What's in A Name?

I write under a pseudonym. I have always sought to distance my writing life from my domestic one and psychologically that seemed an important facet of that compartmentalisation.

But I have always been fascinated by people operating under different names and have written about it in several of my novels. In my debut novel "A,B&E" a gangster's moll faked her own death to try and avoid the contract he'd put on her head, and needed a fake identity sharpish. 

For she simply cannot afford to be tracked down by her name. She can't appear on any bureaucratic lists. She has no driving licence, no social security paperwork, no health insurance records and no credit card in her (assumed) name. She has nothing to her name, not even her real name. 

"My assigned identity was forged for me by someone I’ve never even met. Karen Dash. My new moniker. A bit of a giggle. An in-joke on my way out the country." 

Karen's new identity is that bestowed on her by way of a counterfeit passport. The name 'dashed' off the top of the counterfeiter's head. Referring back to the high quality Swiss colouring pencils of my and maybe his childhood. Where he first had his interest pricked in visual reproduction. Do you remember Caran D'Ache colouring pencils? At the time they were as ubiquitous as the Swiss Army knife and gave the lie to Harry Lime's contention that Switzerland had only ever produced the "cuckoo clock". Now they brand themselves as "Maison de Haute Ecriture" (maybe Harry Lime had a point after all).

Karen Dash never existed, despite her larger than life presence on the pages of the novel. It is a name wrought to prevent her true identity being revealed, found and then expunged. It is a dead end of a name.

In my novel "Not In My Name" a homegrown terrorist stalks the internet looking for a patsy and necessarily adopting whatever name he requires for his task. The world of the internet is populated by soubriquets and people hiding their identity. Yet he is able to track down one specific person's true identity for he needs to groom her for his purposes....

In my new novel "Three Dreams in the Key Of G" I've taken the opposite tack. the three central female voices all have the same name in terms of the sound of their name.

First is the mother of two young daughters in post peace-agreement Northern Ireland

My name is Jean Ome. Phonetically speaking. And in actuality too, though I have no passport to prove this (denied me since now they bear the EC’s {Papist} impress). Nor do my other personalised permits and financial enablers bear this out, since my maiden name has never been supplanted (not because I’m an independent career woman, instead just too much of a put-upon mother to have gotten round to it). So in all my transactions outside the house promising to the bearer, I am still Jean Malcolm. She of a whole lifetime ago. Who gleefully mocks and taunts me for my divergence from her.

The family name really should be Home as in ‘home sweet home’, ‘home is where the heart is’ or ‘home and dry’. As in arid. Home is a very important concept where I come from. A closed, reinforced door, buttressing the street, the neighbourhood, the community, the town, the county and the province. Home is the be-all and end-all of who you are. It’s what you stand for, rather than it standing for you. Bricks and mortar proprietary, or bricks and mortar projectiles. Indeed, how we do hail from our unwelcoming streets.

The second is a seventy year old English woman domiciled in Florida, where she runs a shelter for victims of domestic violence. If only it was that simple...  

My name is Jean Ohm and I’ve encountered major amplitudes of resistance in my time. In fact, I’m generating some right now, through this little social experiment I’m currently conducting. We’ve got FBI, DEA, ATF and all manner of sect-obsessed acronyms and cult-crazed codons pointing their telescopic, turned-up snouts, to tune in to our drop-out community...

My name, as conferred upon me by my parents. Marking me for life. Or rather expunging me, as it now appears. Draped around me like the orange garb of the death row prisoner. The name embodies me, even as I enflesh it. But it was ever thus. The ‘H’ kept apart the feuding factions of my parents. The capital ‘O’ I take from my father, buffeting the stout, lower-case maternal ‘m’. Each seeking my allegiance against the other. Pressed in upon from both sides, until I lose consciousness and slip under. Thus is my feminised ‘h’ silenced and rendered inferior. A typographical error. The ‘O’ and ‘m’ too hellbent on knocking seven bells out of each other, to let anything come between them.

The third character, the human genome itself. Complaining at its assigned nomenclature, at our febrile assaults to decode its life-giving (and removing) mysteries.

My name – My name in full, apparently, by your latest dead reckoning, contains three billion characters. It is not the book itself that you are after reading, all two hundred volumes; more the thirty-odd thousand letters in the appellation which should adorn the book’s spine. Yet I remain innominate.


The historical practise of a wife taking her husband's surname, as with Jean Malcolm/ Jean Ome above, is still extant, as a woman is stripped of her identity which she grew up with and has a patrilineal name conferred upon her. 

All three of the female character in this novel fight back against such impositions upon them, in order to preserve their sense of self. And just what is the psychic link that unites all three of these characters?

Published by Dead Ink Books 26/07/2018

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

For videos, reviews and interviews

I Vow To Thee My Country - That You Got It Badly Wrong

There's no doubting that the situation in Syria is immensely complicated. Two ex-members of the military who are Conservative MPs voted against their Party and opposed a bombing campaign of Syria. An ex-member of the military who is a Labour MP opposed his Party line and voted in favour of bombing. Perhaps the most telling individual vote was that of the Chair of the Parliamentary select committee on Foreign Affairs, Conservative MP John Baron, voted against bombing (as he did in the vote on bombing Libya).

You'd hope your delegated political representatives would have some handle on the intricacies. But in the recent day long Parliamentary debate and vote, the level of political and strategic analysis was in short supply, replaced by moral and emotional pleas on one side or the other. Or the debate was partly hijacked by the Prime Minister's rather inflammatory assertion that to vote against the proposed campaign equated you to a terrorist sympathiser and consequent demands by outraged MPs for him to apologise for such a statement.

