World of hypocrisy
James Delingpole
When I first read that Ronan Bennett had co-written a screenplay depicting the run-up to 9/11 from the terrorist perspective, my reaction was just what you'd expect. I thought, 'Bloody hell, What a tosser. First he joins the IRA. Then says he'd never turn in the perpetrators of the Omagh bombing. Now this. If he hates us all so much, why doesn't he piss off somewhere more congenial — Chechnya, maybe, or Darfur?'
Then I took the trouble to watch The Hamburg Cell (Channel 4, Thursday), directed (in disjointed, impressionistic, dispassionate snippets) by Antonia Bird, cowritten by Alice Perman who spent two years researching it, and found it to be chilling, plausible, well-acted, thought-provoking, intelligent, measured: TV drama at its very best.
Instead of concentrating on creepy zealot Mohammed Atta with his cold dead eyes, the film chose instead possibly the most human of the conspirators — Ziad Jarrah, a Catholic-educated secular Muslim from a well-to-do Lebanese family who yet ended up piloting one of the hijacked planes — the 'Let's Roll' Flight 93 — on 9/11. His final phone call from the airport to his lovely fiancee Aysel — 'I love you. I love you. I love you' — was eerily redolent of what his doomed passengers would soon be telling their loved ones on their mobile phones once they realised death was near-certain, You might fear — if you hadn't seen the film — that this was a weaselish way of claiming parity between callous terrorists and murdered innocents: of understanding in order to condone. But what the Ziad Jarrah character (Karim Saleh) actually did was act as a sort of Trojan Horse for the viewer: our one vaguely rational point of entry into a mad, mad world of hypocrisy, ignorance, naivety, prejudice, sexual frustration, bigotry and adolescent thuggery. Some of the conspirators, the film suggested, were driven to such extremes by their icy apartness, some by their vulnerability to Islamist indoctrination, some by the testosteronal urge so many young men have to crawl under barbed wire with AK47s at remote Afghan training camps, some by their sincere belief that when you die a martyr you really do get to sleep with all those virgins. But what they all had in common was the extraordinary delusion that by renouncing those very virtues which make our world most good — love, compassion, empathy, family ties, friendship — they might somehow make it a better place.
Jarrah embodied this illogicality nicely. Sometimes, you saw him buying Aysel (Agni Tsangaridou) skimpy dresses, sleeping with her, and cooing sweetly about the beautiful children they'd have when they were married; sometimes, priggishly chastising her for drinking and smoking or dressing indecently. But, then, you need that level of hypocrisy if you're to be able to take seriously injunctions like the one issued to the hijackers as they sharpened their box knives ready to slit the passengers' throats: 'If you slaughter do not cause the discomfort of those you are killing, because this is one of the practices of the Prophet, peace be upon him.'
This muddleheadedness grew worse towards the end, as the conspirators lounged on the beaches of Florida, manifestly enjoying the fruits of the society they were bent on destroying. One terrorist, lounging by a pool, noticed out of the corner of his eye two smiling blonde women. Later — a deft touch, this — we heard him earnestly telling his boss of a vision he'd had of the afterlife, in which two virgins had come to greet him, It was a subtle point well made: if these impressionable, sexually inexperienced young men had spent a bit less time in their heads and a bit more in the real world, 9/11 might never have happened. There are those who argue that The Hamburg Cell should not have been broadcast so insensitively soon after the event. But what I personally find far more worrying is the reaction of the audience who saw it previewed in Edinburgh. According to S.F. Said in the Daily Telegraph, during one of the characters' anti-Semitic rants, 'there was an audible intake of breath'.
If this is really the case, then we have much to fear. It confirms something I've always suspected about bien-pensants, namely their head-in-the-sand reluctance to acknowledge the real nature of the Islamo-fascist threat. They'd much rather console themselves with twee pieties, such as the idea that it's all America's fault or that fundamentalist Christianity is just as dangerous, than acknowledge the truth that the world is being held to ransom by a bunch of Jew-hating, death-loving, logicdefying zealots with whom negotiation just isn't a viable option.
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