In 1962 Pope Cyril VI made him bishop of Christian Education and President of the Coptic Orthodox Theological Seminary. Cyril also gave him a third name: Shenouda. He was named for St Shenoute the Archimandrite, the most renowned saint of the Copts who lived for 118 years. The modern Shenouda revolutionised the seminary and tripled the intake of students. His influence ruffled Cyril’s feathers causing a reprimand when Shenouda argued bishops should be elected. It would not be his last fight over democracy.

In March 1971, Cyril VI died and Shenouda was enthroned the 117th pope six months later on 14 November. A year earlier Anwar Sadat had inherited political power of Egypt and was keen to flex his muscles. The Six Day War with Israel in 1967 had halted Coptic pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a situation that lasted for 11 years. When Sadat brokered the Camp David agreement with Carter and Begin, he hoped the Copts would lead the return of Egyptian travel to Israel. Shenouda did not play ball and decreed a papal ban on Coptic visits to Israel in 1979. “From the Arabic national point we should not abandon our Palestinian brothers and our Arabic brothers by normalising our relations with the Jews,” he said.

Shenouda’s inconvenient pro-Palestinianism irked Sadat as did his support of its suicide bombers. In 1981, Sadat sent Shenouda back to the Nitrian Desert where he had previously lived as a hermit. Sadat was assassinated later that year and on 2 January 1985 his successor Hosni Mubarak reversed the decree. Pope Shenouda came back to Cairo to a hero’s welcome celebrating the Orthodox Christmas on January 7. Shenouda expressed forgiveness to those who wronged him. “All Copts open their hearts to their brothers, the Muslims,” he told the congregation.

As the 20th century ended, more and more extremist Muslims were not prepared to open their hearts to their Christian brothers. In the predominately Christian village of El-Kosheh in 2000, riots between Christians and Muslims led to a shoot-out in which 21 Christians were killed. When the judge blamed Coptic incitement and acquitted most of those accused, Shenouda spoke out in rare public criticism. “We want to challenge this ruling. We don't accept it,” he said. But Copts were increasingly on the outer losing their positions of influence across society with only one percent of MPs.

Worse was to come after Mubarak was overthrown in the Arab Spring. For all his faults, Mubarak was a sometime protector of the faith and allowed them religious freedoms including the right to repair their churches to live broadcasts of Easter services and punished Islamists who persecuted them. When he was deposed, over 100,000 Copts fled Egypt, mostly to Canada. The killing began with a church bombing during a 2011 New Year’s Eve mass that left more than 20 dead and dozens wounded, followed by another deadly attack during the Coptic Christmas a week later. Islamists have called them infidels and accused them of being Western spies and traitors who are stockpiling arms in plots to secede from the country.

Shenouda was the peacemaker, often calling for harmony and he regularly met Muslim leaders to ease tensions. He was revered among Copts and popular among many moderate Muslims who respected him as a survivor. But the strain eventually told on his elderly frame. He flew regularly to the US this year for medical treatment and died on Saturday of lung and liver complications.

His death is a massive blow not only to the 8 million Copts but the 80 million Egyptian Muslims he leaves behind. A strong voice of moderation in a troublesome time, his absence will leave a huge void and may exacerbate the trend of Copts to leave the country. The loss of Egypt’s Copts would not only be tragedy for the millions of refugees, but also one for those left behind. Like my taxi driver in 1988, the Copts form much of the nation’s professional and business class. The loss of their expertise could be a fatal blow to Egypt’s faltering economy.

Nigeria's Boko Haram is threat to US

Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram have threatened the US embassy in the wake of their Christmas Day attack on a church in Madalla, Niger State which killed over 40 people. Nigerian newspaper The Moment said today the White House had intelligence reports indicating that the next target is the Lagos US diplomatic mission. The Moment said security analysts have advised US ambassador to Nigeria, Terence McCulley to get local police to fortify security around all US diplomatic missions and investments in the country. (Photo: AFP)

Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan has declared a state of emergency in four states (Borno, Yobe, Niger and plateau states) in the wake of the Christmas Day attack. Jonathan said what began as a sectarian crisis in the North East has gradually evolved into terrorist activities across the country. “The crisis has assumed a terrorist dimension with vital institutions of government including the UN Building and places of worship becoming targets of attacks,” he said. Jonathan also closed the borders adjacent to the four affected states.

