Deeply Compelling, Perhaps Dangerously Ingenuous

So the very first 'reformed Jihadi' profiled apparently joined ISIS in 2014. Awkward. One wonders, in light of that, how much of his remarkably self-exculpatory narrative was true. One wonders how much Mr Ken's willingness to hear these man's narratives and take them at face value, report them verbatim to us, is doing the jihadis work for them.

And the irony of him describing the horror of an underage girl being married against her will to a strange old man, imprisoned and raped by him, as a supposed contrast to the life of Aisha, the wife of the "prophet", alwhen according to Islam's own "sacred" texts that is exactly what happened to her. There's just a whole lot of wilful blindness on the part of both Westerners and Muslims who wish for a more modern or moderate Islam. The latter have the best of intentions, but they can't exegete themselves a better religion. At the end of the day, the text says what it says and the beast is what it is. And painting over its coat won't change its character.

I expected a lot of apologia for Islam, jihadism isn't 'real" Islam, extremists are a tiny minority, blah blah, etc. etc. so I wasn't too annoyed by it. Just par the course for a Westerner, an American Jew, no less, writing about the people who want to behead him. That aside, the narratives in this book were varied and surprisingly compelling, and seemed to offer real insight not only into the world of jihadis, but if Muslims in general.

For instance, I learnt such trivia as that Muslims are supposed to cover TV and computer screens in their homes, can't play with dolls (too close to idolatry. Reminds me of how American Indians would make dolls without faces. And iirc the Amish do the same), sit with their toes pointed inward and that when martyrs ascend to heaven, their brown skin turns white.

Also for some reason a lot of farting. Happening in that part of the world. Apparently. Like, significantly more than I expected to encounter in a book about Islamic terrorism.

The final story was the most compelling for personal reasons. Gay Arab hereditary theocrat wannabe-terrorist Tom Cruise was not a character I was expecting to encounter in this, or any book. If this were fiction I'd have thrown my phone ever so gently across the room. But he's apparently a real person. It was all Brokeback Mount Merapi for a hot minute (though they were first cousins which, kinda ew, though very standard in the muesli world. At least they can't have inbred kids). And I must admit, for all one eye-rolls at the antifash types who insist that the Western nationalist right and Islamist radicals really have a lot in common dontcha know (when it's traitorous far-left radicals who are the ones literally making alliances with them, apologising for and excusing them, shielding them from both legal consequences and public outrage and, oh yeah, bringing them into our fucking countries in the first place), the section where he was spending every waking minute surfing the net, switching back and forth from gay chatrooms to Jihadi ones, simultaneously admiring and lusting over the pretty boys he encountered in both spaces, until they blurred together, definitely had some echoes for me. 4chan and Telegram chats can reach locker room levels of gay chicken, is all I'm saying. A potentially untapped vein of the "extremism research" salt mine? The Homoerotics of Traditionalist Radicalism. Something for those thirsty yentas to sink their schnozzes into, perhaps.

Ultimately I'm not sure how to feel about this book. It was very well written, evidently very well researched, and the surprising, often literally (apparently) supernatural, connections between the men featured were allowed to emerge in a manner that was both natural and astonishing. It deserves at least four stars for the writing. Its aim was too humanise killers and would-be killers and it did that all too well--so well that one forgets that behind the smiling faces of almost all of these men lie the grinning skulls of their countless innocent victims. Their bleeding bodies are left to lie forgotten by the wayside, their faces nameless and obscured, while their killers are afforded the most generous of platforms, the most eloquent of interpreters, the most sympathetic of listeners. There's something sickening about that.

I have to give the author credit for donating the royalties from this book to an anti-terror charity. If it's true, then that is a very Aryan (in all senses of its meaning) act.

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