The Lyrical Terrorist

'I would like to strike a bomb up the queens bum. Does this make me a terrorist?' No, providing you actually do it,I think it makes you a performance artist and a contender for next year's Turner.

"The court heard that she also spent five months in custody after being arrested in October last year." In a wonderful piece of selective reporting, The Sun omits this sentence and instead runs an article on this lady being let off: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article552365.ece

You will not be a terrorist until you download plans to build a bomb that would fit up the Queen's bum!

lol at Ewan! Some of the Sun reader's comments are priceless especially the one about WHSMith (an organisation I've long suspected of being sinister). But the best comment came from her lawyer as reported in the Telegraph, 'In her defence, her lawyers claimed her poetry was no worse than the First World War poetry of Wilfred Owen.' jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

I think that comment's a far more serious crime than the things she was convicted of. I assume the lawyer meant the content of the poetry rather than the craft.

I think we can safely assume he meant the former but the fact that it could be read to mean the latter is what makes the comment so enjoyable. j

John Burton, defending, said: "She became hooked on Abu Hamza-type addresses and that affected her mindset." The jury was told that she joined an extremist organisation called Jihad Way, set up explicitly to spread terrorist propaganda and support for al Qaida. Jonathan Sharp, prosecuting, told the court she visited a website linked to the jailed cleric Abu Hamza and stored material about weapons. The court also heard Malik belonged to a social networking website called hi5, describing her interests as "helping the mujaheddin in any way which I can". Under favourite TV shows, she listed: "Watching videos by my Muslim brothers in Iraq, yep the beheading ones, watching video messages by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri and other videos which show massacres of the kaffirs." After her conviction, Judge Peter Beaumont, the recorder of London, told her: "You have been, in many respects, a complete enigma to me."

When we are young we tend to romantisize anything and everything. I remember wanting to be a missionary and to die for the lord Jesus. i was probably a bit mad because of the hormonal changes taking place in my body!

I am sure this confused young lady and her jihadist mentors are very amused at the doltish level of dithering sensitivity and generosity in these courts. Being young is an excuse for many things, including apperantly spewing propaganda and identifying oneself as an enemy combatant during wartime. If this weird chick handed me a receipt that said "The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom" I'd paste her in the mouth and call Interpol.

as she waks away deported... get a perspective, due to the morons in the U.S. government (left and right) America is unavailable to save your bacon a third time, then be hated for it later of course.

Oil, oil beautiful, expensive oil add there by a pipeline in Afghanistan our bacon can be roasted anytime! greetings

I think that as part of her rehabilitation into society she needs to go on a poetry writing course. She's confused in more ways than one and needs to learn tolerence for those of different faiths and basic scansion. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

Not much serious comment here then! She downloaded snuff videos of real people being beheaded.She downloaded weapons,poisons,and bomb manuals.She wrote notes saying she wanted to be a martyr and was wanting it more and more.She is not an adolescent she is 23.She is clearly suffering from some desire to kill herself and was associating with people who would encourage her to do it. What is the diff between watching beheading videos and watching child porn? Both are about being excited by something disgusting being done to someone else.The thrill of it is addictive and the ante has to be upped.the trigger can be lack of impulse control as in young Americans with guns in shopping malls or depression.The only difference between Malik and the young American boy is that Malik only had the instructions and not the material.Thank God for her sake and ours she was stopped.And we didn't even lock her up.We certainly didn't threten to kill her for drawing cartoons or writing a novel.She needs help with mental health issues and a few new less dangerous friends.

"The only difference between Malik and the young American boy is that Malik only had the instructions and not the material." That's not the only difference. The more important one is that the American kid can buy a gun and walk around with it. He's only committing a criminal offence once he actually starts firing it. Obviously, there is a constituency of people in the UK who would like to police political thinking on a moral basis. This isn't what this law is designed to do. It's designed to prevent real acts of terrorism. Not only did Ms.Malik not do anything to anyone, there was no evidence that she was planning to. Our laws currently apply very differently depending on which unpleasant political fantasies young people choose to follow. If a middle-class white student wants to go around wearing a Chairman Mao t-shirt and wants to download detailed information on how to slaughter millions of people, it's highly unlikely to lead to a police investigation and though parents might tut a bit, it's generally seen as a phase that young people go through. This is literally comparable because there are lots of Maoist terrorists killing lots of people in the Indian subcontinent.

