Cuttings

                I’ve been looking through newspapers again. The Daily Mirror, The Metro. Tabloids. Trying to turn up those little stories of ‘ordinary’ people (that is, without power and influence) attempting to do things, often bringing about their own downfalls. The man who set out to rob a bookmaker’s, but ended up in a chip shop because he couldn’t read.

            It’s often depressing stuff. I used to cut those stories out at work, and keep them there in an old Quality Street tin. One day, my boss found the tin, and thought that he had a serial killer on his workforce.

            There’s material in there, though. A fair few stories, lately, have been about Muslim teenagers leaving the UK to join Isis. Which is utterly abhorrent to me. The only thing which it did make me think was that, apart from the usual teenage reasons- wanting to impress your friends, wanting to look hard, wanting to get your end away via an arranged marriage- some of them are, like most of us, trying to do good.

            They feel angry about the west’s assaults on the middle east. They feel it has come about because Christians want to persecute Muslims (they call these invasions crusades). They perhaps feel that they want to become better Muslims, even though their own imams might be trying to tell them that this is not the way. And they want to do something more meaningful with their lives than stacking shelves and flipping burgers. As someone on Spiked Online put it, they feel they can find meaning in life from beheading somebody.

            Last week, I went on an anti-terrorism course. A conference room at the town hall. A man, a woman, a flipchart and a laptop connected to a projector. Around the table, a lot of council workers in their jeans and tee shirts, or beefy blokes with their shirt sleeves rolled up. There seems to be a new job with an elongated title every time you go to one of these meetings: Head of Community Outreach, etc.

            The council has been told by the police that we can spot terrorists, because we work with the general public; and, having spotted a potential terrorist, we are able to go over and talk him/her out of it. As one teacher put it, they expect us to do what the Intelligence services can’t.

            They showed us a film. A fictionalized account of a man who was recruited by Islamic extremists, based on true case histories. A schizophrenic from a broken home, who could not get a job, he spent all his days smoking pot, got in trouble with the police and ended up in prison.

            Whilst inside, the extremists talked him into joining them. Promised to look after him, and told him that Allah would take his mental illness away. And it struck me that there must be kids like him on every street corner. With chaotic family lives, no real education, no aspirations or hopes, demonized by society at large, and left to wander around and fend for themselves.

            We seem to be churning people out like that. Dragging them in front of the audience of the Jeremy Kyle Show, to be laughed or jeered at. And nobody ever asks the questions: how did they turn out so wretched? Easy pickings for every gang or terrorist outfit on a recruitment drive