Posted on 05/12/2003 11:53:52 AM PDT by Courier
What Drove 2 Britons to Bomb a Club in Tel Aviv?
By SARAH LYALL
DERBY, England, May 8 — Something changed Omar Khan Sharif, sent him in a new direction, and Derby's older Pakistani population cannot begin to fathom what it was.
But the radicalization of the well-educated, thoroughly Westernized Mr. Sharif, 27 — the forces that led him from Derby to Tel Aviv, where he is wanted on charges of helping to carry out a suicide bombing in a beachfront nightclub on April 30 — make a certain sense to the younger, second-generation immigrants born and raised here. Mr. Sharif was angry, they say, for reasons that would be all too understandable to Muslims everywhere.
"In a way, I sympathize," said Mohammed Zahid, 23, an automobile-plant inspector with a broad Midlands accent, who was strolling down Normanton Road, near where Mr. Sharif lived with his wife and two daughters. "When you see what's happening in Israel, something comes into your mind, something just goes."
On a fine spring day on a pleasantly bustling street, such an explanation seems partial at best. As Sarfraz Bashir, 31, a college graduate in between computer jobs who was helping out at the Jamia Mosque on Rose Hill Street, put it: "In the U.K., you can have a proper job and a proper education. We have everything here — why ruin it?"
Along with another Briton, Asif Mohammed Hanif, 21, Mr. Sharif is said to have entered Israel as a tourist, via Jordan, using his British passport. There, the two checked into a hotel, donned explosive belts and made their way to Mike's Place, a jazz club next to the United States Embassy.
Mr. Hanif's explosives detonated, killing him and three others and injuring at least 50 more, the authorities say; Mr. Sharif's explosives failed to go off and he managed to slip away. He and Mr. Hanif now enjoy the dubious notoriety of being the first British suicide bombers to strike within Israel.
Mr. Sharif's wife, sister and brother are under arrest in London, charged under antiterrorism legislation with failing to disclose information about acts of terrorism.
Publicly, what Mr. Sharif is accused of doing has been roundly condemned here. But scratch beneath the surface in Derby, and people begin to talk about Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel and the oppression of Islam.
"Some people take Islam deeper than others," said a young man on Normanton Road, by way of explaining Mr. Sharif's motives. He declined to give his name, but said he was 19 and an unemployed second-generation Pakistani.
"Killing people is wrong, obviously, but if he was doing it for God himself — then fair enough," said the man, checking his cellphone for the time, so he could get to the bank before it closed. "You have to be pretty brave to do something like that, to hold a bomb in your hand and blow yourself up."
Across the street, a group of hair-gelled youths in Nike and Reebok sweatsuits perched on a railing and commented on the events involving Mr. Sharif. Inside, the older proprietor of a fast-food restaurant dismissed their comments with contempt, but talk they did.
"What he's done is very good, and they won't ever find him," said Basu Hussain, 18, taking a break from his job at Lick'n Chick'n, a fast-food outlet. "We should all get together and kill all the Jews."
Derby seems an incongruous crucible for such talk and for a suicide bomber, and Mr. Sharif an unlikely candidate for a position usually filled by young, unmarried men politicized from birth by virtue of growing up in places like Gaza or the West Bank.
Derby has always prided itself on the good relations between white Britons and Muslims of Pakistani descent, the preponderance of the 8.4 percent of the population identifying themselves as Asian. Although the unemployment rate among young Muslims is disproportionately high, there has been no ethnic violence of the sort that has taken place in other northern and midlands towns in recent years.
The British National Party, a right-wing political group that has gained ground in local governments by capitalizing on Britons' fears of Muslim outsiders, has no presence here. Al Muhajiroun, a Muslim group that advocates overthrowing Western democracies, regularly tries to recruit believers here, but most Derby Muslims — although by no means all — dismiss it out of hand.
Mr. Sharif grew up in the heavily Pakistani Normanton district. It is here, in a neat Victorian row house with a large garden in the back, that his father, Mohammed, a prominent businessman originally from Kashmir who owned a laundry, a kebab restaurant, and other shops, moved with his wife and six children about 20 years ago. Both parents have since died.
In a country where many immigrants stick to their native languages at home, the family spoke English among themselves and wore Western clothes, said Hamida Akhtar, 54, who lives down the street on Breedon Hill Road and was a close friend of Mrs. Sharif. "They were very respectable and nice," she said.
The family emphasized education for their children, and Omar, the youngest, was perhaps particularly privileged. Although he attended state schools (the equivalent of American public schools) in Derby for most of his childhood, between 1986 and 1988 he went to Foremarke Hall Preparatory School, set on acres of woods, fields and ponds about 20 minutes outside the city.
At 18, he enrolled in college in London, and came back transformed. He wore a beard and clothes that identified him as a religious Muslim. He prayed five times a day.
"He used to be dressed like this," Ms. Akhtar said, pointing to her husband, Mohammed, who was wearing a suit and tie. "Suddenly, he was changed." He had a new wife, too, named Tahira Tabassum, who wore a traditional Islamic head scarf.
In recent years, too, Mr. Sharif began spending more time with the local representatives of Al Muhajiroun, a group based at the Finsbury Park mosque in London that has several regional offices around Britain. Its leader, Omar Bakri Mohamed, told the Derby Evening Telegraph that Mr. Sharif had attended regular "ideological discussions" with the group at St. James' Center, a community center on Malcolm Street. "I first noticed him because he could understand Arabic, which he said he had studied in Syria," Mr. Mohamed told the paper.