Any citizen of a Western nation that is proven in an open court with hard material evidence to sympathize with, support, advocate, or participate in the planning of Al Queda style jihad should be deported to an Islamic country immediately. While the discussions above are useful and even required, and nobody is going to make with staying power but writers anyhow, we evade, avoid, and deny what we all know is the real situation to our peril. Also, a gun with the serial number filed off is very illegal. This is the only kind of gun an American kid is likely to procure. At least we have come this far (?)

I don't envy the job of the people who have to make judgment call on this kind of thing. Whilst she did not do anything to anyone and there was no evidence that she was planning to, I think there was good cause at least for investigation if perhaps not prosecution. When authorities don't act on information and something terrible happens, they get a hard time. Regarding the race issue, I think it would have made no difference if this had been a caucasian muslim convert. And Maoist terrorists may be killing lots of people in the Indian subcontinent but we are not in the Indian Subcontinent but the UK trying to pre-empt terrorism. I'm half-way between the two points of view here and I do feel that the authorities are trying to steer their vessel between the Scylla and Charybdis. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

Which Islamic country do you think is going to take our jihadist citizens Dendrite?

"While the discussions above are useful and even required, and nobody is going to make with staying power but writers anyhow, we evade, avoid, and deny what we all know is the real situation to our peril." Nothing being avoided, I just disagree with you. "Whilst she did not do anything to anyone and there was no evidence that she was planning to, I think there was good cause at least for investigation if perhaps not prosecution." I agree with that. I fully accept that if you're posting poetry support terrorism in the public domain, you can't really complain if the authorities come and ask you whether you're involved in it. But given that they themselves had concluded that she wasn't actually doing anything, the prosecution and court case were unnecessary. "Which Islamic country do you think is going to take our jihadist citizens Dendrite?" Yes, that could be a tough one. There are quite a few unpleasant governments in Islamic countries but most of them are as opposed to Al Qaeda as our governments, although not generally for the same reasons. "I'm half-way between the two points of view here and I do feel that the authorities are trying to steer their vessel between the Scylla and Charybdis." I think the intentions of the laws are broadly sensible but they've either been poorly crafted or poorly applied or both. I can understand why you'd want downloading bomb-making information to be a crime - primarily so you could arrest and charge people who are suspected of being involved in terrorist activity but who initially there isn't enough evidence to charge with anything else. I don't accept the moral case for people to be prosecuted for what Ms Malik did but, even if I did, I'd have trouble understanding the practical argument for this kind of prosecution when there's limited resources available to tackle real terrorism.

What we don't know is what her pre -sentencing reports said.She may well have been deemed a danger to herself and others whether or not she gained access to WMD of any kind (although the Godfathers of the death cult Jihadism would find a Heathrow employee a bit of a gift).Someone who writes " I want to kill myself" on a til receipt is asking for a response perhaps asking to be stopped. It is often difficult to do it if they won't engage with mental health services.We really dont know without access to all the evidence why she was taken so seriously.Why do we consider her incapable of bizarre violence? There are fewer women here who run amok with machetes but there have been the black widows of Chechnya and Palestinian female suicide bombers.this young woman may have had a vast need for the "fame" she thought such an action might bring her.

I think the chances of her gaining access to WMD are negligable. She's more likely a candidate for carrying out a small isolated attack of the home-made variety. I'm not saying she would definitely and there is not evidence to suggest she was planning anything. I think this kind of disturbed mentality is a kind of 'sickness' but it isn't mental illness in the medical definition sense. Mental illness is a fairly slippery term anyway. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

Mark she wrote she wanted to kill herself,this is not mental health. She was beginning to hang out with serious people and who knows some "Godfathers " who may have wished to groom her, this we will never know . I'm finding it hard to discuss this as "ideas" when Jihadists just targetted a school bus in Algeria and killed many. God knows how many they are killing elsewhere,lots of people of both sexes convinced to blow themselves up and anybody in the way Moslem ,child,saint. We have to engage with the vile rhetoric of this and we have to be clear about its evil cult allure.It would be helpful if normal sane Moslems would be tough on it but most can't /won't because it isnt safe to be. In our culture mass murder is mad sick evil to the jehadists it is not.We would define it as a psychopathic state of mind.Useful approaches are to De- brainwash and manage depression and poor impulse control. Jude yes on her own she might only have been able to poison/kill a few people but I still think that is serious enough.If we can head off murder or suicide surely we must try.

