WHAT MAKES THEM TICK?

THE JIHADI’S TALE

23.01.2015

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23.01.2015 Nº.4

COVER CREDITSDANIEL BIDDULPH, SHUTTERSTOCK

B I G S H O T S

6 BERLIN Container city

8 USA Sink or swim

10 YOSEMITE Room with a view

12 FRANCE Je suis Cabu

P A G E O N E

14 After Paris: ‘Captain Peroxide’ says ‘I told you so’ by Winston Ross

18 The cartoon warriors of the Muslim world by Simon Speakman Cordall

20 How Denmark tamed its Islamists by Elisabeth Braw

24 Then a Nazi victim, now a neo-fascist by Kostas Kallergis

28 Russia’s new underground media by Anna Nemtsova

N E W W O R L D

48 Why nearly half of us hear voices (and how to fix it) by William Lee Adams

D O W N T I M E

54 The movie exposing Israel’s marriage scandal by Christopher Silvester

54 Maggie Gyllenhaal on the struggles behind success by Zach Schonfeld

60 A celebration of the critic as ‘twisted assassin’ by Robert Gore-Langton

66 This week in 1961 Cuba crisis

FEATURES

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30 The jihadi’s taleOur chief feature writer spent three months piecing

together the life story of a young British terrorist. The result is shocking. And terribly sad.

by Alex Perry

40 Ralph Steadman’s right to offend

The celebrated cartoonist, who describes himself in our interview as ‘Distasteful. Unhygienic. Truculent. Moody. Provocative towards bastards,’ has responded to the Paris

killings with a new artwork exclusively for Newsweek. by Robert Chalmers

AL-BRITANI: Aka Ifthekhar Jaman, was a YouTube star before he went to Syria to join Isis, see p30

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Alex Perry is an award- winning corre-spondent and author who has covered Africa, the Middle East and

Asia for 15 years. His latest book, The Rift: Africa’s Final Fight for Freedom, will be published worldwide in 2015.

Anna Nemtsova is a longtime correspondent for Newsweek based in Moscow. Her work has also appeared in The Chronicle of

Higher Education, Foreign Policy magazine, nbcnews.com, Marie Claire, and The Guardian. .

Elisabeth Braw joined Newsweek following a visiting fellowship at the Reuters Institute at Oxford university.

Previously she was senior reporter at Metro International newspaper group.

Robert Chalmers is a novelist and journalist whose awards include the British Press Association

Interviewer of the year and the PPA magazine writer of the year. He has worked at The Observer and The Independent on Sunday and is a contributing editor of GQ.

William Lee Adams is a former correspondent for Time magazine, William has reported from

drug houses in Romania, prisons in Norway and riots in London. As well as writing freelance assignments, he runs the world’s most-read blog devoted to the Eurovision Song Contest – wiwibloggs.

CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER EDITOR-IN-CHIEF CHIEF EXECUTIVE

Johnathan Davis Jim Impoco Etienne Uzac

I N T H I S I S S U E

NEWSWEEK (Europe, Middle East & Africa)Published by Newsweek Ltd, a division of IBT Media Group Ltd

EDITORIAL EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Richard Addis

PRODUCTION EDITOR Nick Passmore MANAGING EDITOR Cordelia Jenkins HEAD OF DESIGN Daniel Biddulph NEWS EDITOR Barney Guiton DEPUTY NEWS EDITOR Lucy Draper DESIGN EDITOR Jessica Landon PICTURE EDITOR Marian Paterson SUB-EDITOR Maria Lazareva SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR Damien Sharkov ASSOCIATE EDITORS Deirdre Fernand Cathy Galvin Victor Sebestyen

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Simon Akam Sarah Helm Christena Appleyard Anthony Holden Bella Bathurst Caroline Irby Alex Bellos Catherine Ostler Rosie Boycott Alex Perry Robert Chalmers George Pitcher Harry Eyres Katharine Quarmby Miranda Green Nicholas Shakespeare

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AP

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GERMANY�Container cityAn asylum seeker enters his new home in eastern Berlin, where as many as 400 refugees will be expected to take up lodgings in these brightly coloured, portable “container” blocks. These utilitarian-looking housing estates have been devised as an emergency measure by the federal government to house the unprecedented influx of refugees who arrived in Berlin last month. Such ‘container cities’ will be built in six deprived neighbourhoods around the capital. Far-right groups have already protested about the plan.