But I'm going to try and pick the emotions and moral outrage out of the debate and offer some crystal clear rebuttals to the arguments made in favour of bombing Syria. Of course readers may not agree with either these arguments or the position to oppose bombing and that's fine. But I hope to show that that the points offered during that debate are not enough to clinch any argument.

                             


The main argument was that bombing Syria increases the security on Britain's streets. Actually it does the very opposite. Those in Syria are not the threat to us here at home. Rather it is from UK citizens already living here. You may say that such homegrown terror is co-ordinated from Syria. But it doesn't have to be. Recently a fourteen year old boy from Blackburn was jailed for mentoring a would-be terrorist in Australia. The nature of global communications means you don't actually need a command and control centre to co-ordinate your terror campaign. Of the Paris terrorists, no more than two had returned from Syria. To fight for ISIS's cause does not entail seeing service or training in Iraq or Syria. There will not be ISIS fighters coming back from Syria at this point in time to perpetrate a terrorist act on British soil. If any potential UK terrorists have seen service there, they are already back in the UK (and you have to ask questions of our intelligence service as to how they have been able to sneak back in).

So the terror threat remains ever-present. Why therefore do I say that the vote for bombing makes the UK less secure? Look at the way Islamic terror operates. They cannot sustain a campaign against any single country. So there have been individual attacks in Canada, Australia, France, Lebanon, Turkey. And of course the Russian airliner shot down in Egypt, a very rapid response to Russian bombs falling on ISIS areas. In the case of the Western targets, each time their participation in the air war against Islamic State is cited as the reason. Terrorists want to send a message and with only one chance to do so (such is the nature of suicide missions) they have to stage what they see as a spectacular. By voting to bomb Syria, the UK has just placed itself in line for a similar response from ISIS and it supporters. Britain will need to be taught a lesson is the logic. Or the logic or reprisal. Terror acts in the UK have always been a possibility, but with this vote I believe it has now become an inevitability. Not just me either, for only today UK intelligence services report that the vote has increased the likelihood we would become a target. Have they only just realised that? Or did they they know this all the time but fail to inform the Prime Minister? Or maybe he just ignored that advice.

Ah but we are already fighting the Islamic State by bombing Iraq were some of the arguments advanced during the debate. For the sake of a few hundred yards across a border that ISIS has abolished what is the difference? Well seems to me you can't have it both ways, if you want to deny the legitimacy of ISIS and re-establish the territorial legitimacy of both Iraq and Syria, then you have to continue to recognise the integrity of those borders.

The next argument was that France has asked for us to step up to the plate and assist them in the light of the atrocities in Paris. Added to that is that the UN basically gave a green light to go to war on ISIS. The argument is advanced that we in Britain must not only support our friends and allies, but we cannot allow others to do the job of protecting us while we stand to the side doing nothing. And yet that is exactly what we and the whole of the West has been doing by allowing the Kurds to bear the entire burden of facing ISIS on the ground. Since ISIS' dramatic expansion of territory, we have apparently been perfectly happy to have others provide our protection and security, so that argument just does not hold water. Now there are perfectly strong reasons why Western troops should not be committed to Syria and Iraq, since that will just escalate everything in the region and provide a rallying call to the ISIS cause. But don't then posit that we take care of our own security.

Jumping in to the cause of our allies is hugely problematical as well. Since the collapse of Communism, NATO s no longer facing a united bloc of foes. I would argue that it has ceased to be of use, rather it increases the likelihood of war and conflict rather than head it off. An attack on one NATO country is deemed an attack on them all. If Francoise Hollande had called for NATO to attack ISIS for bombing Paris, we would have been duty bound. I find it significant that he didn't quite go that far, because he knew what it implied. You can argue that although Russia has been stripped of its former allies of the Eastern Bloc, it still remains a threat to the West as Putin continues to provoke by his actions. Yet NATO proved incapable of preventing Putin's actions in Ukraine, partly prompted by Ukraine's stated desire to turn away from Russia in favour of the EU and NATO. But the key to the NATO argument is the behaviour of NATO member Turkey. Turkey is following its own agenda in the region. It shot down a Russian fighter. Whether it was correct in law or not, if Turkey had declared itself under attack from Russia, again we would all have been duty bound to jump in and escalate hostilities well beyond the local militias and terrorist groups. Again you may argue that it was only the threat of NATO doing just this that prevented Russia from reacting more strongly to the downing of its fighter. And that may be true, but with Turkey being a loose canon, who is to say that it won't do something else that this time provokes irresistible response from Putin? Turkey also has been aiding ISIS fighters by providing sanctuary across its border and is almost certainly involved in ISIS's trade in oil and other assets that funds their State and continued military activities. Not a very united front or consistency of action on display from NATO here.

David Cameron asserted that there are some 70,000 anti-Assad rebels who could be used to fight ISIS on the ground. This is an utterly absurd notion and frankly a most worrying one if our Prime Minister has the level of understanding to believe this is gospel. Take a look of a map of the various forces in Syria courtesy of BBC


The rebel forces are nowhere near ISIS strongholds except in a couple of areas near Damascus. Plus they are solely concerned with fighting Assad's forces. They are not going to give up that primary aim to turn they efforts against ISIS, unless you first remove Assad and that doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. Also of those 70,000 troops, how many are Jihadists and Islamists? Do you really think the fighters of the Al-Nusra Front are people we want to be dealing with? They are extremists too. I'm curious whether there is any thinking about rewarding the Kurds with an independent Kurdistan as they have been calling and in some cases battling for for years prior to this particular conflict? How would that be received in Turkey I wonder? Turkey regards its Kurds as more of a threat to the state than ISIS

