I
daresay plenty of people have no pity for Samra Kesinovic or for Sabina
Selinovic. I daresay plenty believe they brought their horrible fates on
themselves. But all I see is two girls so impressionable and confused
that they came to view themselves purely as victims, and became purely
victims precisely for that reason.
In April 2014, aged 15, the girls left their home in Vienna to join Islamic State. A note left behind said they wanted to die for Allah. Social media accounts showed the girls holding Kalashnikovs, announced that they were married to Chechen jihadis and pronounced their general contentment. These accounts are now believed to have been operated by people other than the girls.
By October, press reports were claiming that the girls had contacted their parents to say they’d made a “huge mistake” and wanted to come home. In December, a UN counter-terror expert, David Scharia, reported on two 15-year-olds of Bosnian origin: “Both were recruited by Islamic State. One has died in fighting. The other has disappeared.”
Exactly what happened to them is hard to pin down. According to the Austrian media, a Tunisian woman who managed to escape confirms Scharia’s report, saying that Selinovic died in fighting in Raqqa, and Kesinovic was beaten to death by jihadis after she tried to flee. But stories from places such as Raqqa always have to be treated with the utmost caution, and verifying this news is bound to be complicated.
Whether they are alive or dead, they are victims of brutality, and the fact that they delivered themselves up as willing victims is all the more awful. Plenty of teenagers adopt ridiculous beliefs, only to realise quite quickly that they have been idiots. In few cases are either the beliefs or the consequences anything like as brutal as Kesinovic’s and Selinovic’s. Yet, it’s impossible, surely, not to feel sympathetic to fellow humans who develop such bleak perceptions of their lives that they think Isis is the answer, let alone to act on those bitterly negative views with such avid certainty.
Apparently not. Not only is it possible to feel no sympathy. It’s also desirable. Or so the Sun newspaper wishes us to believe. The Sun, in the wake of the Paris attacks, ran a now-notorious headline designed to get its readers in a righteous lather because a poll had found that 20% of Muslims felt “sympathy” for British jihadis.
Many people, including employees of the polling organisation, Survation, which carried out the research, have expressed disgust at the way the material was used. It seems plain that the Sun wished to give the impression that there was something wrong with feeling pity for people who had become so dangerously deluded, so psychologically vulnerable, that they could only give their own lives an illusion of meaning by taking the lives of others. What has been lost in the debate, however, is the fact that this one in five figure is not worryingly high, but suspiciously low.
Assad is pitiless. Isis are pitiless. Why on earth does the Sun imagine that the inability to feel pity is a good thing? What worries me about these figures is that they surely show that the vast majority of the people polled felt under pressure to suppress any sadness at the parlous state of the world and any sadness for the people most corrupted by it.
Instead, as a society, we are expected to follow a narrow emotional script, featuring precious little other than hate and fear, written by politicians, the media and, of course, fundamentalist terrorists themselves. The editorial line chosen by the Sun confirms that people, and Muslims in particular, are absolutely right to feel such pressure.
Isis are often credited with being “masters of propaganda”. In truth, however, they tend simply to provide the atrocities that again and again stoke up the hysterical western propaganda machine they rely on as their global proxy.
In April 2014, aged 15, the girls left their home in Vienna to join Islamic State. A note left behind said they wanted to die for Allah. Social media accounts showed the girls holding Kalashnikovs, announced that they were married to Chechen jihadis and pronounced their general contentment. These accounts are now believed to have been operated by people other than the girls.
By October, press reports were claiming that the girls had contacted their parents to say they’d made a “huge mistake” and wanted to come home. In December, a UN counter-terror expert, David Scharia, reported on two 15-year-olds of Bosnian origin: “Both were recruited by Islamic State. One has died in fighting. The other has disappeared.”
Exactly what happened to them is hard to pin down. According to the Austrian media, a Tunisian woman who managed to escape confirms Scharia’s report, saying that Selinovic died in fighting in Raqqa, and Kesinovic was beaten to death by jihadis after she tried to flee. But stories from places such as Raqqa always have to be treated with the utmost caution, and verifying this news is bound to be complicated.
Whether they are alive or dead, they are victims of brutality, and the fact that they delivered themselves up as willing victims is all the more awful. Plenty of teenagers adopt ridiculous beliefs, only to realise quite quickly that they have been idiots. In few cases are either the beliefs or the consequences anything like as brutal as Kesinovic’s and Selinovic’s. Yet, it’s impossible, surely, not to feel sympathetic to fellow humans who develop such bleak perceptions of their lives that they think Isis is the answer, let alone to act on those bitterly negative views with such avid certainty.
Apparently not. Not only is it possible to feel no sympathy. It’s also desirable. Or so the Sun newspaper wishes us to believe. The Sun, in the wake of the Paris attacks, ran a now-notorious headline designed to get its readers in a righteous lather because a poll had found that 20% of Muslims felt “sympathy” for British jihadis.
Many people, including employees of the polling organisation, Survation, which carried out the research, have expressed disgust at the way the material was used. It seems plain that the Sun wished to give the impression that there was something wrong with feeling pity for people who had become so dangerously deluded, so psychologically vulnerable, that they could only give their own lives an illusion of meaning by taking the lives of others. What has been lost in the debate, however, is the fact that this one in five figure is not worryingly high, but suspiciously low.
Assad is pitiless. Isis are pitiless. Why on earth does the Sun imagine that the inability to feel pity is a good thing? What worries me about these figures is that they surely show that the vast majority of the people polled felt under pressure to suppress any sadness at the parlous state of the world and any sadness for the people most corrupted by it.
Instead, as a society, we are expected to follow a narrow emotional script, featuring precious little other than hate and fear, written by politicians, the media and, of course, fundamentalist terrorists themselves. The editorial line chosen by the Sun confirms that people, and Muslims in particular, are absolutely right to feel such pressure.
Isis are often credited with being “masters of propaganda”. In truth, however, they tend simply to provide the atrocities that again and again stoke up the hysterical western propaganda machine they rely on as their global proxy.
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