NWOBJ - what did I tell you ?

earlier this month ....

"... the only jihadis who seem to fit the "weirdo loner" profile of yer average native pyrotechnician seem to be converts ..."

And behold ... poor little rich boy ...

Returning to Colston's, Andrew Ibrahim's weight and lack of sporting ability helped other pupils label him a "loser" and his increasingly unruly behaviour led the school to ask him to leave in December 2002, shortly before his 14th birthday...

Despite his increasing addiction, his parents stood by him, splitting the rent with him on a flat in Kingswood, a suburb in North East Bristol, with his mother doing a weekly food shop for him. At the flat, Ibrahim had videos of women's feet he had taken on his mobile phone at college without their knowledge, which he admitted were part of a "sexual interest" and he had searched for pictures of Kiera Knightley's feet on the internet.

He had become hooked on heroin and crack cocaine, using the drugs several times a day and stealing to fund his habit. He was reprimanded by police for possessing heroin in May 2006 at the age of 17 and warned for shoplifting on two occasions in September and October 2006.

Alongside his various addictions, Ibrahim had five tattoos done during 2005 and 2006, including "Hardcore" across his stomach and "HTID" on his right bicep to represent "Hardcore Till I Die" after a style of rave music. He also had a variety of hairstyles and colours along with a series of facial and intimate piercings.

Well, he did - and then he changed.


Before - a typical young Briton, expressing his individuality by copying loads of other people.



After - altogether a more serious figure. Grow the beard a little longer and buy a motorbike ! I digress.

Sunny once again looks at the press coverage of this kid-with-everything and sees the cancer of racism rearing its ugly head yet again - or is it the cancer of Islamophobia ? I forget.

"Let’s see – nutjob wants to take out other Britons. Is working alone. Gets caught. But one story makes the front page of the Evening Standard. Another story involving a white guy who was in a more advanced stage of bomb-making barely rates a mention in the back pages. "

He's referring of course to this somewhat sorry figure.

I can’t believe that Sunny is as daft as he pretends to be. I guess it's just that his target audience need their fill of such stories to balance his often cogent criticisms of the cultures of the subcontinent. He must know perfectly well that the ‘public schoolboy’ angle will hit the Mail, Telegraph and Evening Standard erogenous zones – they just love a ‘middle-class gone wrong’ story and this guy has the dream background. Whereas the soi-disant Waffen SS guy was an inarticulate working class drunk.

A better parallel would be to compare Neil Lewington, inarticulate white Waffen SS UK Member, with an inarticulate white working class jihadi convert. Google ‘Nicholas Roddis’ – of the fearsome Al Qaeda Organisation In Rotherham. He didn’t make much of a media splash- got reported, but never hit the front pages or radio headlines.

And as for Sunny's ‘more advanced stage’ of explosive manufacture – our Waffen SS chap basically had some firelighters – call them incendiary devices if you wish. I also have some advanced stage incendiaries - I put them in the grate, light them - and they burn at once ! Then I put coal on top.

Our public schoolboy had HTMD in his fridge – that’s stuff that makes quite a bang – and a suicide vest for it to go in.

“When they entered his flat in April last year, police found between 125-245 grammes of the unstable explosive Hexamethylene Triperoxide Diamine, also known as HMTD, in a Family Circle biscuit tin in Ibrahim’s fridge. He had also made an electrical circuit capable of detonating the explosive at short range and a half-made suicide vest … Ibrahim made the HMTD, the same substance used in the July 7 attacks, and suicide vest entirely through instructions from the internet.”

(btw, I don’t know if the 7/7 attacks actually used HMTD – you get different stories from different sources. After the attacks the story was that it was TATP as used in Gaza rockets, then it changed to being ‘organic peroxide-based’ i.e. flour and concentrated H2O2. For obvious reasons I’d reckon there was a lot of disinformation about. I note that the wikipedia entry for HMTD has been pruned to remove information about the easily-obtainable ingredients and a link to a 'how to make it' site, among other things.)


UPDATE - two other thoughts ... both Ibrahim and Lewington were nobodies with big hopes (or big fantasies if you like). Now they're somebodies, even if they're not somebodies we'd like to be ourselves.

And this strikes me as far more significant than Mr Little-boy-lost Ibrahim. The reporter is at Regents Park Mosque, listening to preachers instructing the faithful to kill apostates, adulterers, homosexuals, avoid the company of non-Muslims - you know, that stuff that would come under 'hate crime' were a Christian saying it. But it's not that, it's this :

I was amazed at how many young British women seemed to find this version of the faith attractive. One young girl told me that when she first attended the circle, she was dressed in jeans and that she had many non-Muslim friends. She now loves only those that are around her - "other sisters in the circle" - and only engages with non-Muslims to try to convert them. Many of the sisters had the idea of living as a separate community - a concept alien to me and many other Muslims I know.

More canaries in the coal mine. Like Peter Hitchens, I think it's likely that this country will see a great religious revival in this century - but that it may not be a Christian one.