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By Root 1006 0

seamy side of globalisation, international jihadist terrorism was another—although this is, emphatically, not to imply any justification or moral equivalence between sunbathing and bombing. As distances shrank and barriers to movement dissolved, terrorists who availed themselves of all the scientific technologies of the contemporary world—much of it manufactured in China and Japan—flailed out in rage against the undermining of their religious identity as they had reconstructed this as an ideology. Religious self-assertion replaced scrutiny of why the Muslim world has made no significant scientific discoveries in the last four hundred years. Although a war would be declared on terrorism—which is a tactic used by a kaleidoscope of groups—a better analogy would have been with the containment of a contagious disease that can never be entirely eliminated, any more than governments can destroy international organised crime.

Farce preceded tragedy when malevolent minds turned to a devastating strike against the West itself. In September 1992, two men arrived at New York’s JFK airport in the first-class section of a Pakistani aircraft, for jihadists like to travel in style. (Advised by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on tradecraft, they seek the deference given to the rich by travelling business or first class and put down a five-star hotel on immigration forms, moving never by taxi but by subway or bus to a cheaper place the following day). This time something went wrong. Immigration officers focused on Ahmad Mohammed Ajaj, a bearded Palestinian, with a Swedish passport whose photograph peeled off in an agent’s hand to reveal the image of someone else beneath. Ajaj started shouting that his mother was Swedish, an irrelevance to the fact his face and the passport’s real photo did not match. A secondary search revealed British, Jordanian and Saudi passports in his leather case. There were also manuals about forging documents and making bombs, one of which had the words Al Qaeda on the cover. At another immigration desk, Ramzi Yousef, dressed in a colourful confection that included baggy pantaloons, presented an Iraqi passport, with no US visa, and a laminated identity card from an Islamic centre in Arizona, although the names on the two documents did not match. He smiled politely, his face dominated by a bulbous nose and hooded eyes, and requested political asylum. After averring that he was a victim of persecution and giving his correct name, Yousef was told to attend a hearing in three months and released. Apparently the airport detention centre was full that day. Ajaj was sent straight to jail.

Ramzi Yousef was Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim, the thirty-year-old son of a Palestinian mother and a Pakistani father domiciled in Kuwait. We have encountered him already as the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, though the latter was not much older. After studying electrical engineering at the West Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education in Swansea, where high foreign fees talk, and the Muslim Brothers Swansea chapter was active, Yousef had been through an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. He had the light sensitivity and the burn marks on his hands and feet to prove it, for he was an expert in making bombs. He hated Israel, and the US for supporting it; US civilians were fair game as they paid taxes which indirectly propped up the Zionist regime. Besides, from firebombing Tokyo, via Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the US itself rained death on civilians. Noam Chomsky, John Pilger or Harold Pinter might have written his script. In fact, Yousef was not especially motivated by religious zeal; he was driven more by a sort of criminal fertility that operated under cover of Islam.57

Still posing as an Iraqi, Yousef quickly got his bearings in Brooklyn’s Arab community, establishing contacts with the Alkifah Refugee Center, a ‘charity’ established by Abdullah Azzam to funnel money to the jihad in Afghanistan. He frequented mosques in Jersey City, where the blind sheikh Omar Rahman—unconscionably having been given