Jonathan made the announcement on a visit to the Catholic Church in Madalla near the capital Abuja where 44 people were killed by a bomb as they were leaving a Christmas Day mass. During his address in the church, many worshippers cried uncontrollably, including two women who lost their husbands and four children in the attack. Parish priest, Reverend Father Isaac Achi, said the church had forgiven the attackers.“On behalf of the whole Christians in this country and Christ lovers… we have forgiven them from the bottom of our hearts,” he said. “We pray that such thing will not occur again in any place in this country.”

But others remain unhappy with the president. Nigerian newspaper The Nation said the governors of the affected states were annoyed they were not consulted in the president’s state of emergency. Some of the governors told the Nation the magnitude of the Boko Haram problem required collective effort. An unnamed governor said most of his colleagues were not happy being sidelined. “[Jonathan] has forgotten that whatever affects the nation is a collective burden we need to bear,” the Governor said. “"If governors are supposedly Chief Security Officers in their states, it presupposes that they must be part of solution to the spate of violence in the country.” The governors want a say in the choice of a new inspector general of police. Hafiz Ringim is due to retire within the next three months and the restructuring of police is central to Jonathan’s security overhaul to combat Boko Haram.

ND Danjobo from the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Ibadan said the rise of Boko Haram was related to the long-term failure of governance in Nigeria. Mohammed Yusuf, the movement’s founder was a Nigerian who was radicalised on Qur’an study visits to Chad and Niger. In Hausa language, the word “boko” can mean either “Western” or foreign; while the word “haram” is an Arabic derivative meaning “forbidden”. Yusuf wanted to forbid all Western influences and replace the modern state formation with the traditional Islamic state. His followers were school drop-outs and underemployed university graduates who believed that their hopelessness was caused by a government that imposed western education and failed to manage the resources of the country to the benefit of all.

Islamic Northern Nigeria has always been suspicious of western ways and there were major riots in 1980 against Christian interests that claimed 4,000 lives. The rise of Islamism elsewhere in the globe has strengthened hardliners and they were involved in a major outbreak of violence in 2009 with riots across six provinces and 1500 dead. Security forces killed 500 extremists in Borno alone. Despite, or perhaps because of the riots, Boko Haram enjoyed a wide spread of support within a short period of time. Yusuf was captured in 2009 and was "shot dead trying to escape". His followers treated his death as martyrdom and the group enjoyed renewed strength. In August 2011, Boko Haram attacked the UN headquarters in Abuja with a suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, killing 23 people and injuring more than 80 others.

A US Committee on Homeland Security report of November 2011 said Boko Haram was a direct threat to the US developing alliances with Algerian-based Al Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb and Somali al Shabaab. The report said the US Intelligence community largely underestimated the potential for al Qaeda affiliate groups to target the Homeland, wrongly assessing they had only regional ambitions and threats against the US were merely “aspirational.” They urged increase its intelligence collection on Boko Haram, outreach with the Nigerian Diaspora in the US and better liaison with Nigerian security and counter-intelligence services.

9/11: A journey through memory and airspace

This is a picture of me on the top of the World Trade Center South Tower in late August 1991 or early September, roughly ten years before 9/11. The picture was taken by my then-wife when we were on a delayed trip around the world a year after we married. Memories being fragile and fragmental, I don’t have much recollection of the building other than vague inklings conjured up by that photo. I do remember the fantastic views and from that spot I looked out to the Statue of Liberty. In those days the Statue was still open to the public but the queue to climb the stairs was too long so we didn’t bother going to the top when we were there the day before.

Getting to the top of the World Trade Center was far less problematic. I don’t remember the queue being onerous, the minute long trip to the 107th floor was probably just as uneventful as this one in September 2000 just one year before the towers were obliterated. Yet something had already changed between 1991 and 2000 – the World Trade Center had been seriously bombed. While I was on honeymoon, the planning to destroy the towers had already begun. The aim of the 600kg explosion that went off in February 1993 was to knock one tower into the other and bring both tumbling down. That didn’t happen but the blast killed six people, seriously damaged five sublevels and sent smoke spiralling up 93 floors of both towers making evacuation difficult and two hours long.