MARKUS SCHREIBER

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USA�Sink or swimYoung members of the United States Army’s Special Tactics Training Squadron hurtle deep into a pool with their hands and feet tightly bound. A new twist on waterboarding? No, just ‘drown proofing’ which is a form of special training designed to keep aspiring servicemen calm during underwater combat operations. Successful students eventually graduate to the Special Tactics Operation Squadron: one of the US Air Force’s elite infiltration units. A sizeable 18,000 officers apparently survived training and are currently serving in the ranks.

MASTER SGT. JEFFREY ALLEN

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BIGSHOTS

�USA

Room with a view

A climber rests as he waits for the

skin on his hands to heal halfway

up the “toughest climb in the world”. Americans Tommy

Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson are working

their way up the sheer 3,000 foot monolith

El Capitan in California’s Yosemite

National Park for two weeks with no

safety equipment bar ropes in case they fall. In this picture

the two are over the most difficult part of their route and hang above the ground at

a distance well above the height of Europe’s

tallest building - London’s Shard.

COREY RICH

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�FRANCE

Je suis CabuFrench caricaturist

Jean Cabut aka ‘Cabu’, looks hard at work in this portrait

of 1983 filling the pages of France’s

satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Cabu

and seven of his colleagues were

shot and killed last week after their Paris

office was stormed by two Islamist

gunmen, outraged at the magazine’s depictions of the

prophet Muhammad, prompting a

worldwide show of support for

their “freedom to blaspheme” with

similar protests across London, Berlin and the US mourning

the Charlie Hebdo team.

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CAPTAIN PEROXIDE:Holland’s leading anti-immigrant campaigner, known for his outlandish hairstyle as well as his anti-Islam, anti-immigrant views, tweeted after the murder of Charlie Hebdo journalists, “This means war.”

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AFTER TWO SEPARATE rounds of evacuating my pockets completely, walking through metal detectors and having my backpack checked, I was a little surprised to find Geert Wilders behind the keycard-controlled door to his office, alone.

Wilders, 51, is the leader of Holland’s most anti-Islam political party, and he regularly uses his platform to denounce not just radicalised Muslims but their entire religion. It is Thursday 8 January. A scant 24 hours had passed since ter-rorists in Paris gunned down two police officers and 10 journalists at the headquarters of French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo. One of the gun-men’s targets – editor-in-chief Stephane Char-bonnier – is on the same al-Qaida “hit list” as Wilders, who has fielded death threats from his enemies for the past decade.

While 7 January may have been a tragic day for France, its events have already begun to raise the

power and profile of political figures like Geert Wilders, whose Freedom Party surged to its highest level in more than a year in national polls following the attack, making it now the most popular party in Holland. As his megaphone grows louder, so does the target on Wilders’ back. To see him sitting like this, without burly bodyguards, is almost unsettling, given how many people would love to slit his throat.

Wilders is known as “Mozart” or “Captain Per-oxide” in Holland for his outlandish hair. Today he is wearing a shiny black Armani suit. A bright green tie competes for attention with his trade-mark platinum blonde pompadour. A portrait of his idol, Winston Churchill (also an outspoken critic of Islam), hangs on the wall behind him, next to a small sculpture of Wilders himself. When I ask him how he’s doing, he answers: “Surviving.”

THE POLITICIAN WHO COULDN’T WAIT TO SAY, ‘I TOLD YOU SO’After Paris, the leader of Holland’s most popular party lets rip. Many hope his grandstanding will backfire

BYWINSTON ROSS

@winston_ross

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Wilders is being a little dramatic, but that’s understandable from a guy who says he has spent the better part of a decade wearing a bulletproof vest, being shuttled from Dutch military barracks to prison cell to safe house because of his outspo-ken antagonism of Islam. And yet, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo only amplified his rhetoric: “This is war,” he tweeted hours after the shootings in Paris. By war, he told me in an hour-long inter-view, he means a war with all of Islam.

For better or worse, this is Wilders’ moment, his chance to proclaim, “I told you so” to Euro-pean politicians who haven’t, in his view, taken the threat of terrorism too seriously. “They’re crying crocodile tears” over the attacks, he says. “They refuse to define the elephant in the room, which is Islam. The Islamification of our society is what’s causing this, and it’s all inspired by the Qur’an.”

