Marina Hyde: Where better than the Lake District to study cordon bleu cooking, watercolour painting - and now jihad
Soon after last year’s London bombings, a photograph emerged that featured two of the perpetrators whitewater rafting in North Wales. Apparently this was the leisure activity during some kind of al-Qaida bonding weekend, if you can imagine any such mini-break without thinking of estate agents chortling, “What goes on tour stays on tour”. Naturally, in light of the horrific tragedies of that July day, it was the mundanity of the image that was so utterly chilling. It was duly captioned along the lines of “a few short months later they were committing mass murder”.
And yet, there is more than one way to view a picture. You can choose to look again at this image and elevate these sodden paddlers to the status of Luftwaffe commanders or Red Army generals, senior strategists in some cohesive global struggle between good and evil in which we are all currently involved. Or you can choose to observe that, to be perfectly honest, they are wearing the same cretinous grin that afflicts us all when captured coming over the brow of a rollercoaster at Thorpe Park, and deem that a fairly useful leveller. And so with the men plotting jihad among the daffodils near Lake Windermere, who may well be holding their war councils in tearooms before breaking off for an eccles cake. Allow yourselves the luxury of a smile.
Posted on August 15th, 2006 at 7:52 am
| See also • Basra: testing to destruction • Daniel Davies: Don’t just do something, stand there • The giver of life |
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Filed under Chicken Nuggets, T.W.A.T., The home front |
I did have to stop and think, when it was claimed in a newspaper the other day that ‘the plane bomb suspects’ had gone on a training exercise in a national park - a claim which was minimised throughout the article by saying things like; ‘there is no indication that any weapons of survival training was provided’ until the story had reached the level of ‘the plane bomb suspects went camping’.
The thing is, this camping trip was being used as part of the popular evidence against the men. One paper warned that the men could face prison for attending a terrorist training camp. But, so far, it seems that the only thing that made this camping trip different to one that you or I mght go on was the identity of these men. They were suspects. And why were they suspects? At least in part because they had attended ‘terrorist training camps’. Gah!
If nothing more comes out of this ‘training camp’ story, I think I might write a post about it. I’ll call it; “Brown men can’t camp.”
Yusuf suggests that camping trips to well known beauty spots are regularly organised by Mosques as part of their general cultural programmes. I didn’t know that, but why not? So were these boys at a “terrorist training camp”, or enjoying a weekend away with fellow members of their congregation (if that’s the correct term).
Oh. Wasn’t there a deal of fuss at the beginning of the year about National Parks losing funding because they weren’t attracting enough visitors from ethnic minorities? I have in mind reports like this one:
It’s hardly joined-up government, is it?