Occasionally the internet throws up a perfectly conceived web-site. Simple, on the money and instantly gratifying. An example sprung up before the last soccer World Cup; “Create your own Brazilian football name“. I dare you not to enter the names of everyone you know. Minutes of guaranteed fun.
Another pearler is “The Oracle of Bacon.” Readers will be familiar with the Kevin Bacon dinner party game. The idea is to link actors by degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon; the number of steps is known as the actor’s Bacon number. Type in the name of any actor and the Oracle of Bacon will give you their number. For example, Paul Hogan’s Bacon number is 2 (he was in “Almost an Angel” with Brian Frank who was in “Where the Truth Lies” with KB.)
The original idea probably came from the film “Six Degrees of Separation” which, ironically, was one of the few films made in the last 20 years that didn’t feature His Baconness. According to Wikipedia, “Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one “step” away from each person he or she knows and two “steps” away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is no more than six “steps” away from each person on Earth.”
The game can thus be moved into the so-called real world. Let’s play Six Degrees of Osama. I’ll go first. David Hicks admitted to having met the Big O. Hicks’s US military lawyer was Michael Mori. A friend of mine met Mori while he was on one of his tours of Australia. So my Osama number is 4. That is probably enough to get me on an ASIS data base.
At a recent dinner party we went round the table and played “Who’s the Most Famous Person You Have Met?” Slightly drunken but no doubt authentic answers included celebrity heavyweights Princess Di, Pope John Paul II, Rupert Murdoch and Bush the Elder (I shook his hand from the crowd at the Open at St Andrews in 1995. That’s probably enough to get me on a Secret Service data base).
However, the winner by popular acclaim was K, who met Dale (“The Flea“) Weightman at a pub in Melbourne in the 80’s. “Big deal”, I hear discerning readers cry, “how can the Flea compete with the Pope? I don’t care how many All Australian (3) or Richmond best & fairest (3) medals he won. I don’t even care if he is in the AFL Hall of Fame and is a diabetic.” But, dear readers, did you ever give the Pope a lift home in your car and pash him? I thought not. Not even Mel Gibson can claim that one.
Finding out that one’s Osama number is 4 is pretty impressive. But it’s not going to shake BabbelOn’s world. On the other hand, take a look at this bloke. Does he look familiar? His name is Azahari bin Husin. Resist the temptation to google him for a moment and bear with me.
Malaysian born, he lived in Adelaide in the mid-70s and went to Norwood High, just up the road from where I was schooled. I may have even shared a bus with him. After that, however, our career paths diverged a tad. Thirty years later he was a very dead Islamic terrorist, the bomb-maker behind the Jakarta and Bali bombings, killed in a police raid in Indonesia.
Just how, one muses, does one travel from pimply Adelaide schoolboy to world-ranked jihadist? Did he have terrorist DNA or was he radicalised somehow? If the latter, what triggered his conversion to the dark side? Was it a single moment or a slow process? And, the sixty four million rupiah question – did it have anything to do with his experiences in Adelaide?
(Perhaps we can look beyond his adolescence and blame the British. It turns out that Azza went on to earn a PhD in Property Valuation from the University of Reading. It is somewhat ironic that his post-doctoral career consisted of blowing up buildings.)
Could there have been something in 70’s Adelaide that triggered his radicalisation? After all, those were the heady days of Abba and the Bay City Rollers, platforms and flairs, Don Dunstan and colour TV. Could exposure to Australian culture have so revulsed him that he could only find solace in the Koran and jihad? It is easy to forget, from the comfort of the Noughties, how shocking and depraved the Seventies really were; the crimes against decency that were committed. Is it really possible that this could have had anything to do with the good doctor going to the dark side? Surely not, the rest of us managed to survive punk and square-dances relatively unscathed, embarrassing school photos aside. But continue to bear with me patient reader as we take a quick detour through Islamic fundamentalist history in search of a clue.
The Muslim scholar credited with inspiring Al Qaeda and the Big O himself was the almost unpronouncable Sayyid Qutb. A leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and an extensive author of Koranic studies, he was hanged in 1966 after being convicted of attempting to overthrow the Egyptian government. While still in the public service and before joining the Muslim Brotherhood, he spent two years in the US studying. According to Wikipedia:
“Qutb was extremely critical of many things in the United States: its materialism, racism, brutal boxing matches, poor haircuts, triviality, enthusiasm for sports and “animal-like” mixing of the sexes (which went on even in churches). In an article published in Egypt after his travels, he noted with disapproval the sexuality of Americans:
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the American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs — and she shows all this and does not hide it.
And their taste in music :
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Jazz is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires …
Qutb’s experiences in the U.S. partly formed the impetus for his rejection of Western values and his move towards radicalism upon returning to Egypt.”
Apparently, the nadir of Qutb’s fact finding mission to the West occurred at a Colorado church social, where he witnessed with his own eyes young men and women dancing together.
So, there you have it. Two years in the US in the late 40’s produced the man whose anti-Western, pro-jihad writings most influenced Big Osama. Is it not possible that four years in Adelaide in the 70’s could have the same effect on our nascent Malaysian bomb-maker? Perhaps the brutal boxing matches and jazz were not a big factor but the poor haircuts, triviality, enthusiasm for sports and animal-like mixing of the sexes would have been much in evidence. Particularly at Norwood High.