Wilders insists that he’s not pleased at the power that the attacks will surely bestow on him; his Freedom Party was leading in the polls before the massacre in Paris. If the next parliamentary election were held today, his party would pick up 31 seats, more than double its current count. Wilders could become Holland’s prime minister if he can cobble together enough of a coalition to make that happen.

Europeans are becoming increasingly intoler-ant of the wave of Muslim immigrants stream-ing across their borders from the Middle East. They’re burning mosques in Sweden, marching by the tens of thousands in Germany and ceding greater and greater control to the politicians who speak the loudest against Islam. Ten years ago, Wilders’ proposal to ban the construction of new mosques in the Netherlands were viewed as the ravings of a far-right leader fomenting extrem-ism in order to consolidate his own influence. He has compared the Qur’an to Adolf Hitler’s mani-festo, Mein Kampf, declaring that half of its pages should be ripped out and that its sale should be banned in Holland. Now, reporters call Wilders a “populist”, and no longer dismiss his xeno-phobic proposals as rubbish. When he asked a crowd in March of last year whether they wanted

to see “fewer Moroccans or more Moroccans” [sic] thousands chanted “Fewer Moroccans!” He promised to “Fix that!”

Wilders faces a trial this year for inciting hate speech at that event, but he insists he did noth-ing wrong. “The biggest disease we have faced in the last decades in Europe is cultural relativism – the idea by liberals and leftist politicians that all culture are equal. They are not,” he told me. “Our culture, based on Christianity, humanism and Judaism, it’s a better culture. We don’t settle things with violence – well, sometimes we do, but mostly we don’t. Cultural relativism has made it so people don’t know who they are any more.”

Born in Venlo in 1963, Wilders is the youngest of four children. Raised Roman Catholic, he has since left the church and calls himself agnostic. He studied at the Dutch Open University and travelled extensively in Israel and throughout the Arab world during and after his compul-sory military service in the Dutch Army. At 17, Wilders lived in the Jordan Valley, a few miles above Jericho, and he decided, over time, that Muslim countries were the most dysfunctional and violent and he began to see immigration of Muslims into non-Muslim countries as blight. “I’m not against immigration because I believe all the people who immigrate are bad people,” he says. “But they bring along a culture that is not ours. Islam is not there to integrate; it’s there to dominate.”

The death threats do not seem to have deterred Wilders. He left his more mainstream party over its support for Turkish entry into the European Union, and, in 2006, formed his Freedom Party, surprising the country by winning nine of the 150 seats in Parliament that same year. In 2007, a popular Dutch radio station proclaimed Wilders “politician of the year” in part because of his “well-timed one-liners”. In 2008, he posted a 17-minute film called Fitna on the web, lifting texts from the Koran and the statements of radical Muslims to paint a dark picture of Islam. In 2009, the British government banned Wilders from vis-iting the United Kingdom to show his film, and prosecutors in Holland charged him with inciting hatred and discrimination, but a Dutch court dis-missed the charges two years later, ruling that he had targeted a religion – permitted in Holland’s free speech law – not a specific ethnic group. In 2010, Wilders visited Ground Zero in New York on the anniversary of the 11 September attacks, and spoke at a rally against the construction of an Islamic centre near the site.

Wilders’ party is among a legion of populist movements spreading on both ends of the polit-ical spectrum throughout Europe, says Matthijs

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Rooduijn, a political science professor at the Uni-versity of Amsterdam who studies radical popu-lism. This new brand of populists is critical of the political elite and agrees that government is no longer listening to the people. But Wilders’ brand of populism seeks to link that dissatisfaction with politics to the refugee crisis, and to terrorist attacks like the one in Paris last week. Hours after the Paris attacks, Rotterdam mayor (and Muslim) Ahmed Aboutaleb told his fellow Muslims living in Holland to “pack your bag and leave” if they

didn’t like freedom of speech. In France, Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant Front National party is now the country’s strongest. This combination of populism and nativism is a fruitful one today, Rooduijn argues, because it provides a bogey-man for growing fears about globalisation: the job-stealing, terrorist immigrant and the estab-lished politician who shelters him.