I'm all for broad definitions of mental illness where this aids diagnosis and treatment of medical symptoms but if we give that classification to all young people who at some point claim to want to kill themselves, people with mental illness will outnumber those without. The other stuff about Jihadists has nothing specifically to do with mental illness, up to the point that there's evidence that it does. We've had this discussion before because Camilla (and others on this site) are keen to offer mental illness as a blanket classification for the holding of abhorrent beliefs and/or beliefs which they find incomprehensible. My problem with this line of thinking is that it places mental illness in a category of badness beyond evil - which is an unpleasant and medically inaccurate approach to mental illness and a huge let off for people who do things that are evil.

I have to disagree Camilla. Suicidality does not equate mental illness. In fact those who actually do kill themselves are not always mentally ill. I think she may have had grave emotional and perhaps mental disturbances (or perhaps just minor ones) but I'd be reluctant to use a term like 'mentally ill' for the reasons bukh gives. Those who are mentally ill are stigmatized enough without having connotations of 'evil' piled on top! If you had said she had 'psychological and emotional issues' rather than 'mental health issues' that need addressing, I think you would be making your point better and more accurately. And I am sympathetic if not in entire agreement with your viewpoint. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

Murderousness goes way beyond "not agreeing with someone" way way beyond.So blow up a bus load of kids because they shouldnt exist? That is crazy. the death cult has it own internal logic none in any other type of thinking at all .There is no reason or politcal excuse for that.Psychopathy which is a very small category of mental illnes does offer some way in.the psychology of cults also does. I'm not hearing solutions here.I'm not hearing what it should be called and how it should be addressed if you dont think the understanding of mental states has a useful bearing.You cannot say "they have a right to believe in mass murder" If that holds then "us the Western Democracies" are done for as our tolerance will not let us defend ourselves adequately from the murderers.Their right to believe would take precidence over our right to live.

As it happens we *do* have a right to "believe in mass murder," we can still believe in whatever we want without comitting a crime (advocating it on the other hand ...)

If the guardian readers are outraged she was prosecuted at all and the sun readers are outraged that she was 'let off' my feeling is that they probably got it 'about right'. My only hesitation with this posit is that as Bukh says it seems like an enormous waste of money/ resources. If she really was just a kid bigging herself up on the Internet, a long grilling, an investigation and a warning that it could have led to prosecution should have been sufficient to shock her into the realisation that her online behaviour was alarming and could land her in serious trouble. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

Mark have you forgotten 7/7? A lot of people were killed and a lot more injured.Since then we have "got lucky" a few times apparently.So if people are not comfortable with "being drawn into a psychopathic state of mind "as an explanation for suicide bombers what is? I'll go for the apotheosis of evil but I'm not sure it helps.Evil belongs to religion not reason.

Yes there was a difference although a lot of the terrorists in those days were gangsters the Mafia would love.The difference was not blowing themselves up as well on purpose and quite often warnings were given.There was an aim,there was a structure.Their aim was not just the annihilation of the rest of us so they could impose their thoroughly Stalinist regime. Even if we continue to get lucky it gives comfort to those who promote terrorism and plan to practice it if we do not have a very clear unequivocal view about how unacceptable it is,unless we say it .Our weakness is that we value life so much that even if someone is absolutely guilty of planning mass murder or even does do it, we will only ...be nice to them for the rest of their miserable lives at vast cost to us.It makes us look weak to aggressors who understand only eye for an eye brutality.

The thing is that we have now embarked on a path which says that our thoughts are subject to censor. You can now be prosecuted for THINKING about something. You don't even have to be PLANNING an action, you are forbidden to THINK about it otherwise you are liable to be prosecuted according to the law. When they made it compulsary to always have a means of identification at hand here in The Netherlands they said that they had many safe guards built into the bill of law to prevent abuse. Ha Ha who's laughing now? The state with a steady flow of money generated by the enforcing of this law!

