‘Going Postal’ with a twist, part 2
Sent on July 26, 2005

 
We know their names now: Mohammed Sidique Khan, Hasib Hussain, Shahzad Tanweer, and the mysterious Jamaican, Germaine Lindsay. They were the London bombers of 7/7. We don’t know their individual motivations for suicide-bombing, nor who recruited them for it.

The information that has trickled in about them to date hasn’t brought much clarity so far. Their families are bewildered; the two young wives never suspected. People who knew the three from Leeds say they were nice boys, and were liked. No one realized they’d become Islamic extremists, let alone that they had it in them to kill innocent civilians.

And the more we learn about them, the more puzzled we are by the details. On the surface, at least, they seemed to have little reason for personal alienation. The bombers weren’t children of poor families but of hard-working, moderately prosperous ones. They didn’t want for much, materially speaking; one of the three Leeds men was known for cruising around in his dad’s Mercedes. Two, Tanweer and Hussain, were in university before they left for Pakistan, though they weren’t the best of students and Tanweer was known then as a goof-off. Their respective parents let them go to Pakistan hoping that they would learn some discipline abroad. Hussain, at least, seemed to have upon his return; he did well thereafter in his business school curriculum, making his abandonment of a potential career all the more strange.

For his part, Khan was both well liked and conscientious in his work with young children. He might have started at the bottom of the educational system, but many do, and there was promise for him there. Moreover, his wife (now widow) is pregnant with their second child. The shadowy Lindsay, of whom we still know the least, also had a wife and child. What could be more important to these men than their children?

Actually, it’s a story we’ve heard before, though not in this context. Think about it: remove the religious and political backdrop, and who do they remind you of? Who else did no one suspect until the killing was over? Who shocked their families and community with the vehemence of their attack? Try the Columbine shooters.

They were the sons of moderately well-off parents, those Colorado boys, products of a good suburban school system. They had nearly everything that normal modern teenagers could reasonably want. Unlike adults who ‘go postal’ and start killing those around them, those teens hadn’t lost everything and weren’t, objectively speaking, bereft of hope — hell, they’d hardly lived long enough to have a clue to what life is about, though that might have contributed to their peculiar willingness to die (they really didn’t know what they’d be missing). No good reason for them to freak out and start killing people, let alone actually plan it. But prosperity is not a safeguard against alienation, as the children of the wealthy well know.

The Columbine shooters felt like outcasts, whether real or self-styled, and they became murderers who fully expected to die in the process. It would be easy to write them off as either bad seed or sulky fanatics dipped in angst and melodrama. If they hadn’t had guns and killed so many of their classmates, any faculty member who discovered their deep disaffection might have told them to cut the drama and learn some coping skills, while referring them for school-based therapy. But of course, it turned out to be too late for that.

In the end, the Columbine teens saw themselves as unwanted, out-of-place rejects, marginalized, and they were angry enough to kill over it and die for it. They wanted somebody to pay for their disillusionment and outrage.

And so did the London bombers.

There are plenty of outraged Muslims who, despite their anger over the political situation in the Middle East, will not kill, let alone become suicide bombers. What separates them from those who cross the line? Something makes the latter snap while the former do not.

The investigators working the London bombings should try to discover exactly when the four suicide bombers came to see themselves as so disenfranchised and their larger Islamic community so betrayed that they were willing to destroy themselves and others in order to make a very bloody point — and then see who they were talking to and fraternizing with at the time. Who took advantage of their disaffection and new-found fanaticism.

It’s now suspected that Lindsay, the Jamaican convert to Islam, organized the bombing. That makes a certain amount of sense: there’s no true believer like a convert, and nearly no one as willing to proselytize. And in a sense, the other three were also recent converts — in their case, to extreme Islam, which means they were ripe to be influenced by Lindsay or any other true hard-line believer. But who recruited Lindsay?

Which leads us to the next question: what made Lindsay angry enough to ‘go postal’ for his concept of Islam, and when/how did he reach that point? We need to know, and to understand. The answers might make it easier to spot the next would-be suicide bombers before they light themselves up (and us with them).