Of Le Pen and the late Nazi-descendant Jörg Haider of Austria, Wilders said in 2007 that “Le Pen and those kind of people (are) terrible”. But in 2013, he formed the European Alliance for Freedom with Le Pen, in an attempt to cobble together a large enough group to influence the European Parliament. The same year, al-Qaida released a “Wanted: Dead or Alive” list of the terrorist group’s 11 most hated figures. On the list: Wilders, Hirsi Ali, Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier, who was murdered in Paris last week.

Wilders propoals are simple: to immediately halt all immigration to The Netherlands from Islamic countries, allow all those who want to leave to wage jihad in other countries to go, but not to come back. Holland should leave the Schengen and close its open borders. “Democ-racy can only flourish in a nation with nation state, with border control,” he says. He is clear that he doesn’t advocate any kind of violence against anyone, and insists that nothing he has ever said should make him responsible for attacks on peaceful and law-abiding Muslims. “If you set fire to a mosque, you’re a criminal and I hope you go to jail for years,” he says. “We should be tolerant to people who are tolerant to us. We should be intolerant to people who are intolerant to us.”

It’s hard to say if any of these proposals are more likely to gain traction in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The Freedom Party has performed well in opinion polls at various times over the past 10 years, and that doesn’t always translate to gains in parliament. In 2010, Wilders doubled the number of seats for his Freedom Party in parliament, from nine to 24, thanks to the votes of 1.5 million people, siphoning votes from the more moderate Christian Democrats. A straw poll of Dutch junior and high school stu-

dents before the election found him winning the election in that demographic. But two years later, Wilders’s party actually lost seats in the government, his numbers dropping from 24 to 12.

Even if his party does win the largest number of seats in the

next election, he would have to convince another party to form a coalition in order to gain any real sway in affecting policy, thanks to the Dutch sys-tem of rule. Most political observers here find that unlikely. “Other parties have said ‘We don’t touch him, even if he is the biggest’,” Wilders acknowledges. “But I think anything is possible.”

As the shadow of Wilders’s platinum bouffant looms large in Europe, it’s his notoriety that may have a greater impact on the ongoing debate about immigration and the ongoing persecution facing refugees from Muslim countries. Wilders’s views may, in the end, eclipse his ambitions, which is why he seems to eagerly anticipate the hate speech trial he faces this year and why his first move, in the wake of the attacks in Paris, was to call for a debate with Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte about immigration.

Next year he’s planning a trip to Australia, he says, to help right-wingers in that country start a new political party modeled after the Freedom Party. Geert Wilders is taking his show on the road. “This is not a national fight,” he says. “The fight with Islam has no borders. The war has no borders. The fight for freedom has no borders.”

Anthropologist Lizzy van Leeuwen isn’t con-vinced that Wilders’s star will keep shining as brightly as it has in recent years. On the surface, the attacks in Paris may give him an easy chance to make a point, but she hopes his grandstanding will backfire, that people will see it as an attempt to seize power on the bodies of dead journalists. “There’s a risk in talking the way he does in this moment. It’s too obvious, too easy to declare all Muslims extremists and terrorists, too cheap,” she says. “Too many people will see through that. He has to be very careful. If he makes a misstep now, it will damage him for a long time.” n

“ Immigrants bring along a culture that is not ours. Islam is not there to integrate; it’s there to dominate.”

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THE KILLINGS at Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday have hit Syrian Tarek Alghorani hard. His girl-friend tells me he’s been distant since the news first came in; the events in Paris have stirred too many memories. Tarek knows better than most the exorbitant price that laughing in the face of terror can demand.

In 2006, before Syria became synonymous with the slaughter and sectarian violence of jihad, Tarek was sentenced to seven years in the country’s notorious Sednaya Prison for daring to satirise the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in his blog, Syrian Domari. After being freed in 2011, he continued his opposition to the regime that had imprisoned and tortured him, embark-ing with others on a graffiti campaign that would result in the deaths of his friends and, ultimately, his flight from Syria. Still, almost lost within the smoke of a busy downtown bar in Tunis, Tarek laughs. He laughs a lot. He tells me how he laughed as the judge handed down his sentence, “I looked at him and I said, seven years? You won’t even be here in seven years.”

For a regime that has outlawed criticism, humour presents a threat bordering upon the lethal. Many of those in Sednaya with Tarek

had been responsible for acts of terror that had resulted in the deaths of hundreds. Tarek’s sen-tence for mocking the regime was as long as any. “Funny; funny is not easy, but it’s perfect for giv-ing an idea to another. Funny draws people in. Funny gets you more followers and (for the gov-ernment) that makes you more dangerous. With funny you can do anything. You can give your opinion in a smart way.” Tarek pauses to ask him-self a question, “Funny? Funny does everything.”

