Chapter 5: The News Meeting

10.27AM At the morning news meeting Max the editor of Global Business turns to all the journalists in his cramped office and says he is going to write an editorial about the danger of hatred towards bankers and how the financial sector should respond. “Does anyone have any thoughts on this subject?” Without cognitively registering that my vocal chords had moved, I heard myself say: “Perhaps the next time they could at least learn to aim better and finish the job.”
Perhaps out of sympathy, or because of the awkward silence that greeted my comments, Max gave out a surprised chuckle. He was a short man with extremely thick glasses, giving him the air of someone who is caught half way between furrowed contemplation and amusement at the absurdity of existence. He was generally cheerful and beaverish, with a classic editor’s ability to shout and jump up and down at appropriate moments. I could never quite read him, believing that, as a newsman to the marrow, he lived for the business and the Story, and everything and everyone else was secondary to this passion in his life. You either joined him in his insatiable enthusiasm, or got out of the way. I grinned nervously then reverted to a serious expression, noticing that no one else in the room appreciated my sudden outburst. “What I mean is this man is clearly a crook. And it was very convenient that he was shot the day before he was due to appear before a Senate committee and tell them what he knew about his bank’s off balance sheet operations.”
“Thanks Nick, there’s definitely something strange about it all – I had no idea you felt so strongly about the subject. Who do you think would want to shoot him?”
“The bank? It’s clients? I’ve no idea.”
Senior reporter Nina then chipped in: “What the bankers need is a marketing campaign, like a guy taking his kids to school, growing his own vegetables, giving blood, riding a bike, and then turning up at his investment bank, to show how bankers are human too.” She did not crack a smile, keeping her usual poker face. I felt a smirk break out uncontrollably but everyone else remained poker faced. Then Nina, easily the best journalist on the team, gave me a wink. “Of course no-one would believe it.” Everyone laughed, mostly in relief I suspected. Nina was a single-minded, ambitious workhorse, also shortsighted, with the thickest glasses available making her appear to be permanently squinting and narrowly focused. She was Jewish, but she had somehow missed out on the attractive, smouldering Semitic genes and been given those of the heavy-set field hand. She had upstaged me, as always. My outburst seemed to bring a sudden close to the meeting as everyone shuffled out nervously. I did not look anyone else in the eye. I left the news meeting feeling a vague queasiness, as if somehow I am an imposter, a fraud, and that other journalists and editors are really there doing the job that destiny and their own talents has found for them. I am riding a surf board without a license and it is only a matter of time before I fall off and get very wet. On the way back to the desks, Nina said: “Nick. Nice intervention there. Funny.
“Funny weird or funny ha ha?”
“A bit of both,” she smiled disconcertingly. “Oh yes, how’s the exotic futures piece coming on?”
“Nearly finished. You’ll have it by end of the day.”

11.03 AM. MSN msg from Ibn Khattab: Hey Nick, I wouldn’t go out in the City today. It’s the day of the Overwhelming Event, as written in the Holy Book.

11.06. Nick to IK:
What Event? What do you mean? What does the book say – do you mean the Quran?

11.07 IK to me: Go and read the word of Allah.

My conversations with Ibn Khattab began some years back in the wake of the London Tube bombings. He popped up on a forum on the Whatreallyhappenedon911.com, alleging that 7/7 was some kind of false flag operation, an inside job. He stood out for appearing reasonably intelligent and sane among the rants and semi-coherent ramblings one found on the site, with their bad spelling and hatred of Jews. I did not buy his conspiracy theory, but I wanted to know more about this man with an archaic Arabic nom de plume.
A friend of mine had a close run with one of the 7/7 bombs and her friend died. She had to walk through a tunnel on the Piccadilly Line and she was pretty shook up by the experience. My own reaction to this was mixed. I was strangely unmoved. The widespread emotional reaction to these bombings, the outburst of British stoicism and Blitz spirit, lacked context and proportion. Every day in Iraq more than 50 people were dying at the time in similarly horrible bombings, massacres and military operations. I had small nephews, new to the world. Children who shone out as precious and vulnerable. The possibility of them coming to harm was the clearest marking between a good and evil world. Driving down the motorway one day, the radio news reported a car bomb killing a bus full of school pupils. I cried out and swerved, railing not only at the unspeakable perpetrators, but at a world in which such a thing could happen at all. Did these cold-blooded killers not too have children or nephews and nieces? War is hell, we know, and this is what hell means
I waded the backwaters of the internet in search of clues to the mindset of young British Muslim men, the ones who would blow themselves up for their jihadi cause. What motivated them? The war, the war stupid. But history too. A narrative emerged of western Governments engaging in a 200-year campaign of subversion and adventures in the Muslim world, ending with the fall of the Caliphate in 1924 and the creation of Israel in 1948. Nothing had gone right for the Muslims since.
When I probed him online, Ibn Khattab helped me fill in the picture: “The British have got a lot to answer for.”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me why. “
“Yes. You usurped the Mughals in India, waged several wars in Afghanistan, although they gave you a good beating, but you didn’t learn from that. You occupied Egypt, Sudan and Aden, and your hero Churchill stuck a bunch of puppet tribal rulers on ech of the oil wells in the Gulf.”
Nick: “Hang on, what’s with the ‘you’? Churchill is not my hero! And you know what, I didn’t do any of this.”