The 1993 perpetrators came from all over the Middle East led by Kuwaiti-born Ramzi Yusef. The bombing was financed by Yusef’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who is now in Guantanamo Bay and probably the main reason Obama broke his election promise to close it. As well as WTC 1993, his terror credits included the 1995 Bojinka Plot to blow up 12 US airliners and also crash a plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yusef said the idea for using planes to crash into buildings came from his friend Abdul Hakim Murad, who in turn heard it from the CIA. An undeterred Khalid Mohammed apparently proposed the plan of the 9/11 plot to Bin Laden in 1996.

Whether that is true or not is debatable, but the idea of suicide attackers has long been an extreme staple of warfare because it is so difficult to defend against. It entered the political landscape in 1881 when Tsar Alexander II of Russia was attacked by Nihilist Ignaty Gryniewietsky who who blew himself up killing the Russian ruler in the process. Gryniewietsky’s last letter read: "Alexander II must die...He will die, and with him, we, his enemies, his executioners, shall die too...How many more sacrifices will our unhappy country ask of its sons before it is liberated? It is my lot to die young, I shall not see our victory, I shall not live one day, one hour in the bright season of our triumph, but I believe that with my death I shall do all that it is my duty to do, and no one in the world can demand more of me.”

Gryniewietsky's dangerous conflation of honour and purpose was exactly the same as that inspired Japanese kamekazes in WW2 and later infused Yusef, Sheik Mohammed and those that came after them in 2001. Osama Bin Laden is now dead so there is no way of knowing what role he played in 9/11. What is clearer is the role of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 19 terrorists that brought down the four planes in the attack. Atta was one of just 4 who weren’t from Saudi Arabia.

Born in Egypt, he graduated in architecture at the University of Cairo and was the key person in the Hamburg cell of radical jihadists that got together from 1998. Atta and other members of the cell went to Afghanistan to meet Bin Laden where they agreed to work with Al Qaeda. In March 2000 he sent an e-mail to 60 companies inquiring about flight training, "Dear sir, we are a small group of young men from different Arab countries,” Atta wrote. “We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilots.”

His application for a 5-year US visa was approved and he flew to Newark in June 2000 to enrol in the Accelerated Pilot Program at the Academy of Lakeland in Florida, bankrolled by Sheik Khalid. Within a month Atta was flying solo as was his friend Marwan al-Shehhi (who would lead the South Tower attack as Atta took out the North). With daily training. Atta earned his commercial pilot’s licence in November 2000. He told trainers he was hurrying because he had a job lined up at home. With plenty of money to wave around, no one asked him any questions.

By the end of the year, Atta was studying flight deck videos for most of the major commercial airline planes including Boeing 767s and Airbus A320s. In July 2001 Atta went to Spain to meet Yemeni-born Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a fellow Hamburg cell co-conspirator. Ramzi was supposed to be one of the attackers but could not secure a US visa because immigration officials thought Yemenis would illegally overstay their visit. Ramzi supposedly passed on Bin Laden’s instructions what was to be targeted: "four symbols of America”: Congress, the Pentagon, and the two towers.

A plan to get a 20th hijacker to replace Ramzi was thwarted when Saudi-born Mohammed al-Qahtani (also now at Guantanamo) was not allowed in the country because he arrived with a one way ticket and not enough cash to convince authorities he wouldn’t end up an illegal immigrant. It meant Flight 93 had four hijackers unlike the five on the other planes making overpowering them slightly more feasible.

On 23 August 2001 two events occurred that might have raised the alarm about Atta. His driving licence was revoked in court for failing to turn up to defend driving when without a licence earlier that year. The same day Mossad included him on 19 names they gave to the CIA they said were planning an imminent attack. But no-one connected the dots. On September 10, he drove to Portland, Maine where he was scheduled to fly to Boston at 6am on the 11th. At the airport the following morning, Atta was selected for extra screening by the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System.