Not everything is funny. There is little humour to be found in the “festival” of Falaqa that greeted Tarek’s arrival at Sednaya. The anima-tion drains from his face, “They fold your body into a car tire, so you cannot move. Then they put a thick iron bar here,” he says, indicating to the back of his knee. “After that, they beat you on the legs with sticks, until you are black from the beatings. When the security services torture you during interrogation, you know that if you give them something, they will stop, even if just for a little bit. When the prison guards beat you, you have nothing. You can say nothing. It’s just beating.”

Similarly, there is little that could be consid-ered funny in the murder of his friend, Nizar

THE SYRIAN SATIRIST MAKING GRAFFITI BEHIND ENEMY LINESTarek Alghorani spent seven years in jail for mocking Assad’s regime. Now living in Tunisia, his new target is Isis

BYSIMON SPEAKMAN CORDALL

@IgnitionUK

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THE WALL: Inspired by similar campaigns in Iran and Egypt, Alghirani created stencils by which Syrian youths could replicate inlamatory images en masse

Rastanaoui. “They put us in with the jihadists, with al-Qaida and the beginnings of what is now Daesh, (the Arabic term for Isis) . . . In 2008, the prisoners revolted, taking control of the prison. One group of jihadists, we never found out who, came for Nizar. They took him to another floor and beat him with water pipes. When we found him, his head was like this,” he says, indicating with his hands something the size of large water melon. “We couldn’t recognise him. We only knew him by the T-shirt he was wearing.”

Tarek grew up in 1980s Damascus, the son of a small businessman. “They tell me I was always joking. I was always up to something, making up songs, jokes, this kind of thing.” As a child he became a voracious reader, consuming every-thing that hadn’t been censored and applying it to life within Syria. Referencing Descartes’ Method of Doubt, he explains how his distrust of the regime grew, eventually drawing him inex-orably to a life online. Initially he joined the internet discussion forum Akhuaia (fraternity) before, along with others, founding the satirical and political blog, Syrian Domari in 2003, eight years before social media was to drive a revolu-tion throughout the Arab world.

Tarek was released from jail in 2011, emerging into a Syria experiencing the first throes of the secular, democratic revolution that was to tragi-cally descend into the vicious and the sectarian.

minds, because people are scared of the wall. They tell you, ‘Shh . . . the walls have ears. Don’t say anything’.” For Tarek and his friends, graffiti equated to defiance and hope. “For more than 40 years, all we have are pictures of Bashar al-Assad and his father. Every day, that is all people see. With graffiti, we can break that. We can break that wall. When there is a demonstration and people are shot, afterwards, the television will come and say that nothing happened there and they will film it empty. With graffiti, we can say that we were there, these are our martyrs, and that we are still there.”

Inspired by similar campaigns in Iran and Egypt, Tarek switched from creating graffiti, to creating the stencils by which Syrian youths could replicate the images en masse. More sten-cils appeared, some mocking Assad’s resem-blance to Hitler, others making great play of the leaked information that the President’s wife, Asma al-Assad, (in Arabic, Assad means lion) referred affectionately to him as her “duck”. It was a gift Tarek savoured.

Nine of Tarek’s friends were killed during that campaign. Their families remain in Syria, so their identities must remain secret. However, the death of one, Nour Hatem Zahra, was publicised, his funeral drawing disaffected Syrian youths in their thousands. It is still visible on YouTube.

Tarek left Syria in 2012 after learning that, once more, he was wanted by the regime, this time – not to be arrested – but to be killed. Initially, he left for Jordan, before later relocating the relative safety of Tunisia. He now works for the Tunisian Centre for Press Freedom and has little choice but to observe the carnage that has come to characterise his home from a distance. Though reduced, his involvement in the secular, youth-led Syrian resistance remains. His latest effort, a stencil of Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was taken directly from the pages of Charlie Hebdo. “I wanted to show solidarity with Charlie Hebdo. I don’t know if they’ll use it in Raqqa, (the de facto capital of the Islamic State) but they might.”