IK ignored by plea. “You tricked the Arabs into fighting the Turks, promising them freedom and using them to capture Jerusalem for the Christians in 1917. That was clever – taking back the Holy Lands after the Muslims finished off the infidel occupiers 700 years ago. But you don’t give up. The new Crusaders came back using Saddam as an excuse.”
I decide to change tack, move him off his diatribe. “I respect your position, there’s a lot to what you say. But you can’t really believe that you can go back to the Seventh Century, when a man could marry a nine-year old and you could lock your wife up and beat her, not too much of course, because the Prophet said it was okay by God.”
There was silence, then. “You’re talking blasphemy. Be careful. There’s a lot of anti-Muslim propaganda on the internet.”
“But you can’t deny that according to the Quran a woman’s testimony is worth half a man’s, and she inherits half of what he inherits. Muhammed kept how many wives exactly?
“Those marriages were nearly all political, to form alliances. “
“And what about his Copt slave girl?”
“I don't know about that. Mohammed, PBUH, and his followers freed 40,000 slaves. He personally freed over sixty. Islam says that all people are equal under God, that slave and free man and woman are siblings. When Islam spread, it came into contact with Roman and Christian society where slavery was completely acepted. It’s not like they could just abolish it. Slavery was part of the order of things but Islam tried to improve the position of all people, including the slaves. Listen to me – honestly I’m no expert on this stuff. Read the Hadith.”
“No time.”
“Okay. Mohammed, PBUH, made a slave - Zayd ibn Harithah - his adopted son. He told his followers to free their slaves whenever they could. Bilal, the first muezzin – you know, the guy who makes the call to prayer – was an African slave. This proves that Islamic slavery is nothing like western slavery. The Prophet said that Arabs and non-Arabs, blacks and whites, men and women, were all equal under God, no different than the teeth on a comb. Under Islam, slaves are not just cattle, they have rights, a conscience, they can buy their freedom, become esteemed administrators, even rulers.”
“What about all the concubines kept by Mohammed and his followers? Why was Mohammed allowed to marry more than four wives, including a nine year old girl?”
“His marriage to Aisha was to strengthen his alliance with Abu Bakr, who became the first Caliph after the death of the Prophet. PBUH. He also married and freed his Jewish concubine Safiyya and made her Mother of the Believers.“
“I see. But doesn’t all this just show that Islam is the work of a man, and one who enjoyed a prodigious variety of sexual pleasures. I mean, what kind of God or Prophet condones and deals in sexual slavery?”
After that we had no communication for several weeks. I had gone too far. Then out of the blue he messaged me and the dialogue resumed. He seemed to be angrier than before.

Ibn Khattab: “It used to be all about the niggers. Now it’s the turn of the Arabs and the Pakis. You lot could not tell the difference between any of us before – till our bredren flew some planes into the towers. Well, now you better get your head around it. We are not just Pakis – we are Arabs, Somalis, Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Chechens, Azeris, Kashmiris, Iranians, Kurds – I could go on. We are Muslims, but we are about as alike as Brits and Russians or Japs.”
“That’s fine, but your point is undermined somewhat by using the N word, don’t you think? Aren’t Somalis niggers?”
“I’ve been called Paki enough time by the Niggers, to earn the right to call them what I fucking well like. Somalis are brothers, Jamaicans are chiefs and beggars – even when they convert they can’t manage to set fire to their own shoes! That was a joke by the way.”

I tried to find out more about Ibn Khattab, but he gave little away. He and his ‘soldiers of Islam’ were evidently living in the UK, probably in East London but possibly Leicester or Luton. There were inklings of time in prison, where he had nursed his resentment toward the niggers, and learned to love their music. Quotes from Tupac Shakur littered his commentary:

“My mama always used to tell me: 'If you can't find somethin' to live for, you best find somethin' to die for.”