The Clinton administration launched CAPPS in the late 1990s as a response to the growing terrorist threat. The system uses information on the ticket booking matched against no-fly lists, FBI fugitive lists and other data to assign a risk score. CAPPS deemed 8 of the 19 attackers worthy of further attention. One was ignored because he had no bags, and the rest, including Atta passed muster because their bags contained no explosives. The process was designed to stop people leaving bombs in the luggage and then leaving the airport. But it did not take into account people who wanted to use the planes themselves as another example of the poor man’s air force.

On arrival at Boston, Atta and the others had to go through security again – something the hijackers were not expecting and got angry about - but they got through without incident. The Portland detour served several purposes – a smaller airport was easier to get through, it deflected attention from the fact 8 other Middle Eastern men were leaving directly from Boston and also left the operation intact if Atta had been arrested in Maine.

There was no evidence Atta had box cutters aboard the plane. He did have two Swiss Army knives and a Leatherman multi-tool. He boarded American Airlines Boeing 767 Flight 11 to LAX scheduled to depart at 7.45am. 81 passengers (out of a 158 capacity) and 11 crew were aboard. Two hijackers sat in first class, Atta and two others sat in business class with none in economy (coach). Flight 11 took off at 7.59am and was close to cruising altitude in 15 minutes. The last routine instruction the plane responded to was “American 11 turn 20 degrees right”. When air traffic control radioed Flight 11 seconds later to climb to 35,000 feet, there was no response. They asked 8 more times in the next 10 minutes with no answer.

By now Atta and his 4 helpers stabbed and slashed their way to control of the cockpit. At 8.19am flight attendant Betty Ong rang the NC reservations office to say there was something wrong. She rang that number because it was a common help line for passengers with reservation issues. Her call lasted 25 minutes, though only a default first four minutes was recorded. A calm sounding Ong told the bemused operator the cockpit was not answering her calls and she thought they were getting hijacked. She said two attendants had been stabbed.

By 8.25am Boston air traffic control knew there was a hijack situation. They heard a hijacker’s voice saying “We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you will be okay. We are returning to the airport”. Seconds later Boston Control heard him say “If you try to make any moves you will endanger yourself and the airplane.” As they escalated the information, Ong told NC the plane was flying erratically. Boston told FAA command in Virginia the flight had entered New York air space.

Another Flight 11 attendant Madeline Sweeney got through to Boston Airport and spent 12 minutes talking to the American Airlines flight service manager. The airline then set up an emergency response centre. By now Ong was reporting a fatality in seat 9B held by former Israeli soldier Daniel Lewin. A minute later Boston heard another message from the cockpit: "Nobody move please. We are going back to the airport.” Boston desperately tried to raise Cape Cod military staff to get fighters airborne to tail the plane.

By 8.38am Ong was telling the operator the flight was descending rapidly. At the same time, Boston told the North American Aerospace Defense Command's Northeast Air Defense Sector a plane had been hijacked. Battle Commander Colonel Robert Marr was getting ready for a NORAD exercise when he confirmed this was "real-world" and ordered fighter pilots at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts to battle-stations. He phoned Major General Larry Arnold who confirmed the order to scramble the planes and “get permission later”.

At 8.44am the Ong call ended abruptly. At the same time Sweeney was saying “Something is wrong. We are in a rapid descent... we are all over the place." The flight service manager asked her to look out the window to work out where they were. Sweeney told him, "We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low." Seconds later she said, "Oh my God we are way too low" and her call ended.

A minute later the Air Force was scrambled but had no idea where to go. At 40 seconds past 8.46am, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the World Trade Center. Atta, Ong, Sweeney and 89 others in the plane were dead as well as countless others in the North Tower. The full horror of Sheik Mohammed’s planned day would take just two more hours to enfold on the world, mostly on live television. The scars it left on America’s psyche, the Arab world and the airplane-travelling public have yet to heal 10 years later.

Ultimately Sheik Khalid Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden were successful in hastening the destruction of US power. In October 2001, Bush turned down a Taliban offer to hand over Bin Laden to a third country and as early as late 9/11 Rumsfeld was pushing the line to bomb Iraq “because there were no targets in Afghanistan”. At no point was any effort made to punish Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah for providing most of the terrorists or Egypt's Mubarak for providing Atta.