“Satire and magazines like Charlie Hebdo can’t stop. We must still fight for freedom of expres-sion. We can never stop. We must do it for all people, so that they can say what they want to say. If you write something I don’t like, I can write something saying you’re wrong. If you draw a picture attacking me, I will draw a picture back. In this way, word by word, caption by caption, we can move forward. Not with violence. Vio-lence will not stop anything. Violence is for dic-tators, for terrorists. It’s for everyone who wants to make us frightened. No, we will not give them that. We must continue.” n

Once more, despite the beatings and the torture he had experienced, Tarek felt compelled to take up arms against the regime that had taken seven years of his life. This time he did it with an aerosol can.

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THE AUTUMN OF 2005 was Denmark’s Charlie Hebdo moment, except it was more deadly. On 30 September, the newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the prophet Muham-mad, including one showing him with a bomb in his turban. Local Muslims reacted with fury, and soon protests were engulfing Denmark.

By early 2006, 200 people had been killed, Denmark’s embassies in Beirut and Damascus had been destroyed, and Danish, European and Christian organisations in Muslim countries had received threats. Then prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen called it Denmark’s worst crisis since the Second World War.

It’s all the more surprising, then, that in the years following the cartoon crisis, it has mostly been quiet on Denmark’s radical Muslim front. That’s not to say that there aren’t problems. For every million Danish residents, 100 have joined Isis fighting in Syria or Iraq, a recent sur-vey shows. Only Belgium has a larger share of foreign fighters. Yet there have been no more attacks on Danish targets at home or abroad. Denmark’s secret, which French authorities may want to study more closely, is the elevation of the humble social worker. “Denmark hasn’t been

HOW DENMARK LEARNED FROM ITS OWN CARTOON CRISISAfter 200 people were killed ten years ago, the State introduced radical integration policies that have paid off

BYELISABETH BRAW

@elisabethbraw

afraid to tackle the Islamic radicalism problem,” notes Magnus Ranstorp, a counterterrorism expert at the Swedish Defence College. “Around 2008, it began addressing Islamic radicalism-re-lated crime through prevention work, creating the so-called SSP model where schools, social services and the police work together. What’s equally important is that government agencies on the state level work hand in hand with local

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CIVIL UNREST: A wave of protests by the Muslim community swept Denmark in 2006 after caricatures of the prophet Muhammad were published and denounced as “blasphemous” and an “attack” on Islam

gramme with the goal of preventing radicalism. Last year, authorities also added psychologists to the setup with the specific goal of reintegrating returning foreign fighters, and a new govern-ment plan includes training youth who’ll serve as role models and facilitate dialogue with young-sters at risk of radicalisation.

“Another crucial aspect is that Denmark has understood the importance of working actively for integration and is much better at not letting

ghettos form,” notes Ranstorp. “Politically, there’s some hard talk, but in reality they make sure that neighbourhoods are inte-grated. The authorities even have a direct dialogue with mosques such as Grimhøj. It’s not clear that it has any influence on the mosques, but at least it’s there to signal red lines or during crisis situations.” Grimhøj,

which is suspected of radicalising a number of the foreign fighters, has long caused controversy. Imam Oussama el Saadi has said that he hopes Isis will win and declined to denounce the Char-lie Hebdo attack, noting that “the Protestant and Catholic churches didn’t distance themselves from the acts of the terrorist Breivik”.

The social workers and psychologists, then, often work under extremely adverse conditions, trying to prevent jihadist acts one would-be jihadi at a time. And, with the government in charge of overall strategy, the real action takes

authorities.”In fact, because the cartoon crisis hit this

peaceful country with such surprise and force, officials had to innovate as they went along. “The lesson learned was that security had to be on permanently high alert, which it has been ever since,” Fogh Rasmussen says. “We also learned that integration is not just about jobs and education, it’s also about values. Among the rad-icals you see many well-educated young people.”

That’s where social workers now play a crucial role. The SSP model features a corps of mentors working with at-risk youth, steering them away from radical groups or encouraging them to leave if they have already joined, and maintaining close connections with their families.

Social workers involved in the programme are trained by the Ministry of Children, Gender Equality, Integration and Social Affairs in con-junction with PET, the country’s national security intelligence agency. Working with PET, Danish prisons have developed a staff retraining pro-

“ Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you have to say everything always.”

