In a changing and confusing world, there’s always one thing you can rely on: Mary Liddell providing her familiar warm bath of liberal pieties every Sunday in the Observer. Today she boldly suggests that “understanding all our vulnerable young, not just Muslims, has become a priority as never before”:
Think of two mothers. The first, Marie Fatayi-Williams, stood near Tavistock Square last week and mourned her missing son, Anthony. Her lament echoed the grief of women from Niobe, who saw all her children murdered, to those who suffer now. ‘How many mothers’ hearts must be maimed?’ she asked.
In a Leeds suburb, another woman weeps. Hasib Hussain’s mother, Maniza, rang police at 10.20pm on the night of the explosion to report her 18-year-old son missing. On Friday, she saw the CCTV picture of the child she had last watched dozing on a sofa. Now he was marching through Luton station laden with the bomb that would slaughter 13 innocent people on a No 30 bus. Anthony Fatayi-Williams was among them.
Mothers of murderers evoke many emotions: pity, suspicion, blame, rage, fear. As the dead go to their graves, so do our certainties….
There are many issues for the women who raised these ordinary tyrants and the society which incubated them…. How to make bad children good is one of great preoccupations of this century….
Once, zealotry was just the province of Wahhabi training camps. Now the focus is on British suburbs where Muslim mothers, and fathers, may find their angry sons are strangers whom they love but cannot discipline or comprehend.
In Bend it Like Beckham, the heroine slips out, unbeknown to her strict parents, to play for a football team. But what if children have more sinister dreams and darker secret lives?…
Religion, simultaneously the panacea and the root of evil, offers no safe passage to good societies…
Among abused children, the 35 per cent with no loving figure to turn to are likely to be violent or disturbed. Temperament and biology matter. Violent children have a low resting heart rate and a slow reaction to danger, as if their emotional cues are imperfect. Racism and lack of police protection trigger a ‘deadly petulance’ in which minor slights induce a murderous desire for revenge.
Shame, depression and powerlessness are all part of the lethal outsider [?] who sees no future and believes he will not live long…
Providing other remedies means thinking more broadly. As the American high-school killings showed, Islam has no freehold on suicide attacks. And behind al-Qaeda are the foot soldiers whose motives are barely explained.
Disenchantment may be part of it, but pique is not the trigger for mass slaughter. Iraq may be a factor, but boys with no GCSEs do not become lords of destruction because of the inadequacies of foreign policy. The capacity to be an ordinary monster lies less in a tick-box checklist than in a short circuitry of nature and nurture that warps the human soul.
At some level, the particularity of jihadism meets something more universal. Seeking to understand Hasib Hussain is not to excuse his brutishness in any way. We need to know what drove him, for our own sakes. Why this boy and not the next? Why one family and not another? Exploring the answers we already have and seeking more is not only a shield against Islamo-fascism. It is also a key to comprehending all our children, of whom too many are pitched somewhere on the long spectrum between enlightenment and darkness.
There will be new laws to protect us, some good, some bad. There will be banning orders, some justified, some not. But understanding what corrupts the vulnerable is the means of ensuring that fewer mothers’ hearts are maimed.
Well, who could possibly disagree with that?
Leave a Reply