Why the Charlie Hebdo killers are as laughable as Rupert Pupkin – the wannabe stand-up from The King Of Comedy who would do anything for fame.
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You wake up in the morning and you do not turn on the radio or television.
There is no radio or television.
Instead you get out your mat and begin the first of many daily prayers.
You will mix with no women during the working day.
Nor do you hear their voices on any of the radios or televisions you do not own.
When you get home at the end of the day you will not watch a movie or read a book – you will unscroll that prayer mat once again.
Later on you might attend a public punishment, perhaps to see a woman flogged, or something similar.
It is difficult to see what would attract a young man like Chérif Kouachi to a life like the one described above – the kind of life promoted by fundamentalists like the Taliban.
Kouachi was, at one time, a budding rap star.
I discovered this as I watched the news channels replaying footage of him and his brother Saïd – the men who walked into the Charlie Hebdo offices and shot 11 employees and a police officer.
There was one clip of Kouachi aged in his early 20s, music playing in the background as he walked towards the camera, smiling, with the self-consciously loose-limbed stroll of the pop star aspirant – desperate for fame.
He looked like any one of the wannabes who send videos of themselves off to X Factor, Big Brother, or whatever.
I thought a similar thing when I watched the alleged ‘martyrdom’ video of Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who murdered a police officer and killed four hostages at a Paris supermarket two days after the Hebdo atrocity.
There he was – lounging against a wall in black leather jacket, AK47 propped beside him as he gestured to the camera.
It almost feels like satire, doesn’t it?
Just like something taken directly from the plot of Chris Morris’ Four Lions: the hopeless rapper who takes a couple of wrong turns and ends up dying confused and desperate in a hail of police bullets having committed a massacre.
The Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly probably already had a lot of bad ideas rolling around in their heads prior to their radicalisation: the kind of ideas that grow out of lives of poverty, underachievement and petty crime.
Theirs were lives lived on the margins.
Throw ego into the mix along with notions of greatness and notoriety and the idea of instant absolution for any crimes (crimes that indeed were not crimes to them, but glorious acts of martyrdom) and you have the perfect cocktail for attracting the disaffected outcast.
Sometimes it seems remarkable there are not more Kouachis and Coulibalys: young, passionate men desperate to invest their lives with some kind of meaning who are seduced by ideology and then sent off to kill and die in order to serve the ends of older, more cunning, more cynical men.
This was an established trope long before the events in Paris.
It was the story of the 9/11 hijackers.
You could even make a case for it being the story in, say, the early days of the trenches of World War One and the jungles of Vietnam.
Ah, but we were at war then, might be the argument.
Obviously, in the mind of the jihadist, we are at war now.
“We don’t kill civilians,” the Kouachi brothers said to a member of the public who approached them shortly before their last stand. But there are no civilians anymore – we are all in the front line now.
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“There will be many more like Cherif Kouachi out there – angry, confused young men eager to invest their lives with some kind of meaning.”
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The 9/11 attacks were widely described as being ‘low-tech’: a handful of fanatics with some Stanley knives wrought utter devastation and took thousands of lives.
There might come a point soon when the hijacking of those planes is looked back on as the apex of sophistication.
We might find ourselves living in a time when the low-tech attack means a transit van screeching up in a busy city center and men piling out of it with Kalashnikovs at the ready, firing indiscriminately into crowds of people.
It is necessary here to state the obvious: we must remember the difference between those who worship Islam and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.
We must howl down idiotic statements like Rupert Murdoch’s knee-jerk Twitter reaction to Paris when he wrote, ‘Maybe most Moslems (are) peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.’
(In the same way, presumably, and as many people pointed out, that all Christians must be held responsible for the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church, or that all Australians must be deemed accountable for Rupert Murdoch.)
Fundamentalist Islamic terrorists attack Muslims too.
Muslims like Malala Yousafzai, the schoolgirl shot in the face by the Taliban for daring to demand an education
Muslims like Ahmed Merabet, the French policeman shot dead by the Kouachi brothers.
Or the Al Qaeda car bomb in Yemen that killed mainly Muslims. Or… well, the list goes on.
It is useful to remind ourselves of the existence fundamentalist groups like the Taliban favour.
Remember the kind of world they would like to bring about: one like that described in the opening paragraphs of this article.
A world where women are not to be educated or listened to, where homosexuality is punishable by death (as still happens in Iran today) and where there is no music, literature, cinema or art. We need to ask ourselves – what is attracting young men to such a philosophy?
Martin Scorsese’s 1982 movie The King Of Comedy features Robert De Niro as Rupert Pupkin – an aspiring comedian who kidnaps a TV chat show host in order to get himself a shot on prime time TV.
“Well,” Pupkin reasons, “better King for a day than schmuck for a lifetime”.
Something very like this was behind Mark Chapman’s thinking when he murdered John Lennon.
You kill someone famous and talented and you inherit part of the aura: your names become forever intertwined.
“You know who I am,” Coulibaly shouted as he marched into the supermarket in Paris and began killing people.
Of course, at that point, no-one knew who he was.
However, there will be many more like him out there – angry, confused young men eager to invest their lives with some kind of meaning.
Desperate for the world to know their names.