Only the Lonely

The only way to top Roger Simon's title, Lonely
are the Brave, was by accident. His post was linked to a poll showing him
among the few novelists planning to vote for George W. Bush. Rambling through
his site I accidentally stumbled on a cancelled Mark
Steyn column which argued that all future hostages like Kenneth Bigley
should be written off to reduce the incentive to take more hostages.

Today, for the first time in all my years with the Telegraph Group, I had a
column pulled. The editor expressed concerns about certain passages and we
were unable to reach agreement, so on this Tuesday something else will be in
my space.

I�d written about Kenneth Bigley, seized with two American colleagues but
unlike them not beheaded immediately. Instead, sensing that they could exploit
potential differences within "the coalition of the willing", for three weeks
the Islamists played a cat-and-mouse game with Mr Bigley�s life, in which
Fleet Street, the British public, governments in London and Dublin and Islamic
lobby groups in the United Kingdom were far too willing to participate. As I
always say, in this war the point is not whether you�re sad about the dead
people, but what you�re prepared to do about it. What "Britain" � from Ken
Bigley�s brother to the Foreign Secretary � did was make it more likely
that other infidels will meet his fate.

The 62-year old British engineer's body was dumped
in Baghdad on October 8th, after he was beheaded on video. Steyn's almost
heartless, mechanical determination to carry on contrasted starkly with the
expectations of nearly everyone else. Bigley himself never expected to be be
kidnapped. He had led the kind of knockabout
life that makes one believe it possible to get along with all sorts.

He spent most of his life on the move. He married Margaret Hose, at 21, and
they bought �10 tickets to Australia in 1963. He worked in Victoria before
moving to New Zealand and then back to Liverpool where he ran two
supermarkets. ...  He soldiered on and spent the next few years running a
bar on the Costa del Sol and working in the Middle East. It was in Dubai that
he met second wife Sombat, 35.

Bigley avoided guarded compounds and lived in an ordinary residential
neighborhood. When warned by his friends that he might be kidnapped, Bigley
responded, not without reason, that he was too old for kidnappers to bother
with. To the end Bigley seemed to ask, 'Why me?' In the video of his execution,
the British hostage asks: 

"Here I am again, Mr Blair... very, very close to the end of my life.
"You don't appear to have done anything to help me," the 62-year-old
engineer continued. "I'm not a difficult person. I am a simple man who
just wants to live a simple life with his family." At the end of Mr
Bigley's plea, he is beheaded by his masked captors.

To the end many Europeans were convinced that reason would prevail; that
Bigley would be released. It seemed impossible for such an absurd execution to
go forward. A column in the Observer
noted that the British government had entered into negotiations with the
kidnappers; that the Irish government had offered to make Bigley an Irishman to
confer the protection of a neutral passport; Muhammer Khadaffy, Yasser Arafat,
prominent British Muslims and Cat Stevens -- yes Cat Stevens -- had appealed for
his life. With supplicants like this, how could Bigley not be released? The
Observer's answer was because America refused to join in the chorus.

Foreign workers are not escaping Iraq. The numbers of them applying for
jobs is actually increasing. Dick Cheney's Halliburton says it has 30,000
foreigners working there and another 100,000 applicants waiting to go.
Unemployment at home and big money in Iraq attract not only Americans, but
Nepalese, Turks, Armenians and Pakistanis. Some have died in attacks on
foreign installations, others - including Muslims from Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey
and Pakistan - have been murdered in captivity. As a tactic, kidnappings are
less effective than suicide bombings or roadside attacks. But that so many
Muslims have been murdered must mean that even an Irish passport would have
been no shield for anyone working under a US contract in Iraq. It is about
occupation, not nationality.

"America could have saved Bigley", was the article's conclusion.
It's stubbornness alone had nullified the efforts of men of goodwill; and that
stubbornness deserved no voice, even when articulated by so polished a writer as
Mark Steyn. But even the Guardian
began to have its doubts about the efficacy of sweet reason. Andrew Anthony
focused upon the efforts of Muslim convert Cat Stevens, AKA Yussuf Islam, to win
Bigley's release.

Among the many voices of British Muslims who pleaded on behalf of Bigley
was Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens. This is what he
wrote in an open letter to the Tawhid and Jihad group thought to be holding
the civil engineer: "As a member of the Muslim Council I request you, in
the name of Allah, the Rahman (the all-merciful), to release British citizen
Ken Bigley for the good name of our religion and according to the sayings of
Allah in the glorious Qur'an." He also went on to ask that the kidnappers
"show the world the justice and mercy which Islam teaches us".