Which leads on to the wider question, of just what is the long-term vision for the area? We have been fed a few clues, that it wouldn't include Assad, that the Islamic State would be dismantled. And what territorial borders would be established? As with so many of the states created out of former Ottoman colonies, the borders created for the likes of Syria and Iraq are somewhat arbitrary and don't reflect the various tribal and ethnic divisions of the populations there. Also there are scant traditions of democracy in the region, so again, how does one go about establishing such a thing from so low a base? Hasn't worked in Libya, is clinging on by its fingertips in Afghanistan... Destroying the Caliphate, which seems to be the one thing all the allies have agreed on, will not remove the threat of islamic terrorism. Instead it will spread it like a virus. As said earlier, they do not need a command and control centre in a specified territorial space. After the insurgency in Iraq was supposedly put down, the insurgents just slipped away and returned to blend in with their fellow citizens until ISIS collected them altogether into a new menacing force. The same is likely to happen again. Also IS is just as much an idea, an aspiration as it is a territorial reality. If I can resort to a crassly inappropriate phrase, it is a genie free from its bottle never to be recaptured. A Caliphate functioning under Sharia law will remain an aspiration for many Muslims and next time it could be in Lebanon, or Saudi Arabia or Yemen. ISIS are currently making great strides in Afghanistan. In Libya. The place does not matter. It will not fade away if this one in Syria and Iraq is destroyed.

So:
1) Bombing Syria makes us less secure here in the UK not more
2) This is not about an abnegation of the responsibility to protect ourselves and relying on others
3) Formal military alliances make it more likely to draw us into full war rather than less
4) There are no 70,000 Syrians on the ground who can take on ISIS
5) There is no plan of what to do if and when ISIS falls
6) The Caliphate as an idea is here to stay and will remain a recruiting tool to the flag beyond the destruction of the Islamic State itself

Arose By Any Other Name - novel extract

Blog: 17th May 2006 / 27th Rabia Awal 1427

Another- the last- fitting for my nuptial dress. Has me more than a little nervous. Only natural of course. My fingers are trembling and I can’t do up a single clasp. The seamstress clicks her tongue in sharp disapproval and says such conduct would be unbecoming on the big day itself. The girdle feels tight, even though I have barely eaten this last week, despite cautioning from those around me to maintain my strength. I have even surrendered up my beloved gelatis. But today I feel I can treat myself to a bombe glacée. A last trifling indulgence, before the most profound change occurs in my life. And if I spread a couple of inches under its calorific assault, then I’ll just have to suck in my stomach, which with the likely state of my breathing tomorrow, shouldn’t be too hard a task. I force myself to think pure thoughts by envisioning my betrothed before me, as the seamstress gingerly packs up my raiment. And in conjuring such happy thoughts, a smile breaks out to envelop the worry lines around my pensive brow. Now my lips quiver only with joy. Such a remedy never fails. Tomorrow we shall be conjoined for ever. I leave the premises to search out my ice cream, once I have safely stored the vestments. Now it is just a question of killing time.

*

With all the trepidation, it’s been a very long and sleepless night. As the light faded, my thoughts flared around me, projected into the formless shadows moving on the wall. Car headlights seared their way through my shutters and churned and roiled my ceiling, making me dizzy and disoriented. Shutting my eyes did nothing, as they managed to prise through the membranes of my eyelids. How thin and insubstantial all of my body feels at this time. My flesh a flimsy curtain, partitioning the unknown chambers ahead.

I rose from bed and am now carving this for the want of something to do. Of course they left me no means of communicating with the outside world. But they did leave me a knife for self-protection and when I had blunted that, I used the flints sheared off from the stone walls of the room itself. Had other brides and grooms to be, been put up here before me? Then the building will tell its tale as well as my own.

My overriding thought right now, would to please be permitted some sleep, so I am not too befuddled for tomorr- or later today as it now is. I’m going back to bed, doubtless to joust some more with my ceiling-borne demons overhead. Whence death seemingly always comes, in our insignificant part of the world. Where the sky is forever falling in.

*

A pealing siren outside woke me, even though it was far away in the distance. A presentiment of ill-fortune? But again I just marinade my mind with thoughts of my beloved opening his arms in welcome and all such anxieties melt away and me with it back into my furtive dreams. Wherein my Mother soon intercedes. Bustling and barging the angelic bystanders as she cuts a direct path to me. Standing now right in my face, eclipsing even the joy of my light, for she would not approve of such an espousal. This is not exactly an elopement, yet still she cannot know till after the event. I have recorded her a message to explain the matter. But her forceful image has demanded an explanation of me before she is even in the know. A lingering last vestige of guilt.

Mother, the sole message is I love you. Even as I seemingly repudiate you by this act. I am not propelling myself away from you. This you must understand. How I love you more than anything else on this earth and I am beaming this message to you, with greater force than all the generative force soon to adorn my belly, that will pull us apart merely on this plane. In my absence, you will receive only greater honour. Till we are ultimately reconciled in Paradise. My Mother and I hug, seemingly unconditionally as she did when I was a baby. And finally I fall into a dreamless sleep.

18th May 2006 / 28th Rabia Awal 1427

I imagine hearing another siren, but as I groggily come round, I realise it is my beeping alarm clock. An adhan summoning me to my calling. My salvation. I shut it off. I’ll be present at my union soon enough. Lying here, I try and evoke an image of the light of my life in the future, but nothing comes. It’s as if my thoughts are like birds, flying in confusion and without navigation during an eclipse, as my rapidly beating heart has blotted out the sun. So I do what I’ve been steeled to do and I use it to my advantage. I am to enter the core of this black sun, and ball it up in my hand. Driving the fingers till they seal my palm. Thereby readmitting the light to embrace me once again. Ha, already the quickened pulse recedes. Resumes its orderly place in the background. But do not be fooled. That faint tick, tick, ticking, is the sound of my seething heart, walled up behind the thorns and briars of my sin. How they dam up my heart from God. Now is the time to purge them like an infernal machine, back whence they came. Return my pure being back to the bosom of God. For He cannot be contained. My heart is fit to irrupt, its furious palpitations cannot be accommodated a moment longer.