I asked him if he thought terrorism on UK soil was justified:

“Of course it is. This is war. The Crusaders have killed countless civilians and never shed a tear for them. Civilians who do not resist this war are legitimate targets.”

“So are you a real jihadist then?”

“What do you mean? Do you mean, would I die for Allah, or to defend Muslims? Of course, if you are a Muslim, you have to be prepared defend your fellow Muslims when they come under attack?”

“That’s more of a theoretical answer.”

“Theoretical bollocks. It’s 100% real. I’m ready to die in defence of Islam. And by the way, this isn’t about creating a Caliphate in Birmingham, like the some of the media are saying. That’s just some bullshit that the Zionist ideologues came up with to scare people. Muslims don’t force conversion. You’ve got to want to become Muslims.”
“That’s not what I read.”
“Well, bro, maybe you read wrong. I’ll give you some references.”
“Much obliged, I love a good read. Have you read What’s Wrong with Islam?”
“What is it?”
“It’s written by a Canadian lesbian Muslim.”
“Ha, you really are having a laugh now bro. You can’t be a carpet muncher and a Muslim. That’s like a vegetarian who eats Big Macs. It just doesn’t work.”
“You may be right but it’s a good book.”

Part of me wanted to actually meet Ibn Khattab and another part of me wanted to stay well away from him and his brothers. I toyed with investigating the whole British Muslim scene and the young discontents who had decided to declare war on their Mother Country, but somehow I had never quite got round to it. Last time I wandered around the back streets of Bethnal Green, some Asian kids in a car drove past shouting “Fucking honky”, and for the first time I experienced what it’s like to be on the end of racial abuse, like all those Asian kids at school who used to get called ‘Paki’ and be beaten up and told they “stunk of curry”.
I was interested in IK’s views on terrorism, in particular 9/11 and 7/7. I asked if he thought Osama bin Laden was behind the World Trade Centre attacks.

“Of course not. If you can step away from all the lies from the Jewish controlled media, you just need to read what he said.”

“It’s not all Jewish controlled.”

“Alright, may be not all of it, but the Kaffirs work for the Zionists. If you want to know what the Emir said, here’s his words:

Link to AP news story, 17 September 2001:

Bin Laden says he wasn't behind attacks

In a statement issued to the Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, bin Laden said, "The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it.

"I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons," bin Laden's statement said.

"I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders' rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations," bin Laden said.

End of link.
“Is that clear enough for you?”

“Criminals often deny their crimes. And anyway, he admitted it on Al Jazeera a few weeks later. He admitted it several times.”

“Those confession videos were faked by the Americans. I mean, look at the one that came out just days before the election in 2004 – making sure Bush won. Look at the nose of the real Bin Laden – and the one in the videos released by the Yanks. Different nose, wider face”

“I don’t know about that. I agree it’s strange – to release a video to help your enemy win an election. But I still think he was behind 9/11. If he wasn’t, he’d have released a video saying the others were fake. He never did. Maybe they were both working for the same goals. Neither wanted peace.”

“Islam is peace. All the Americans had to do was get out of Arabia and stop occupying the Muslim lands. He offered them peace many times but they rejected it.”
“Bin Laden and Bush were both zealots. Bush was a born again Christian. They worshipped the same God. Jesus is a prophet of Islam. And the Jewish prophets were shared too.”
“Yes, that’s right, but the Jewish bible is a how-to guide for stealing land and genocide, written by a homicidal estate agent. I read it once, when I had time to, at Her Majesty’s leisure. Numbers and Deuteronomy tell you everything you need to know about Jewish religion – ‘and thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee.’ Pretty much exactly what the jews have done!”
“A manifesto for bankers and colonialism – interesting. Of course, you can find a justification for all kinds of evil in both the Bible and the Quran. I believe the Quran has quite a lot to say about smiting enemies and taking their land and women.”
“The Quran does not hold up any one nation above all the others, with unlimited rights to rule over them.”
“No, it just gives that power to the followers of Muhammed.”
“The Muslims lived in peace with Christian and Jew for centuries before Zionism. Islam lays down rules for peace among the peoples.”
“Unless they happen to be Buddhists or Hindus, in which case they can be killed with impunity.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“What about the Buddhas of Bamyan, blown up by the Taliban?”
“I don’t know about that. I do know Muslims ruled India peacefully for hundred of years. We treated the Hindus a hell of a lot better than they treated us since then.”
We had many interesting discussions about theology, history and the various bloodthirsty and disturbing proclamations of the prophets. But today he said something that made me pause.
“Don’t go into the city. It ain’t safe.”