[I sense several more posts coming on today, so I'll get the ugliest out of the way first.]
by Jerome du Bois
In my earlier piece Theo van Gogh Calls on Mohammed Bouyeri, published on January 31st, I had the ghost of Mr. van Gogh wondering aloud before his murderer:
"Some down here in this vale of tears want to know: what is it with you Muslims and the ritual slaughter with knives?" He lifted the Blackberry. "So many recent cases. There's no answers, and don't expect to say much tonight, little man, but we need to push the questions: Why do you love the knife so much? Why must you carve them up, just as the psychosexual crazies do? You see --hell, you, you worthless bastard, you ought to know-- using the knife is a crime of passion; it's up close and personal, love turned to hate. But I didn't even know you, and I wouldn't give you a second glance in life, and yet look at what you did!"
And he shows him.
On Sunday, Charles Johnson posted A Clockwork Green, an excerpt of an article by David Cohen in This Is London online: The Rise of the Muslim Boys. Here's the whole excerpt he quoted:
Winston emerges menacingly from the kitchen, a meat cleaver in one hand and a kitchen knife with an eight-inch blade in the other. “I love knives,” he says, his eyes gleaming as he begins to slash the air inches from my face.
“Guns make a f***ing noise, but knives go in,” he pauses, “ silentlike, easy.” He begins stabbing the wall and hacking the plaster, and then, just as suddenly, stops, seemingly sated, like an addict who has had his fix.
He holds up his blades to inspect them. “F***ing quality,” he says, and deposits them unceremoniously his trousers. Winston, 21, black and from south London, licks his teeth as he paces around the stripped-bare flat on a Peckham estate that serves as one of his gang’s many secret hideouts. He speaks in his gang’s uniquely coded lingo.
“Knives is f***-all. Later, my bruvs will be back from their robberies with our skengelengs [guns] and cream [money]. Later there be MACinside-10s [sub-machine guns] all over the floor, laid wall to wall. And moolah! We count it - 10 grand, 20 grand. Then, after midnight,” he adds, matter-of-factly, “me and my bruvs go to mosque to pray.”
Winston’s casual depiction of a lifestyle of crime tightly bound up with religious observance would normally be regarded as paradoxical, but in his case it is what defines him. For Winston is a member of the Muslim Boys, a gang, the black community says, unlike any that has operated before in south London.
The whole article is chilling. Here's how it ends:
Winston is now agitated again and he begins playing with his knives, laying them in patterns at his feet. "You lucky the other bruvs not here yet," he says. "They pick you up and throw you straight off the f***ing balcony."
One final question, I say. Where does your money go? "To the f***ing laundry, innit," he says, licking his teeth. Is there any connection between your gang and al Qaeda? He glares at me. "That's a deep piece of info. I support Bin Laden. I wouldn't ask that question, bruv - it's rude, it's dangerous, it's ..."
Time to leave. There are moments when words do not come easily to Winston, when he prefers to let his hands do the talking, and right now, they are being frighteningly expressive.
It's ugly inside Winston's head (and his stinky world: "My life is the grime."). But I'm still not any closer to answering Theo van Gogh's questions.
Posted by Jerome at February 8, 2005 10:50 AM | TrackBack