On
Lyrical Terrorists
By Michael Deibert
10 November, 2007
Michaeldeibert
Blog
Is
it possible that Gordon Brown's United Kingdom has joined George W.
Bush's United States in the questionable practice of locking up its
own citizens for things that the government believes they might do sometime
in the future as opposed to things they have actually done? It certainly
seems like it.
Today in London, a 23 year-old
Heathrow airport employee named Samina Malik, born and raised in England,
was declared guilty of possessing material likely to be useful in terrorism.
Malik was charged and tried
under the United Kingdom's rather outlandish Terrorism Act 2000, Section
58 of which permits the charging of an offense and imprisonment of up
to 10 years against anyone collecting or in possession of "information
of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an
act of terrorism," a definition that would seem improbably broad.
It is hard for a writer such as myself to forget, for example, that
the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara was known
to have studied Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and its meticulous
descriptions of the Spanish Civil War while camped out with Fidel Castro's
rebel army in Cuba's Sierra Maestra, or that William Butler Yeats wondered
aloud, after learning that some of the Irish rebels of 1916 quoted his
play Cathleen ni Houlihan as they faced the executioner: "Did that
play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?"
From everything I have read
about the case, Malik indeed sounds like a somewhat, well, strange young
lady. According to the Guardian, hardly a font of pro-government apologia,
Malik, who authored poems with titles such as "How To Behead"
and "The Living Martyrs," apparently enjoyed collecting extremist
Islamist propaganda in her spare time, including such tomes as The Al-Qaeda
Manual and The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook. Malik was also apparently
an aficionado of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the frothing Egyptian cleric convicted
of terrorism-related offenses in Britain last year, and used the social
networking site called Hi-5 to describe her favorite television shows
being "watching videos by my Muslim brothers in Iraq, yep the beheading
ones."
Not exactly the kind of person
you would want to be sitting across the table from on a blind date.
But how did the British constabulary
apprise themselves of this? Try as I might, I could find no record of
how the bobbies learned of Ms. Malik's decidedly odd proclivities beyond
a line in the Daily Telegraph that "police were alerted after finding
an email from her on another person's computer.
It would seem that, their
own internment policies in Northern Ireland aside, the Brits in this
instance would be borrowing a page from the rather rancid, extra-judicial
"enemy combatant" status that the Bush administration has
seen fit to employ. Remember the case of José Padilla, who was
arrested in May 2002 and held as a material witness in relation to the
September 11th attacks, then held under the Authorization for Use of
Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF) as an "enemy combatant"
and then finally, in 2005, on charges he "conspired to murder,
kidnap and maim people overseas." There may well have been rather
more convincing reasoning as Padilla was alleged to have in fact met
with top Al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, but the legal sleight of hand
that kept him from his day in court cannot help but disturb all of us
who value America's constitution more than the current occupant of that
White House at any given time.
One thing struck me about
the British case, though.
Malik was also apparently
a hip-hop fan, whose first creative forays were into love poetry while
attending Villiers High School in Southall, and then branching out into
harder, more aggressive creations modeled on Tupac Shakur and 50 Cent,
using the sobriquet Lyrical Babe. That in turn, when her interests...shifted,
became Lyrical Terrorist, a moniker the British press made much of.
As someone who was in Manhattan
on September 11th, I seek to make no light of the ghastly potential
impact of terrorism on a mass scale. But I do wonder if Judge Peter
Beaumont, and Prosecutor Jonathan Sharp had bothered to familiarize
themselves with the oeuvre of the Philadelphia hip-hop band The Roots,
whose song "Clones," from their 1996 album Illadelph Halflife
(which played as one of my soundtracks for a good part of that year),
featured the following couplet from MC Dice Raw:
Dice Raw the juvenile lyricist,
corner store terrorist.
Block trooper, connoisseur of fine cannabis.
Focus never weak, blow up the spot like plastique.
Leave a nigga shook, to the point, he won't speak.
While I'm not suggesting
that Ms. Malik's rhyme style had reached quite the level of Dice Raw's,
it still gives one pause that one person's poetry is another person
terrorist threat, much as the rapper Ice T once pointed out his confusion
as to why people harangued him but didn't get upset when Johnny Cash
would sing the line "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die."
I may be wrong, but something about this case makes me wonder if 30
years ago, Ms. Malik wouldn't have been sporting a Mohawk and a safety-pin
through her nose and 15 years ago taking ecstasy and dancing to the
Happy Mondays. But maybe not.
It just seems to me to be
a slippery slope once you start arresting people for things that you
think they might do in the future. And our current crop of political
leaders - who have already managed to cause death and destruction on
a mass scale - would seem to be the last people in a position to judge
who will and who will not be a danger to society.
Put under house arrest for
the time being, Malik must return for sentencing on 6 December.
We indeed live in strange
times.
Michael Deibert
is a journalist and author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle
for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). He lives in Paris.
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