I swing my legs out of bed. My bare feet meet the cold stone of the flags. All the more felicitous then, since a grave will be yet colder. I wash myself from a bowl of water, letting the precious liquid trickle back down to its source. Our adversaries would deny us even this most basic of elements. As I bathe them, I devote each one of the two hundred bones in my body to you my Love. And by my actions, I imagine we will share them in turn with five times that amount of suitors, dispersed like passing out wedges of wedding cake. Spearing into their trespassing hearts, as we entwine and are yoked together into death. Then there is the added confetti of nails and ball bearings, only this time it will be the bride showering the congregation. Even my virginal veil of modesty shall be aflame and sail through the air combusting all it brushes against. My flying blood will baste their foreheads with the indelible sign of their guilt. The liquid in the bowl is still once again.

I hope my laving is suitably thorough, but I am without any mirror for inspection. One isn’t to wake on the morn of one’s self-appointed expiration and glimpse dread in the eyes. No photos to kiss either, no earthly tugs at all to corrode the will. To blunt my whetted mind. Instead I picture weaving my own carpet. I who have nothing, can still donate this wedding gift. As they deny us the wool because we have no land to breed sheep and we have no looms to spin it within our flimsy, cramped houses, so then will I fashion mine from blood and bone. I aim to weave the largest rug that is humanly possible from my frame, to drape the entire tarmac between two bus stops. And my signature, will be my essence mingled in with theirs. They who are so precious about collecting and burying every last drop of their blood spilt, will not be able to determine if it is mine or theirs. Blotting me up with their paper as they do with their own. How they will waste such resources in taking precise, forensic care of my remains, it will almost be like they are forced to yield me the same worth as their own burnt offerings. But for all this, I will yield them no insights. Other than reinforcing that which they choose to remain wilfully blind to.

I’m ready. This time I rig myself with barely a faltering in my fingers. The clasps all snap home. The girdle still feels tight, but now hangs heavy, arrayed with the wedding gifts lavished last night by my escort. What a most generous gift he has seen fit to bestow upon me. The needles to unstitch with. The pattern in my mind. At last, for the first time in our despoiled land, my belly feels fecund.

19th May 2006

20th May 2006

21st May 2006

Gone

The requested resource

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is no longer available on this server and there is no forwarding address. Please remove all references to this resource.

*

Got your attention now?

Posted by Rough Beast. 12/08/06

I will disclose at once, that the above is a fictionalised account. I composed it, based on several interviews I’ve carried out with jailed Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel. Now, I’ll admit that in itself has been a tad frustrating, since by definition the ones in prisons are FAILED suicide bombers. Would-be suicide bombers. The defeated and the fatigible. Those betrayed by fate. By their own inexperience. By the will of God. Or their own humanity, their own inner struggle, however deeply overlaid and suppressed.

For the bottom line sees the human spirit remarkably tenacious at preserving itself. The body is stockpiled with a whole battery of reflexes to resist its own cessation and death. Its default setting is for life. So mental illness aside, how can this possibly be overridden? It requires an abstergent, in order to yield a blank screen upon which any message can be projected. Including graduation from a human being, into a human bomb. The knack, is to change the bomber’s desires from embracing life, into a hankering after death.

Interview after interview, I was presented with similar, reedily intoned versions of how this was brought about. One strand had them sat drooling at the feet of some hierophant in a madrassa, as he categorically untangles the frayed threads of life, while they scratch their carpet-fluff beards and nod accordance. I’ll tell you something, if I was promised myriad virgins in the Afterlife, I’d probably enlist myself. Blissfully blow myself to Kingdom Come. Presumably, it’s one virgin to tend each bit of the body atomised by high-explosive. Of course, rather than nubile women, why couldn’t it equally be the ghosts of the 72 camels slain for Fatima’s wedding? That’s the drawback with numerical symbolism. It’s open to double counting.

Alternatively, they drilled before a paramilitary hawk, sharpening the recruit’s claws on his steel gauntlet. The logic he advances, is that the mission should be beyond fear, for no other soldier has such certainty of whether he will return alive or dead from his next action. Whereas the suicide bomber knows to the precise minute. What a boon.

By whichever method, these fellows are striking a deal with their egos. They don’t shut them off, rather they believe they are swapping a pretty squalid life not for death, but for another, improved life up in the clouds. A literal leap of faith. Trouble is, when their heads are blown upwards off their body towards Heaven, sure as hell it hurtles back down to earth under the prosaic ministrations of gravity. Does each bomber actually possess the finer shades of understanding, exactly what the Holy Text suggests is in store for them? Ultimately, they remain just teenagers on the most extreme and ugly of promises. And as to the secularist bombers, they too are left in no uncertain terms that they will become pin-up poster boys on the walls of Gaza and Baghdad. This is the poor man’s version of celebrity. A pension from Iran or Syria will see that their family is well provided for, a sort of posthumous dower. Or a divorce settlement.

When one of the plump-bellied commanders or hierophants squeezes into a belt, rather than a whey-faced waif; when one of those educated-in-the-universities-of-their-foes strategists puts his own body on the line, then I’ll afford them credence that they’re not just exploiting and manipulating these bomb mules. Winding up the key of taut and tutored desperation in their backs and setting them off towards mayhem. See, the thing with successful missions as the Japanese kamikazes demonstrated, is that you cull your elite talent. No such thing as a suicide veteran. You need a constant stream of fresh volunteers. But unlike Iraq, where Jihadists are crossing over the borders all the time, Palestine is sealed off. So the quality of the bomber pool declines. They started sending children and simpletons. I saw them in the prisons too, though I didn’t abuse them any further by requesting to interview them. Even those with the slightest sympathy for the strength of will of the suicide bomber, ought to be repulsed by this abasement. Bad strategic decision.