Al Qaeda jihad is being casually downgraded by attempting to draw rough equivalence to the IRA and other groups whose efforts are quaint and amateurish by comparison. To paint serious observers and experts on Al Qaeda as paranoid over-reactionaries only makes hay of the evidence and is simply naïve. We are doing an excellent job so far of dealing with resident jihadist cells in the U.S., UK, France, and Germany. There is a long listing of elaborate schemes, plots, and plans that have been disrupted and thwarted. Without the admittedly oppressive and more-authoritarian-than-usual measures taken since 911, there would have been many tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the U.S. caused by Al Qaeda influenced actions. I'm not sure I want to know whether the more radical opinion posters here are pleased or disappointed with this result. Of course, everything can turn into a slippery slope, especially with extremists and governments, but jihad has been declared and engaged without ambiguity and with no doubt, whether or not we care to notice or acknowledge it. We should understand exactly what this means in a specific tactical sense with unflinching precision, although it will suck the fun out of our day. We can and should strive to "understand" these people later. The jihad cooked-up by the demented and deranged Bin Laden is a very patient and long term program and has nothing to do with Islam other than the wardrobe. It will occur in an ongoing fashion outside of our internet era attention spans, after the ribbons and hand wringing following the last attack are forgotten and we have returned to our bars and televisions. We continue to mention the olde tyme weaponry of bombs and bullets. They will go after the food and water supply and financial systems (I know, applause) if they can. The hard material evidence on all this is in hand. It’s perversely interesting that that there are actually arguments to be found about self-preservation. We should have enough everyday common sense to know when war has been declared on us and at the very least remove the enemies in our midst. I am not recommending killing them, or even jailing them. Just give them a one way ticket to a new address in the Middle East. There are mechanisms and arrangements and diplomacy in place to do this. One of the more stable history lessons we in the West can’t seem to absorb is - never underestimate people who intend to kill you.

"Al Qaeda jihad is being casually downgraded by attempting to draw rough equivalence to the IRA and other groups whose efforts are quaint and amateurish by comparison." You what! Of the three major attacks in the uk I can think of: one (7/7/2005) was succesful and killed a lot of people, the second (21/7/2005) the bombs did not explode, and the third (30/6/2007) the bombs were not even bombs and the only people killed were the attackers who died painfully in hospital. You could argue that these were not Al Quaeda per se and were in fact only a bunch noddy Al Quaeda infulenced idiots - which would only go further to proving that the UK terror threat is small and massively overhyped, particularly when compared to decades of mainland bombing by the IRA who, if nothing else, did at least make bombs that went bang.

"Just give them a one way ticket to a new address in the Middle East. There are mechanisms and arrangements and diplomacy in place to do this." I don't suppose you'd care to back that statement up. We can deport foreign nationals, but earlier you referred to sending away our own citizens. How can we legally do this and who would be willing to take them?

"In fact, the last big bombing campaigns in UK were carried out by people who had nothing to do with Islam. ... Or was that a more honourable form of terrorism than this foreign nonsense? More domesticated? ..." Actually there were worse injustices against people just because they were Catholics from Northern Ireland. The Guildford 4 spent 15 years behind bars for something they didn't do. Birmingham 6, Maguire 7... this wasn't an isolated incident and if the Internet had been around in 1975 then yes, I do believe that people would have paid heavily for visiting IRA sites and downloading IRA material. I don't accept the position that this is bashing foreigners or those of a different culture. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

I notice a recurring thread concerning the fact we 'have got lucky a few times' regarding a terrorist threat. Having served 23 years in the Armed Forces, I am familiar with the hoary old chestnut, 'they only have to get lucky once.' I admit this is actually true: but how do we know we have been lucky? Because the government and the increasingly politicised upper echelons of the security forces - and I include the Police here - tell us so? On what evidence? Oh, I forgot. A highly dangerous confused teenager has been prevented from killing thousands with appalling poetry. Ewan

Use of quaint and amateurish was a very bad choice of words regarding the IRA. There really is no comparison to international Al Qaeda though. Both the U.S. and Germany have deportation programs in place for former citizens with substantive and proven links to Al Qaeda. I am not referring to “renditions” or so-called “torture by proxy” which is deportation to unfriendly countries. I don’t know for sure if this is in place in the UK, I only assume it, and suppose it’s none of my business. You can believe jihad is over hyped if you like, but for the last time this flies in the face of a mountain of evidence collected and work done to date. This is the last post I will make on the jihad matter as I don’t want to poison the generally congenial atmosphere, misrepresent myself, or cause bad feelings. For many reasons I am a complete hard line sonofabitch on this, which you might have noticed. This does not reflect my political views in the aggregate, and in many ways is a contradiction to them, but I stand by these statements.