Instead the PNAC agenda pushed the 9/11 disaster cost of $240 billion out to the dubious double war cost of $1,248 trillion and counting. At 10 percent of US GDP in a time of financial crisis, neither crippling war can yet be considered a success. Instead, they represent a victory to terrorists far greater than they could have imagined with the long-planned destruction of large buildings.

Norway forced to deal with gruesome genies

I’ve just watched the Breivik Video Manifesto, an odious, misogynist and ridiculous grab-bag of far right anti-Muslim ideas with a childish appeal to crusader and templar nonsense. I won’t be linking to it, go search it out yourself if you want to see it. No doubt my viewing it along with countless others is exactly what the mass murderer wanted to happen. American journalist Kevin Slaughter found more ravings in the aftermath of Anders Behring Breivik's slaughter in which a quiet, dangerous lunacy shines through. The hint of menace is there throughout, though the capacity to carry such ideas to their illogical conclusion still defies reason.

Breivik’s actions puts him in a different category to Martin Bryant, Michael Ryan, Thomas Hamilton, Cho Seung-Hui or countless other madmen who destroyed multiple lives randomly in mundane settings. Breivik’s aim was to wipe out an entire political class, both the current generation at the Oslo offices of the Prime Minister and the next generation at the youth camp in Utoya, leaving almost 100 dead people in his grisly wake. The first hand account of Prableen Kaur on Utoya is more chilling than anything Hollywood could dream up by way of terror. Nor was it the end of the matter. Unlike most of the other mass murderers, Breivik did not do the decent thing and turn the gun on himself. Instead he gave himself up and spoke freely of his actions in the start of the second act of his deadly charade.

Breivik’s careful planning of his actions took into account the aftermath. In setting up his recent Twitter and Facebook accounts, he knew the media would trawl all over his digital footprint in the wake of the atrocity. He was relying on mass media to get his message out beyond the lunatic fringe. This was why it was so important the judge closed the court when Breivik appeared this week. He desperately wanted an open court and be seen wearing a uniform. Some painted it as a press freedom issue, but the question needs to be asked “press freedom to do what?”

Judge Kim Heger agreed with police there was nothing to gain from giving him a soapbox. Heger did the right thing by kicking the media out and placing Breivik in solitary confinement for four weeks. Despite the need for transparency in the law, the media could simply not be trusted in the matter. On Saturday, many established journals were led astray by the feverish demands of the media machine, and blamed Islamic extremism for the events without a shred of evidence. Nature and the media abhor a vacuum and the information gap was filled with “fact free conjecture” as Charlie Brooker put it.

Afterwards there was the inevitable mad scramble to find out as much as possible about the life and motivations of the killer. Most picked up the crumbs of evidence he deliberately left behind. Others rushed into the arrant nonsense that the shootings somehow “destroyed Norway’s innocence.” Nor was Norway “suddenly exposed to the banality of evil.” This clichéd rot says nothing other than express a maudlin faux-sympathy for those who suffered a terrible loss. Many people have lost relatives or friends but that is no reason to infantilise the tragedy. Norway is a complex first world country not an eight-year-old child.

Immigration is on the rise in Norway as it is across Europe. Many are uneasy with the changing demographic though few would be prepared to be violent about it. Islam is the country’s second largest religion and there has been a corresponding rise in support for the anti-immigration Progress Party, now the second-largest party in Parliament. Lilit Gevorgyan, Europe analyst at the IHS Global Insight think-tank, sees the killings as a chance to be a catalyst for an honest discussion of the issue in the political centre. "If the twin attacks fail to trigger an honest discussion of the issue, exposing often scare-mongering arguments used by the extreme right, this may marginalise the radical groups and worsen the situation, which in turn could bring more similar attacks in the future," Gevorgyan said. "This is not just an issue in Norway. Across Scandinavia and also in Western and Eastern Europe, you have a lot of people who are very frustrated by the lack of open debate.” Maybe this is giving in to Breivik, but he has released the genie and it will be impossible to put it back in the bottle.