The group has recently played down its links to violence, modifying public pronouncements in a way that seems aimed at consumption by the Western news organizations. But it has spoken very differently in the past, encouraging Britons to go to Afghanistan to fight on behalf of the Taliban, for example.
In 2000, it held a rally through the streets of Normanton, with placards urging the killing of Jews.
Last year, it sponsored a celebratory conference marking the anniversary of the Sept. 11 bombings; a fading notice advertising the event, with a picture of the burning twin towers and the words "a towering day in history," is still stuck to a post outside the Rose Hill Street mosque.
The Finsbury Park mosque, Al Muhajiroun's London base, is well known as a center for espousing anti-Western ideas. Among those who have passed through its doors are Richard C. Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, convicted in the United States of trying to carry out a suicide attack on a plane in 2001.
Most Muslims here tend to avoid people from Al Muhajiroun, who regularly waylay them as they leave the mosque after Friday Prayers.
"The literature they put out is embarrassing for mature members of the community, people who have more understanding," said Fareed Hussain, a member of the Derby City Council. "Not only do they they put out propaganda against Jewish people, but also against Indian people, Sikhs and Hindus."
But there are very real fears that they are offering something that young men, particularly the underemployed and frustrated, want to hear.
It is a hard time to be Muslim in this country. Many Muslims are particularly unhappy about the harsh antiterrorism measures introduced here in 2000 and tightened in 2001, which give broad powers of arrest and detention and have been used too enthusiastically, in the minds of some, by a government eager to demonstrate its antiterrorist credentials.
"We're extremely worried about young people being susceptible to their message," Shokat Lal, general secretary of the Pakistani Community Center, said of Al Muhajiroun. "The people in these groups present themselves as positive role models — they make you want to participate and be part of something."
Mr. Lal said young men across Britain were at risk. "Muslim, and particularly Pakistani, youth at the moment seem to fall within two categories," he said. "Either they join a fundamentalist group, as Sharif did, or they get involved in drugs and crime."
One young Derby Muslim who admires what Mr. Sharif is said to have done is Shaban Yasin, 17. He works at a halal fish, chips and kebab shop that caters to all manner of multiethnic culinary tastes. Suicide bombing, he said, is the "wrong way" to kill the Jews, adding that, "We should find out the best way to kill them, and do that."
Mr. Yasin grew up in Derby, too, and said that his parents, immigrants from Pakistan who settled here happily, had retired and were "living it large" on their British pensions. But, he said, he considers himself a Muslim first and foremost.
If he were to blow himself up for the cause, he said, "I think my parents would be proud of me."
Was he just quoting the Road Map?
I used to think that Kahanists were evil madmen. I still do, but when I hear a story like this, I really start to understand Nietzsche's warning about fighting monsters.
Yeah: Evil.
"...something just goes."
Yeah, humanity and intelligence.
I'm surprised Britain tolorates Muslim extremists carrying placards urging the murder of all Jews. Would a couple of young Jewish men carrying placards urging the murder of all Muslims also be tolorated?
While I agree with your basic implied premise, that ethnology is not simply a matter of living in a particular place--that nationality is not a game of musical chairs, where it does not matter who is in those chairs--I wish that you could find a way to ridicule the false notion that everyone in Britain is a Briton, without insulting other people en masse.
It is not that I personally respect all peoples, equally. I do not. There is no such thing as equality in the biological or botanical worlds. But I do believe that all peoples are entitled to respect until the point where as individuals they demonstrate conduct that denies them that right--as individuals. The very fact that ethnicity is a factor in perspective, in values, in conduct & aptitudes, makes it unfair to put people down, if all you are trying to say is that they are being themselves.
Now, do not misunderstand me. I do not think that all persons of Pakistani ancestry in Britain today, act or behave a certain way: That the crime, which triggered this article, is endemic to all such persons. My point is merely that to make the point that as a large group--as opposed to a few individuals, who genuinely admire British Society, and truly accept its values--they do not really fit into British Society, and create problems both for the Britons and themselves; that to make that point, there is no need to disparage them; that in disparaging them as a people, which you unquestionably do by your second word quoted, you confuse the rational point that you are making, and invite the sanctimonious and self-righteous retort from the "politically correct" crowd.
That is sad, because the survival of the Western Heritage really depends upon an understanding of ethnicity, not on either blind hostility to non-Europeans or blind acceptance of really very different peoples as all being the same. We need to develop the ability to discuss certain issues frankly, with the maximum numbers of people being willing to listen; and while I understand your frustration, I hope you will heed my suggestion, for what is really important to both of us.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
The hostilities which linger on between Christians, and Christians and Jews, and are part of our mental processes do not begin to compute with the hostilities between Christians and Jews on the one hand, and the Muslims on the other. This is not some "Interfaith Breakfast" in Peoria, pal. This is a fight to the death for about 1/2 a Billion people who want us converted or dead. You can simonize the facts and spin them in any "moderate and tolerant" way you wish. The bottom line is that Islam has no inner controls that can direct it to live in peace in the West unless they are held in a minority position and watched. Lots of perfectly nice Muslims who would never harm anyone would be badly affected. Tough.
What Western religion demands that of its followers? Christians are under attack and live in fear for their lives from one side of the world to the other.
That's the one. And all the more appropriate because Neitzsche was an ardent pro-Semite.
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