I think ultimately, without all the diversions, there are three questions that need addressing. 1. Is it useful and realistic to outlaw 'collecting articles "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism'? (this is the charge on which she was convicted after being cleared of "possessing articles for terrorist purposes". 2. Was this law appropriately applied in this case? 3. Is this and other anti -terrorism legislation being used to unfairly target a particular group (Muslims and most likely Asian Muslims?) It needs to be remembered that Ms Malik's poetry instigated the investigation but it was the download of material from other sources for which she was prosecuted. 1. I do have issue about the first point as I am a believer in freedom of speech but I feel I may have to compromise my beliefs in light of the rise of religious extremism. Am undecided on this one. 2. I am not sure it warranted a prosecution in this particular case and the judge said her activities were on the margins of these crimes. 3. I do believe this is absolutely not the case. Tackling terrorism will always respond to the signs of the times. Thirty years ago the threat was from the IRA. Today it is from Islamic extremists and that reality has to be considered when allocating resources. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

I'm no psychologist but may I tentatively suggest that Christopher, a Caucasian male of 17 of no strong religious beliefs is less likely to blow himself up taking others with him than somebody who shares the same beliefs as Ms Malik. Ms Malik was obviously not intending to commit an atrocity at the time of her arrest and our hypothetical Christopher could go on a Columbine style shooting or blow up a gay bar but it's about looking at the balance of probabilities, surely? jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

What Jude's point 1 effectively does is outlaw knowledge. It is now a crime to learn how to build a bomb or brew up ricin, no matter how innocent your curiosity. It is only the fact the police and security services only target people they already perceive as high risks that makes the law in any way reasonable. That is not how laws ought to work. Read literally, it effectively criminalises anyone who owns a bag of fertiliser or and apple pip.

I remember at Uni, myself and a muslim friend having discussions about our explosives-enthusiast brothers. My wee bro was always nicking the high voltage batteries from road lights to trigger various small explosions in the garden. The most atrocious act he committed was rigging a very small device to his wardrobe door so it exploded when my mother opened it to put away his shirts scaring the life out of her! Farzana's brother was a similar type and suceeded in blowing all the windows out of his chemistry lab at school. A lot of lads go through this apparently. This was in the days before the internet and they got their information from the library but I think (and correct me if I am wrong) that Mark is suggesting Farzana's brother is more likely to be investigated and prosecuted because he is a Muslim and Asian than my nominally Christian, half-caucasian brother. But I don't think people would be prosecuted for this kind of thing alone. One has to look at the whole situation from all angles. I think somebody would have to be advocating the use of this knowledge for beliefs which are a real and current threat, to be taken as 'dangerous' and prosecuted. The thing is it won't be 'read literally'! jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

Back to Ms. Malik then. If they prosecuted people for bad poetry… well… and anyone can download bomb plans off the internet, this is all soft. The harder evidence is her membership in Jihad Way and hi5. The prosecutor didn’t separate the evidence to show the case either unwittingly (most likely) or on purpose (it happens)

we threw an H100 in the sewer an it cracked every toilet on that side of the street.

"Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." Supposedly by G Orwell but I have not got time to research it.This only links to Malik in that distasteful things probably have to be done to preserve us all,and will have to be. Deomgraphics suggest that due to size of Muslim families there could well be a Muslim majority and therefore Sharia law here within our childrens lifetimes,unless of course the 2 million Polish Catholics stay and breed Catholics,but they don't all tend to stay, and their birth rate is currently not as high. It is one thing to draw aside our skirts and go tisk tisk it is another to attack (as we constantly do) any boundary, law ,or person trying to make us and our freedoms secure.I still think downloading and presumably enjoying snuff videos of any kind ought to be as illegal as child porn.The watcher is getting a big hard on from it and even if it is free encourages those who make such things.We all enjoy the hits we get don't we?So do the bad people.I also still maintain that a humane approach to those being drawn into bad things in the UK is to use a mental health model and there will not be one diagnosis.Obviously not all the mentally ill are terrorists but those being drawn in may be suffering .they may be vulnerable like drug mules being manipulated .The Godfathers are just evil and will have to be dealt with by big rough men who we will treat badly,disdain, and pay less than firemen.