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GROUP ACTION: Muslim children outside the Danish parliament, which is planning a law to prevent jihadists returning home

place at the city level. Ranstorp notes that it works better in Aarhus and smaller cities, while reaching would-be jihadis in Copenhagen poses a challenge. But as far as Morten Storm is con-cerned, the painstaking prevention work is a futile effort. “The Danish model is the most mis-guided approach you can imagine,” he argues. “The most important step that needs to be taken is preventing those who go abroad for terrorist training from coming back.”

Storm knows a thing or two about Islamic rad-icalism. A Bandidos member-turned-Muslim, the Dane went on to join al-Qaida, later becom-ing an informant for PET. Storm helped PET track down his friend, the Islamic hate preacher Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, allowing the CIA to kill al-Awlaki in 2011. Storm, who now lives in hiding, documents his colourful career in the 2014 book Agent Storm.

The Danish government is planning a law along the lines of what the unorthodox former terrorist suggests. “The threat posed by foreign fighters in Denmark is a highly prioritised area by the Danish government,” Justice Minister Mette Frederiksen says. “In order to address this threat most effectively, we’ve launched a new action plan that focuses on both intervention and prevention. Recently we’ve introduced a bill that enables the police to refuse the issuing of passports, to revoke passports from suspected foreign fighters and to issue travel bans.” That, of course, does not include Danish citizens and residents simply going abroad for terrorist train-ing, the very people Storm worries will commit atrocities at home.

Denmark’s conscientious mentoring, dialogu-ing and counselling risks can offer little defence to violent international forces, even though the government plan gamely offers solutions for growing concerns such as online radicalisation. “Even when [jihadi terror] incidents only involve lone wolves, they’re part of an international threat scenario, because the perpetrators have been inspired by international events,” says Fogh Rasmussen, who went on to become Nato’s Sec-retary-General, leaving office in October 2014. “The Danish security services have prevented

several attacks, but we need improved interna-tional cooperation in order to be more effective. Returning foreign fighters constitutes a real threat.”

But what if Charlie Hebdo and the cartoon cri-sis require a different response altogether, one more profound than mentoring and travel bans? As Michael Melchior sees it, European coun-tries need a fundamental dialogue to establish how their ethnic and religious groups are going to co-exist. He speaks from experience: the sev-enth-generation Danish rabbi is a former social affairs minister and deputy foreign minister of Israel, the Chief Rabbi of Norway and a leading voice for religious reconciliation. “We’ve never had a fundamental debate about the parameters in which different groups can live together in our multicultural society,” he says. “But everybody is in fear of going into that debate because, sud-denly, you’ll see that society has changed.”

That change may involve more adjustment on all sides than simply accepting new names and diets. “We’re living in a multicultural society where values clash with other values,” observes Melchior, who is also the rabbi of a Jerusalem synagogue. “I strongly believe in freedom of speech, but we also need to use that freedom with wisdom. Although the bloodshed and killings [in Paris] just makes one totally identify with those who became victims in the battle for that free-dom of speech, the ultimate goal of democracy in a multicultural world can’t be to trample the beliefs of others.” In Melchior’s book, one step towards successful multicultural coexistence is this: “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you have to say everything always.” n

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TheAftermath

Sarah Helm

A correspondent’s return to Gaza

What made a young Harry Potter fan from a British suburb become a martyr for Allah in the Syrian desert?

The Club

Simon Akam

Living the dream at the bottom of English football

BELOW THE GREEN slopes of Mount Parnassus in central Greece, the small town of Distomo was unusually full of people. The visitors were marking the 70th anniversary of the Distomo massacre, one of the worst Nazi atrocities in the country during the Second World War, in which more than 200 civilians were executed.

On a hill where a memorial to the victims

stands, Greek and German high-school students presented the “Children of War”, a theatrical ode to peace. Photographs of Nazi troops on the Ath-ens Acropolis were projected onto the backdrop. The audience watched in solemn silence.

In the town’s cafés, the atmosphere was nor-mally more boisterous. Soon, Maria Sideri-Tsa-mi’s name is mentioned. Three members of

Sideri-Tsami’s family were killed in the Distomo massacre. Yet the 23-year-old was a candidate in regional elections last May for Golden Dawn, the party widely described as neo-Nazi that has risen to prominence in Greece in recent years.