So I return to these prompters, these whisperers from offstage. The puppet master, pedlars of death. What these men do so successfully, is to take the everyday currency of death in their blighted land and raise it to the ultimate value. The reward they offer, confirmed as instantly as a scratch-card, is the status of martyr. They market death as a lifestyle. Conferring an off the peg posterity. Of soldier; freedom fighter; liberator; hero; martyr; patriot; bomber. When life circumstances have prevented the volunteer from being secure in the roles of lover, father, son, worker, provider, man of leisure. Such appeals strike at the very core of anxiety and neurosis. Become a sapper rather than merely sapped.

These manipulators, these programmers, are marketing geniuses. For being able to turn death around like that and make it an attractive option. An aspirational choice. They ought to be employed in Soho and Madison Avenue, having their work plastered across giant hoardings and on TV. Then they’d be earning enough money to send back to revive their homeland economy. But these mavens of destruction would presumably baulk at the job title of ‘Creative Director’.

extract taken from the kindle novel "Not In My Name" available from Amazon

(Don't) Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before - The atrocities in Paris

It saddens me that that in the light of events in Paris I find myself having to post yet another blog post like this (Charlie Hebdo, ISIS, Lee Rigby murder). Social media is in meltdown with two types of reaction. Either that of political opportunism, (Bomb Syria, ban migrants etc), or that of sheer incomprehension and vapid pronouncements of solidarity.

1) These events are not beyond incomprehension
2) These events are not beyond words
3) These events, monstrous as they are, cannot be labelled and thereby dismissed as 'evil'; they are utterly ascribable to the hand of man.

If you want to show solidarity, inform yourself of the ideas and motivations that lead to events like this. Do not wring your hands uselessly and then throw those hands up in the air asking 'how?' Put in some work and you'll have a pretty good picture of how and why. Then and only then might both citizens and their politicians have a better idea for how to cope and deal with this threat.

I have never worked in the armed forces or the intelligence services. I am not an academic. I am not a politician or civil servant. I am just a citizen. For the 30+ years of my adult life, I have looked around me, observed my world and pursued my own study of the state of affairs in certain key areas. After 9/11, the Madrid train bombings and the suicide bombs on the London Underground, the area of Radical Islamic terrorism became one of those key areas for me. I read books (not newspapers). I educated myself. I tried to establish what the different voices and perspectives were saying whether I agreed with them or not. One of the problems with the response of social media is that no one is actually listening to anyone else, rather talking over each other. It absolutely behoves us to try and penetrate all the logics and rationales being advanced by everyone involved in these events. Because until you do, you will never understand what you are confronting.

I wrote a book in 2010 (published in 2011) about these issues. I traced some of the logic behind non-Islamic terrorism of the 60s and 70s, because terrorist logic remains largely the same. (1960s US dissidents/ domestic terrorists The Weather Underground coined the phrase 'bringing the war back home' through their campaign against US domestic targets to make the citizenry experience the same as the Vietnamese during America's military campaign there). I explored at length the depth of emotion behind suicide (domestic as well as ideological) because the theme of death and its ready acceptance is a key factor at work here. I traced the possible journey to radicalisation of your own citizens. And while I didn't predict ISIS and the establishment of the Islamic State, I did probe the notion of a Caliphate as an aspiration within some strands of radical Islam. Again, let me stress, I am not involved in any of the professions who might be involved in analysing such factors. But I did my reading. The book represents many different voices, but not as a mere cacophony, but with each strand untangled.

Read my book or don't read it (I'm not even putting a link to it here, that's not what this piece is about). Read non-fiction treatments as I did in order to end up being able to write a book on the subject. But please, no longer throw your arms up in uncomprehending despair. Arm yourself with knowledge, open up your ears to what the issues are here. Our nations can pull together and show solidarity by putting in the necessary work to inform itself and to help reach informed decisions. Incomprehension is no longer a defence, either in argument or in actuality to meet an armed threat.

Beheadings, suicide bombings, murdering civilians are not evil acts. Because to dismiss something as evil externalises it, makes it appear to originate from some unknowable, irresistible force, when it utterly and inescapably emanates from within men. Such acts are consciously calculated by its perpetrators for their impact. Terror acts are finely calibrated, for inducing fear in civilian populations to both get them to apply pressure to their politicians and to change their way of life; for the PR value in playing to the terrorists' own communities, fostering further recruitment; strategically to extend the war from far away in the Middle East to the cities of Europe, 'so they know what it feels like, so they live in the same state of anxiety'; ergo for revenge as well; to suggest the cause of the terrorists is very much alive and kicking and cannot be defeated... All this is not to say that there were also some impulses as well as ideas and objectives. The guys who shoot people in a concert hall enjoyed it. Guys who use rape as a weapon of war (against the Yazidis for example) enjoy it. Suicide bombers accept death. These are the impulses of serial killers and mass murderers. But unlike serial killers, even those who have some warped logic tying together their actions in their own minds as 'logical', these killers share and are united by their rationales. It is a collective mindset, unlike that of individual psychopaths. So although murderous & violating impulses are at play, they are dwarfed by their ideological motivations.

Assassin's Veto - Friday Flash

We condemn their killing, but when you stir the hornet’s nest…

We condemn their murder, but they were fully aware of the risks

We condemn the lethal violence visited upon them, but some sacred cows are non-negotiable

We condemn the beheadings, but they knew the likely consequences

We condemn the journalists' executions, but such are the occupational hazards of covering wars

We condemn the cartoonists’ massacre, but they simply went too far

We condemn the bombing of the theatre, but the play was inflammatory

We condemn the hounding of that author to death, but he remorselessly refused to show restraint

We condemn the rapes, but if they dressed that provocatively what did they expect?