... Perhaps Yusuf Islam does not mean much to Zarqawi. Very possibly he's
never heard any of his records, even the recent religious ones on which he
sings without godless instruments. But Islam, who has been a key figure in
gaining government support for Islamic schools, does have a respected position
among Muslims in Britain, and if Tawhid and Jihad had really wanted to gain a
propaganda coup, it might have responded to Islam with a demonstration of
leniency rather than ritualised murder. In reality, gaining the respect of
fellow Muslims was always going to be a much weaker motivating factor for
Bigley's kidnappers than their own hatred of the West. This, I think, is a sad
truth of which Islam was well apprised before writing his letter.

And that hatred, Anthony found himself forced to confess, was present even in
Cat Stevens himself.

Nevertheless in writing it (the Bigley petition), he positioned himself,
and the British Muslims for whom he spoke, on the side of universal humanity.
Alas, that is a position that in the past he has not always occupied
unambiguously. When Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie,
Islam was reported to have made a speech in favor of the decree. He denied it,
claiming that he had only protested at the publication of the Satanic Verses.

Yet eight years later, he told me that he thought Rushdie, who was still
under round-the-clock protection, should be "extradited" to Iran to
stand trial - where presumably his sentence would have been a good deal
stiffer than a fine. He also expressed views on adultery and the punishment
thereof, that might best be described as mediaeval, if that didn't defame a
whole epoch.

That unreasoning hatred was present in at least some Muslims in Britain was
underscored by the theft of the Bigley condolence book from its display stand in
the Birmingham Central Mosque. According to the BBC:

A book of condolence opened in tribute to the murdered Iraq hostage Kenneth
Bigley has been stolen. Thieves also took a framed photograph of him, candles
and some sympathy cards from Birmingham Central Mosque. ... Muslim leaders
from across Birmingham signed the book as a gesture of support to his family
in Liverpool. But on Sunday morning a caretaker discovered the thefts and that
a picture had been turned upside down.

Naturally, nobody knew who did it.

Dr Mohammed Naseem, chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, said: "They
are sick people. We don't know who's done it and I can't put a motive on it.

Dr. Naseem's observation is the sole ray of light in this whole muddled
affair. He and Steyn have put their finger on the simple error that everyone
from Bigley to those campaigning for his release have made. Not only is it
impossible to put a rational construction on these events, it is a waste of time
to try. Bigley thought he was too old; the schoolchildren in Beslan thought they
were too young; the French journalists thought they were too French to be the
victims of terrorism. And they were wrong. Wrong because they assumed that enemy
intent rather than capability was the limiting factor to their mayhem. It is an
odd statistical fact that fewer Americans have died from terrorist attacks in
Iraq than Iraqi children. The one thousand US combat deaths in the months since
OIF is only
slightly larger than the number of Canadians killed in the 1942 Dieppe Raid
over the course of 9 hours; and not because the terrorists are eager to
"show the world the justice and mercy which Islam teaches us" but because
they cannot kill more.

Radical Islam is self-evidently at war with the West because their efforts
are limited only by their capability. And the West is just as clearly not yet
at war with radical Islam because its actions are still limited by its
intent. Zarqawi sawed off Bigley's head simply because he could; America spares
Fallujah from choice. That inability to think of ourselves as being truly at war
underlay the rejection of Mark Steyn's column. He had only stated the obvious.

... consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the
moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, "I will
show you how an Italian dies!" He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff
video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic
TV stations declined to show it. If the Foreign and Colonial Office wants to
issue advice in this area, that�s the way to go: If you�re kidnapped,
accept you�re unlikely to survive, say "I'll show you how an Englishman dies",
and wreck the video. If they want you to confess you're a spy, make a little
mischief: there are jihadi from Britain, Italy, France, Canada and other
western nations all over Iraq � so say yes, you're an MI6 agent, and so are
those Muslims from Tipton and Luton who recently joined the al-Qaeda cells in
Samarra and Ramadi. As Churchill recommended in a less timorous Britain: You
can always take one with you. If Mr Blair and other government officials were
to make that plain, it would be, to use Mr Bigley's word, "enough". A war
cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it.

And, if you don't want to wind up in that situation, you need to pack heat
and be prepared to resist at the point of abduction. I didn't give much
thought to decapitation when I was mooching round the Sunni Triangle last
year, but my one rule was that I was determined not to get into a car with any
of the locals and I was willing to shoot anyone who tried to force me. If you're
not, you shouldn't be there.

 A lonely voice. But then, Lonely are the Brave and lonelier are the
dead.