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Jihadi John had just been tempting fate with that name. Don’t name yourself after the one who got assassinated. If you’d been Jihadi Paul you could have live into old age and the one downside would be having to dye your hair purple. I mean some people think Jihadi Paul would go first, to be replaced by a lookalike with the wrong size ear lobes, but I am not buying that. Just cos you’re covered up doesn’t mean you can be easily impersonated. Yeah, John’s the cool one, but there’s no point in being cool if you are (probably dead). Even Jihadi Ringo would have been fine. Jihadi George is shitting himself right now.
Maybe if the Jihadi Beatles had concentrated on their music things would have turned out differently
Oh what Beatles/Islamic State japes I had for most of the day, taking horrific events out of reality and divorcing them from the actual facts in the hope of raising laughter from hopelessness. Like all fascists Islamic State don’t like jokes at their expense.
And tonight they returned to Paris, who (as the location of some of the attacks suggest) they principally seem to hate because of some satirical cartoons. Somehow we were all surprised by this, even though I think we’ve known this was inevitable and the fact that it’s already happened on beaches, in museums and on trains. And unlike most of the other terrorist attacks (or yes, drone strikes) it happened somewhere close to home in circumstances that could have included any of us. And as much as our sympathy is directed at the unlucky people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, the real terror of it all is that we realise we might be next.
People always try to make this stuff about themselves, as social media clearly demonstrates. “I was in Paris three years ago” might be someone’s first remark, as if this “near-miss” is somehow more poignant. “It could have been me” is a human response and the success of this, from the terrorist’s point of view, is that with an attack like this, it could be any of us. And of course that fear of a random brutal death is exactly the point of these attacks.
I am sure you feel as sick as I do about the possibility of this being the new way of doing things, but it can’t change the way we live our lives, any more than any terrorist campaign ever did. Given how easy it is to attack soft targets in this way, it doesn’t happen very often. Maybe it will happen more and it’s hard to argue against the idea that aggressive campaigns by our governments hasn’t helped produce more martyrs willing to fight back. But statistics on are on our side. There’s millions of us and there’s only a handful of these dicks. We shouldn’t let the fear overwhelm us.
A generation has lived seventy years without the kind of major conflict that threatens to impinge upon their daily lives. They’ve been very lucky.