Playing Detective - A Couple Of Unanswered Questions From The Paris Slayings

I'm no different from anyone who doesn't work for the police or intelligence services, although I have published a work of fiction about terrorist actions. And my amateur spidey sleuth senses are twitching over a couple of aspects of last week's terrorist outrages in Paris.


Firstly, at least one of the terrorists may have seen action in Syria, but Kalashnikovs and Rocket-Propelled grenade launchers are not just something you can smuggle back in your suitcase like hotel towels.


So how did the terrorists get their hands on such hardware?
1) The radical Islamic terror networks have excellent quartermasters who can secure this kind of ordnance
2) The terrorist bought them from the criminal underworld.


Either way, the two converge in the sense that even the quartermasters have to source the guns from somewhere, so at some point someone is trading them illegal weapons


Have Europe's borders become so porous that guns flow as freely as people? Where are the security checks on baggage (if smuggled by individuals) or freight (if sent commercially)? At some point in the transport cycle this hardware is likely to have originated from outside the EU, from the former Soviet Union, or Syria and Iraq perhaps. But the moment it comes into the EU it has to be discovered by the authorities or we remain totally vulnerable.


The French underworld has always been heavily tooled up, with machine guns to the fore. So it is quite conceivable that the guns were purchased locally. In which case it behoves the criminal classes to rediscover some notions of loyalty to the state they operate within, by keeping their sixth sense open as to the possible use of desired purchases and refuse to deal with terrorists. After all, it could be their wives and children hit in the crossfire. It's true that some terrorists have backgrounds within the criminal underworld, but if they drop out of circulation to go fight in Syria and then reappear trying to hook up with their old contacts again, it ought to sound alarm bells to the crims.


Secondly, Jihadists who declare war on their home state, cherish and welcome death. They don't hand themselves up for arrest of their own volition. And yet seemingly this is exactly what the third member of the Kouachi cell did in Reims. Could he possibly be entirely innocent, but his name came up in the frame because some identification material of his was found in one of the cars stolen by the brothers during their spree? Could he have handed himself in just to clear himself as an entirely innocent party? If that is the case - and we've heard absolutely nothing since his arrest - then the third gunman from the Charlie Hebdo massacre is still at large as well. Some more information on the status of this other accomplice (or not) would be welcome to clear up the fog.


I am also slightly confused by the role of Hayat Boumeddiene, the common law wife of the third gunman Amedy Coulibaly. Coulibaly's video sees him declaring his allegiance to ISIS, yet ISIS purportedly don't allow women to fight in their cause because of their lesser role in society to men (I'll refrain delving into the psychosexual exploration of that anxiety). Boumeddiene is said to have been a planner for her husband and exchanged 500 phone calls with the wives of the Kouachi brothers. Were these all just bolstering of their spirits, a reaffirmation of their commitment to the missions of their husbands? Or was this the means of planning communication that meant their husbands could remain off the grid? Boumeddiene is also over the internet pictured aiming a crossbow. If she is in Syria as seems likely, is she being feted as a war hero's widow? Or is she being allowed to apply her nefarious talents to ISIS' operations in the field?

Charlie Hebdo and artists' dereliction of duty

So suddenly we’re all Charlie and we’re all in solidarity with freedom of expression. Sorry, not buying a word of it. In Britain artists of print, stage, music and whatever passes for indigenous film have all fought shy of the political in their subject matter. With a few honourable exceptions, not least within the cartoon and graphics community and the odd stand-up comic (Jerry Sadowitz reviled for his extreme comedy, ‘outed’ Jimmy Savile in his act 30 years before society caught up to him).

In Britain ever since Mrs Thatcher demanded that our art be self-financing so that market demands shaped content, and also since the arts community miserably failed to get to grips with the ideology of Thatcherism with god-awful ‘little’ films about relationships set against the backdrops of riots or demos, we have increasingly detached our artistic output from having any political message at all. And this was in the decade of the Rushdie Affair let us not forget. The ironic thing is that in an era when public discourse on anything has been eroded by the authorities (Blair happily carried this on from Thatcher), art failed miserably to step in to fill the breach. (Nor can twitter usefully redress the balance for that matter). The fact is our artists have been censoring themselves for the past twenty years, be it for economic or political reasons. And now we are proclaiming that we are all about the right to express oneself freely… 

In continental Europe, they just don’t even make the distinction between art and politics. Camus, Sartre and De Beauvoir went on every march going, while Malraux was Culture Minister in the government. Can you imaging an Amis leading a demo, either Kingsley or Martin? Sadly now that Harold Pinter has passed, there is no one to lead our artistic intelligentsia and get them out on the street (although he tended to favour agitation by dinner party). Europe’s refusal to categorise art as political and separate is exactly why you can have a radical magazine like Charlie Hebdo exist in the first place. But as more and more artists cede the political ground through fear of reprisal (or libel), then that leaves fewer arts’ bodies, each operating in isolation and therefore very vulnerable to attacks such as these. If there were a myriad of arts organisations making challenging, provocative, radical art, then those offended by it wouldn’t be able to strike at them all. They wouldn’t know where to bloody start. 

You want to show solidarity? Make some flipping political art for a change. I know I have. It’s what I do. 

The Charlie Hebdo Slayings In Paris

The first thing I want to say is that until the French authorities have definitively established the perpetrators of this atrocity, it doesn't do to leap to conclusions in pinning blame. Remember how in the aftermath of the Madrid rail bombings, the Spanish government blamed the Basque Separatists, so that when it turned out to be Islamic terrorists, they were made to seem completely out of touch and unable to protect their population and promptly got booted out of power at the election that followed soon after. That's how terrorism works, it engenders a sense in the population that they are vulnerable and unprotected by the powers that are charged with just that responsibility.


