Terrorists? They don’t make them like they used to!

A rant from me…

Back in the day, when I was a lad, when men were men, etc., there was an assumption that to be a terrorist you generally had to have been through the mill somewhat. A real terrorist couldn’t just step up to the mark, make a video, strap on a vest then…bang. Oh no, back in the day there was due process to being a terrorist.

To start with, the majority of those willing to risk all for the cause – whether it was IRA, Hezbollah, Tamil Tigers, FARC, Black September, etc., - had one thing in common - they would rough it a bit; go out and live off the land, make crap videos pretending they know kung fu and fire an AK47 into the air for a promotional cine film (or later video). They would be willing to go and rough it in the cold Andes, in the scorched deserts, in the sub continental jungles, in the Irish bogs(!) in order to learn their trade. In those heady days, it was necessary to painstakingly learn how to make a bomb and hope that you survived to do it a second time. Those badly choreographed karate moves for the cine camera actually hurt (especially if your partner was some handy sensei from the east). It was necessary to learn how to survive and eat worm omelettes with raw badger kebabs.

Now don’t misunderstand me; I detest all forms of terrorism and deplore the use of force to make people follow some warped sense of how things should be. I hate the fact that invariably, the majority of terrorist victims end up being innocent children, women and men who just want to live their lives in peace. But since time in memorial there have been terrorists kicking around, giving it large and gobbing off – that won’t change.

And for the most part they were working class at best and in many instances from fully impoverished backgrounds. Injustices were experienced and not just read about or imagined. They had generation after terrorist generation to live up to and not a small number of them were very intelligent.  But today - well, today’s would be batch of terrorists have never had it so good. They just don’t know they are born, do this lot. Not like in days of yore.

Gone is the necessity to attend boot camps, designed to make a terrorist out of you. No more does a potential hijacker have to lie up for months at a time in the mountains/deserts/jungles/bogs(!). And as for the crap kung-fu propaganda film – not a necessity for today’s heroic freedom fighter.

And worst of all, unlike in days gone bye, today’s generation of terrorists don’t even have to be born into the cause, to have lived through the conditions they feel they are fighting for, nor to have even met anyone who has lived like this.

And why not? Because of the Internet!

That multi-layered and inexhaustible internet backbone of ISPs and the TCP/IP Protocol blah blah information net, somewhere invisible in the ether, makes life easy for any would be terrorist. Today, any young or middle aged trendy who suddenly decides that life in the suburbs of Surrey is boring can log on to ‘How to be a terrorist without doing any hard work dot com'. He (and it always seems to be a male) grows his hair, visits extremist chat-rooms (quite obviously too socially inept to visit a ‘meet a fit chick dot com’ chat-room), adopts a ridiculous accent and falls for all of the rubbish he hears. Then not content with that, he learns how to make a bomb from the internet on ‘How you, a pathetic and sad want-to-be terrorist, can make a bomb dot com’ and tries to blow himself up - after posting a suicide video on 'We accept all suicide bomber videos here dot com' - in order to take as many innocent lives as he possibly can (yeh! that’ll teach them).

But then he doesn’t even get that right; his shoe/underpants/shampoo bottle/smart 4x4 fails (thankfully) to go bang.

So a message to those snotty little prats who think the world is unfair and so they want to be a terrorist - be a man, go out there and do it like they used to, mix it with the really bad people face to face not in behind a computer screen.

But of course you won’t!

Ecrivain Man