A Lyrical Terrorist
by george s, 6 December 2007
That is what The Guardian headline calls poor little Samina Malik. Has she been sentenced to transportation? Torture? Even jail? No. But she has certainly been sentenced. Unjust. Unjust.
Burton [her defence] said: “She became hooked on Abu Hamza-type addresses and that affected her mindset.” The jury was told that she joined an extremist organisation called Jihad Way, set up explicitly to spread terrorist propaganda and support for al Qaida.Jonathan Sharp, prosecuting, told the court she visited a website linked to the jailed cleric Abu Hamza and stored material about weapons. The court also heard Malik belonged to a social networking website called hi5, describing her interests as “helping the mujaheddin in any way which I can”.Under favourite TV shows, she listed: “Watching videos by my Muslim brothers in Iraq, yep the beheading ones, watching video messages by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri and other videos which show massacres of the kaffirs.”
Extracts from the poems are helpfully given, only, alas, in odd lines that cannot help the reader appreciate the full lyrical grace of the whole.:
One poem, called The Living Martyrs, said: “For the living martyrs are awakening/ And kuffars [non-believers] world soon to be shaking.”Another line ran: “Let us make jihad/ Move to the front line/ To chop chop head of kuffar swine.”A second poem was called How to Behead. “It’s not as messy or as hard as some may think/ It’s all about the flow of the wrist,” it read.Another section said: “No doubt that the punk will twitch and scream/ But ignore the donkey’s ass/ And continue to slice back and forth/ You’ll feel the knife hit the wind and food pipe/ But don’t stop/ Continue with all your might.”
Ah, the sufferings of poets for their art! Those dreadful kaffirs! Perhaps she will write more valuable poems while in the discomfort of her own home. Why not just call her a poet-in-residence?The minor fact that she is a repulsive human being is not, of course, a crime. The delicate rococo charm of her poetry surpasses all such considerations.We kaffirs are once again guilty of Islamophobia. As Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain said:
Many young people download objectionable material from the Internet, but it seems if you are a Muslim then this could lead to criminal charges, even if you have absolutely no intention to do harm to anyone else.
On the other hand, death is too good for Salman Rushdie. Natch.
Thursday 6 December 2007 at 15:20
The headline is factually inaccurate as well. She was not convicted for writing poetry, as the piece makes clear further down. Idiots. This is the sort of reporting that alienates reasonable people.
Thursday 6 December 2007 at 15:39
The minor fact that she is a repulsive human being is not, of course, a crime.
That poetry is pretty criminal, though.
She’s welcome to my copy of “The Ode Less Travelled” when I finish with it.
Thursday 6 December 2007 at 15:39
Just as well she didn’t download any child pornography, by accident or design, isn’t it?
Thursday 6 December 2007 at 21:42
How did she get away with just a suspended sentence? Surely a community service order would have been a more appropriate penalty for Malik’s infantile, anti-social behaviour. Wiping kuffar arses in an old people’s home, perhaps.
Silly girl.
Thursday 6 December 2007 at 21:52
Wiping kuffar arses in an old people’s home, perhaps.
Would you really trust your grandmother to that murderous bitch?
Thursday 6 December 2007 at 22:50
She’s an idiot who says offensive stuff. Not a good career choice if you work at Heathrow, but grounds for a criminal record? Naah.
Thursday 6 December 2007 at 22:56
Jura, she also got 100 hours cs.
Friday 7 December 2007 at 1:20
‘She’s an idiot who says offensive stuff. Not a good career choice if you work at Heathrow, but grounds for a criminal record? Naah’
Did you bother reading Scoop’s post? She was convicted for amassing “a library” of extremist material, including the al-Qaeda Manual, the Terrorist’s Handbook, the Mujahidin Poisons Handbook, a manual for a Dragunov sniper rifle, a firearms and RPG handbook and a Islamist document entitled “How to Win Hand-to-Hand Fighting”. What does a shop assistant at Heathrow need with those?
The ‘poetry’ is a different matter - I think psychiatric help would have been a sensible prescription.
Friday 7 December 2007 at 5:54
Thanks, beak, I didn’t know. That’s cursory BBC Radio 4 news reporting for you.
As for trusting my grandmother with “that murderous bitch”, I’m not convinced she has murder in her. She’s a fantasist; a silly little girl with a massive gob and tiny brain. My late gran would have eaten her for breakfast and shat her out before lunch.
Friday 7 December 2007 at 7:59
Mustafa;
Sure, I read it - but somehow I don’t believe that the fact she owned an RPG assembly manual, actually means she either owned an RPG (assembled or not), or planned to use it at Heathrow. I’d also imagine the average copper could probably take her in a fight, even with her knowledge of the Mujahedin Ninja Master Hand to Hand Fighting Book.
It’s just another aspect of the same unpleasant fantasy world in which she lived. Like I said before, she’s an idiot.
Friday 7 December 2007 at 19:34
Ahem, *Coughs*
*Looks over shoulder*.
The Police said again that she was nicked for the training manuals and the links with jihadi acquaintances..
but just in case..
can I just point out, that when I advocated the kidnapping of Jeremy Kyle some time back, and all that stuff about battering Robbie Williams about the head with a breezeblock and that, y’know, it weren’t … you’know… *sorry*.
I think the unease comes from the time when the term ‘terrorist’ was bandied about as merrily as ‘gangsta’ by a certain breed of middle class hip hop loving male keen to view themselves as scourge of the establishment.
CF: Chris Morris being dubbed a Meeja terrorist, Banksy as Art Terrorist etc etc. In the weeks before 9/11, the Graun even ran a fashion piece on ‘terrorist chic’.
I am an arse.
Sunday 9 December 2007 at 15:25
As so often is the case George Orwell something useful to say about poetry and politics when he wrote a short but devastating piece on Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Foundation Award written for Partisan Review [1949], reproduced in the Penguin ‘Collected Essays’ [Vol. IV, page 551].
Orwell writes that whilst he feels that the committee were justified to give Pound the award if they thought his poetry was the best for the particular year, they might have acknowledged that “the opinions he has tried to disseminate by means of his works are evil ones …”
Evenso, as was once pointed out to Lord Longford, Myra Hindley wasn’t in prison because she was a sinner, but because she broke the law.
Saturday 15 December 2007 at 19:56
Myra Hindley reputedly won a song competition whilst in jail, a great hippyish Joan Baez style dirge pleading for the world to be kind and to free the prisoners and love to conquer all.