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Hug A Fascist Today
Regular readers will know that one of EURSOC's favourite gripes concerns the heroes welcomes that have greeted former Guantanamo Bay prisoners when they have returned to the UK. It is only to be expected that the detainees' radical allies welcome their co-jihadists home; what grates, however, is the joyful welcome arranged by media organisations, including the Guardian, the Independent and the taxpayer-funded BBC.
More sensible newspapers have remained largely silent: Perhaps the Times or the Telegraph imagine it is bad form to ask too many questions of the returned detainees, considering that their detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay absolves them from any responsibility for activities that led them there in the first place.
So with that in mind, it's a welcome relief to read Tory MP Michael Gove in The Times on the prison memoirs of Moazzam Begg, feted by the Guardian for his "strikingly generous spirit", his "humour" and his "insight."
The beginning of Begg's road to Guantanamo and subsequent celebrity was unpromising: Few activists hoping to be celebrated by liberal newspapers would hang around with an organisation dedicated to creating a theocratic state, which its founder boasts would be based on "Fascist and communist states."
From there to a bookshop selling texts urging war on unbelievers - via several warzones, staying in camps frequented by Islamist fighters - before settling with his long-suffering family in Taliban-run Afghanistan. Why Afghanistan, which before the US and its allies invaded was mainly known for its brutal Islamist rule which banned everything from women walking in the streets to flying kites? Which introduced an extreme variation of Sharia law that made public executions and dismemberment the only state-approved entertainment? Which manifested its hatred of other cultures by blowing up ancient artworks and sculpture?
Why Afghanistan? Because, hilariously, "the cost of living there" was low.
Here's Gove:
"There may well be people who have freely chosen to spend large stretches of the past 15 years visiting Mujahidin camps across the globe, who have sought out every battlefield on which al-Qaeda and its confederates have fought, from Bosnia through Chechnya to Afghanistan, who have chosen to set up home in Taleban Afghanistan, and who have earned a crust along the way selling, among other works, jihadi textbooks who are, in every sense of the word, innocents abroad. Mr Begg may well be one of them."
And here, by way of comparison, is the Independent's reviewer, singing the praises of Begg's book:
"...all you want to do is welcome [the author] back, hug his book and punish his tormentors”.
Those cuddly Taliban again. What happened to the brave British media's ability to ask tough questions?
