Gospodin_I

Mohammed Sidique Khan in his years as school councillor in Leeds.

In yesterday’s (Friday) edition of “The Independent” I read about the release of a documentary on BBC Radio 4 about one of the suicide bombers from the 7 July London bombings.

His name was Mohammad Sidique Khan but all his friends called him Sid. In his teenage years Sid went on a trip to the US andj when he returned he was determined to get an US citizenship. He liked it so much that he was wearing cowboy boots and leather jacket. He also hanged with English white boys. One of his school friends described him as an “English lad”. In short - Sid was very English. Moreover, Sid never went to a Mosque, never took Coran classes in school and even married a Hindu woman which provoked all kinds of bad feelings from his Pakistani family.

You might want to ask the question: “Then how this kind of very English, very integrated young man turns into a fanatical suicide bomber?”

The answer, some claim, is very simple: In his early adulthood Sid befriended a group of radical muslims from Leeds and often watched videos depicting Muslim suffering around the world. This, they say, is what made him explode the Edgeware bomb killing himself and another 6 people.

But I found my answer in the Editorial section of the newspaper where Mr. Paul Valley expresses his opinion about the documentary and Sid. Mr. Valley claims that what led young people like Sid to do what they did is that they didn’t know their religion and that is exactly why they embraced the worst aspects of it. I have to add to this that my opnion is that what led them to the acts they committed was the fact that they did not feel part of neither of the two cultures/civilizations. They wanted to be Westerners but they could not because the West would not accept them. And they were already too far from their original cultures. Having this in mind, it is not hard to explain the sudden turn to radical findamentalism…

This entry was posted on понеделник, ноември 21st, 2005 at 1:16 and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.