I am not taking it for granted that Islamic terrorists carried out this attack. But if one was a betting man, they would be the favourites, but the fact that we have a multi-billion global betting industry shows that the favourite doesn't always come in. However, this is such a specialised target (I'd never heard of the magazine before), a bit like going in and shooting up the offices of "Private Eye", whoever is responsible it represents an attack of the right to free expression. Satire is a means of poking fun and subverting whatever it is targeting and while that may cause offence, it is not illegal, it doesn't point a gun at anyone and it doesn't pull a trigger on anything except to fire words or images into the pool of human thought and cogitation.


Yet when people wring their hands about such an injustice, or that the right of free expression is inalienable, or even use the word 'atrocity', they are frankly failing to deal with the issues. Gunmen who would shoot up a magazine office full off journalists have a very different concept of justice than all the handwringers. They seek to make free expression a wholly alienable right, through the force of the bullet. Of course it is an atrocity in our eyes, but in theirs it is an act to politically advance their cause. These assassins are not troubled by the act of murder of unarmed civilians. Chances are they see themselves at war with that which they are opposing. Words like 'atrocity' actually manage to tamp down further useful discussion, because it admits that this act is so incomprehensible, so off the scale of understanding, that there is nothing more that can be added. Wrong.


There is nothing wrong with demonstrations of solidarity. I've heard suggestions of playing the Marseilleise outside Buckingham Palace, through to republishing the Hebdo front page cartoon in every magazine and newspaper front page tomorrow. I get these symbolic acts of standing together. I get the need for them too, representing both a collective grief and a show of strength. But what people need to do and I've said this consistently in books and blog posts, is not throw up our hands in disgusted stymied defeat at these acts being beyond the pale, but to come to understand how the terrorist thinks, acts and conceives. If we persist in dismissing something as unjust by our standards, then we will never come to comprehend his view of the just and the unjust. If we continue to vaguely wave a banner promoting free speech, then we fail to appreciate the nature of its threat to the terrorist, how and why he targets the agencies he does. If we blithely ascribe an outrage as an atrocity, then we miss how this is just business to their minds, their modus operandi. What lies behind, what are their aims, what generates their support, what are the economic, psychologically, social and cultural roots behind people becoming terrorists?


Time to get on the front foot people. And as the first act, that would be definitively determining who was responsible for this attack. It's no longer acceptable to ask 'how can this happen?' or 'how can there be people who act like this?' without also seeking the answer.

New Cover Reveal

In 2011 I published my novel "Not In My Name" about the genesis of a homegrown Islamic terrorist, in response to the bombing of railways in Madrid and London and the spate of suicide bombings in Israel that prompted the erection of the security wall.

Everything that I wrote in that book, about online recruitment, suicide bombers, beheading videos, martyrdom and the nature of a death cult, is more true today with the emergence of ISIS/ ISIL than even back then.

Recently I've blogged on the factors shared with the rise of recruitment to ISIS to the homegrown suicide bombers who attacked the London Underground, here, here and here. I despair of the pronouncements made by the authorities as they flail around trying to get to grips with the phenomena of 5 Britons a week travelling to join up with ISIS in Iraq and Syria. They seem to me to be utterly clueless with this manifestation of militant Islamic terrorism, but the point is it's not that new. My book lays out the journey from Yorkshire to Syria or Iraq.

I'll be honest, my book hasn't done terribly well up until now. I think part of the reason is not that people aren't interested in this subject, but that I did them a disservice with a terrible original cover that looked like the book was a cartoonish treatment of a serious subject. The fault was mine not the designer, since they were working from my brief. So I'm glad to announce that I have republished the book to Kindle with a brand new cover this time designed by Appleseed Images. It will be interesting to see if the cover makes any difference to sales.

Here's the new cover:

UK Citizens joining ISIS in Iraq and Syria

The TV News tracks down the mother of a Jihadi in Cardiff and broadcast her pained squeal for him to come back home from Syria. But he's not coming. He's not going to heed his mother's appeal, because he'd already cut the umbilical family tie by travelling to fight. And now that he's openly shown himself on a recruitment video, he's unlikely to come home when his face is known to the authorities who will watch him night and day expecting him to wage war and terror at home. I think he expects to die out there in Syria or Iraq. Else to participate in a Caliphate erected across Syria and part of Iraq which is the stated aim of ISIS. A pipe dream in all probability because of the forces of resistance that will come to range against any such prospect. But for now, kalashnikovs and pipe bombs tilt at just such a pipe dream.

So no, he's not coming home. The mother's anguish is because it is such a shock. People may ask why she didn't even have an inkling what he was up to. Mothers know about their children right? Well if the intelligence services of our country don't know, practised professionals, why should his mother be any more in the picture? The Jihadi training doesn't start in camps abroad. It begins by learning the techniques to disguise the conversion to the cause of militant Jihad while you still reside in Britain.  To carry off the act of living a normal life, including respecting one's parents, until the moment is ripe to decamp for foreign battlefields. Just like the 7/7 bombers who were described as "Clean Skins" by the authorities in Britain, that is those with no history of terrorist activity. They don't need a history if they are suicide bombers, they just need that one strike and out.

I wrote about the genesis of homegrown terrorists in my novel "Not In My Name". I wrote of the complexities of the political ideals behind the drive to recruitment. Of the twin-track approach of the spiritual and the military professionals. Of the alienation within the home countries that was the launch point for joining the militant Jihadi cause (similar alienation that leads folk to join cults). And how this cult in particular embraced and celebrated and welcomed death as the ultimate aspiration. When writing of those who went to resist Western forces in Afghanistan, Somalia, Chechnya, or the aftermath of post Saddam Iraq, I put it like this:

"This is not just defiance, a refusal to acquiesce. It’s more actively seeking the chance to mix it with someone. To prove their mettle and uphold their misguided notion of honour. The one emasculated by the unabated actions of the West. They’re after accosting the 'Crusaders', not necessarily withstanding them (that’s why recruitment of succeeding fighters to jump into the suicidally vacated breach, is so crucial for sustaining it as an ongoing campaign). Bottom line, what’s actually on offer, is an Oriental Grand Tour, whereby the disaffected sons of the rich can get to kill a GI in each of the Cities with a holy shrine. In truth, they have become a death cult. Venerating and worshipping carnage. Bringing in blood sacrifices as proof of election. Thus I say there is no ideological struggle at stake here."

The mother could not see the crisis of masculinity in her son that contributed to him enlisting to Jihad. A cultural nausea caused by an abhorrence of things in the British way of life that threaten masculinity, that lead to patrols in Whitechapel in London demanding all women cover up their flesh when walking in the area and that alcohol is not to be consumed either. But impromptu street patrols cannot cut it, especially when the authorities clamp down on them as illicit public behaviour. Again I quote from my book:

"They market death as a lifestyle. Conferring an off the peg posterity. Of soldier; freedom fighter; liberator; hero; martyr; patriot; bomber. When life circumstances have prevented the volunteer from being secure in the roles of lover, father, son, worker, provider, man of leisure. Such appeals strike at the very core of anxiety and neurosis. Become a sapper rather than merely sapped."

I wrote these things in a fictional narrative back in 2011 and yet three years later our society still seems shocked and disbelieving that boys from Cardiff and Aberdeen can abandon their studies and go fight in Iraq or Syria. (I wrote of boys and girls from Wakefield, through Madrid to Palestine and Iraq). Nobody seems to be asking the right questions, or suggesting the mechanisms behind such a mindset. But I managed to penetrate it to some extent, (without offering any easy answers), so maybe we all better just catch up and start dealing with the issues involved here.

Available on Amazon Kindle 

Not In My Name - Excerpt

I was struck today by the debate raging over Facebook's decision to reserve the right of its users to post beheading videos depending on their context. I wrote about this in my novel "Not In My Name" which is all about the new politics shifting to the online world and which is far more vicious than any other public political discourse.

Below are two excerpts from the novel around the subject:

How can you criticise beheading videos on the internet, when during the invasion of Iraq, the US military would release footage of its surgical air strikes on mainstream TV news programmes? Both show ferocious acts of killing and the last moments of supposedly sacred life, just one appears in close up. Do you not realise that both seek the same outcome, that of enlisting support to their cause? We’ve moved on from baroquely moustachioed Lord Kitchener 'Your country needs you' recruitment posters. Telescopic military videos are designed to becalm its target audience with the detached, scientific nature of precision warfare, whereas the beheading videos are meant to stir the passions of its gallery. We cavil because it seems so barbaric, but they equally regard our methods as both cowardly and uncivilised with its ravaging of civilians. If we persist in such hypocritical myopia, how will we ever evidence the judgement necessary to resolve this clash of civilisations beneficially to both houses? 

Capitation (poem by Aki) 

Eyes cast down, neck braced by the woodImpressed grain logs the ineffable ruling.Court artist sand, worm’s upraised viewingDeath mask imprinted with my blood. I blanch while the ascending ground darkensTrading places, I divine sacrifice not martyr.

In the arena, a recount of the charges My basket case nerves nod mute accord. There is no bucket beneath to slam dunk Neither Jacobin traitor, nor political agitator My poll will not be mounted upon any pole. All glassy eyed it will be held up highRevolved around, to be cheered all four sides.
My lolling tongue and foaming maw Are requested to shape the words of Shahada.Lip service paid now, whence in default beforeChurlish to supplicate for a miracle. I hear the soft sandalled tread An executioner’s shadow enshrouding As the sword’s molecules dash on deck Each anticipates bloody anointing.

I shut my eyes, no desire to see The separation of my apostate head, From my mutinous body. Instead, An involuntary prayer, to whom I am unsure.I hearken the shimmering swish of a scimitarPerceive behind a field of dancing light.Beauteous spectral wake as blade parts the air.Not taut like steel, but floppy greenLong-stemmed bloom presented afore me
A declaration of love, gift of life Revivifying my enervated senses. I unfasten my lids, unshutter my gaze Winch my head up from the stump And view only the one, you my love As you drop your veil, to reveal A different red hue sun glinting. You shake away the baying dogs With a sweep of your head Your welcoming arms grant private audience

I stand and stride, a little shakily No mirage you, unflinching in bearing A cradle of acceptance Perfectly tailored for my body Hands safeguarding my bare crown. On approach they spangle and changeNow palm fronds provide our joint canopyMy bride elixir births me anew Returns me to my root safely.Intact, yet only half a man stillUnblockishly lower my gaze and modesty

On today's issue my personal thoughts are as follows. Beheading videos are created only for propaganda purposes. Facebook will not permit them being posted for the purpose of advancing a cause or trying to incite commitment and recruitment. I don't really see how representing these videos in a critical fashion can be beneficial to any public debate on the subject of terrorism or violence. Beheading is a bad thing, go figure... Also the act itself is a crime, a beheading video is a record of a crime while it is being committed and that must have legal implications I would have thought. I know happyslapping and joyriding videos abound online, but this is a far more extreme crime. It is the equivalent of snuff porn and that wouldn't be allowed online. Is the only difference that in a beheading video the victim has their clothes on, unlike a snuff movie? I say this not with flippancy, but as has been pointed out today, Facebook comes down heavily on breastfeeding images because of the nudity.

Sorry, I just don't see any circumstance where showing a beheading video promotes any understanding of the issues