Sideri-Tsami has blamed communist resis-tance fighters for the massacre, saying they pro-voked the Nazis by staging an ambush. “They

knew the Germans would come back to the village to kill the people if they were attacked,” she said soon after the memorial ceremony.

Sideri-Tsami’s embrace of the far-right may seem extraordinary. But even people with ancestors killed by

the Nazis or a family tradition of leftism forged in the Second World War have joined Golden Dawn, which has tapped into anger at Greece’s deep economic crisis and disillusionment with traditional politics. In the run-up to the elections, Golden Dawn proudly displayed the video of Sid-eri-Tsami’s interview on its website.

But her declaration was met with less enthu-

I FOUGHT THE FASCISTS. MY FAMILY WILL BRING THEM BACKOnly 70 years ago, many Greeks were killed in Nazi atrocities. Yet today their grandchildren vote for Golden Dawn

BYKOSTAS KALLERGIS

@KallergisK

“ Our grandfathers were refugees, our fathers were immigrants . . . and we are racists!”

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NAZI ECHOES: Supporters of the ultra-nationalist party Golden Dawn have allied with the populist left of the Syriza party to force early elections. The Greeks are going to the polls on 25 January

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siasm locally. “It’s shameful,” says 84-year-old Maria Sechremeli, a distant relative of Sid-eri-Tsami. Sechremeli survived the massacre by hiding under the body of an executed neigh-bour. The scar of a stray bullet from the massa-cre still marks her leg. Sitting in her living room, Sechremeli says she never used to talk about the massacre with her grandchildren, not wanting to upset them or perpetuate the hatred from that era. But she changed her mind after becoming alarmed at the rise of Golden Dawn. “Do they want the best for Greece? By killing people? Doing all these ugly things? she says. “You can tell what kind of people they are.”

After decades on the political fringe, Golden Dawn came to much broader attention in 2010 with a nationalist, anti-immigration and fre-quently violent agenda. Media and academics have labelled the party neo-Nazi or fascist, but its members deny any links to national socialism.The party’s rise coincided with an unprecedented increase in racist attacks against immigrants. This violence went largely unpunished for years until a man with close links to Golden Dawn murdered anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in an Athens suburb in September 2013. The killer was arrested and the government launched a crack-down on the party.

Today, six high-ranking party members, including leader Nikos Michaloliakos, are in jail awaiting trial for setting up and operating a criminal organisation. The trial, which the party sees as political persecution, is expected to begin imminently. Despite the proceedings, Greece’s political scene has been in such flux that Sechremeli says she is afraid Golden Dawn could seize power and trigger a new civil war – in a country whose political traditions were estab-lished in the Second World War and which have been upheld for generations since.

Greece was riven by civil war after Germa-ny’s defeat in the Second World War. More than 100,000 people were killed in a brutal battle for power between leftists and rightists – an early Cold War conflict that ended only in 1940 with the defeat of the left. Many of Golden Dawn’s leadership come from families that were promi-nent in Greece’s postwar right. But not all. Gior-gos Germenis has very fond memories of his maternal grandfather, Panayotis Griziotis. He remembers him as a “modern grandpa” who was always close to the younger generations.

During the war, Griziotis was a communist guerrilla leader in western Greece. When his daughter was 10 years old, he would send her to fetch the then illegal newspaper of the Com-munist Party of Greece (KKE). She too became a

communist. She gave birth to Germenis, whom she used to carry in her arms while putting up posters with party comrades for the annual May Day rally in Athens. Her son is now one of Golden Dawn’s most prominent members of parliament and the first party executive to publicly acknowl-edge, in 2012, that his grandfather was a commu-nist guerrilla.

His revelation came as a huge shock to leftists, who could not comprehend how someone with such family traditions could end up on the far-right of the political spectrum. Germenis is cur-rently in prison awaiting trial with the rest of the party leadership. For this article, he gave written answers to questions passed on by his wife when she visited him in the maximum-security Koryd-allos jail in Athens.

According to Germenis, people who were once communists or socialists are among the most zealous Golden Dawn supporters. “They feel that the parties they were following all these years betrayed them!” he writes. Germenis joined the ranks of Golden Dawn in the early 1990s, when the ghost of nationalism was haunting the Bal-kan peninsula. His parents found out about his ideological departure much later. He says no one in his family tried to change his mind, nor did he try to change theirs. Germenis writes that his mother now believes that Golden Dawn is a truly revolutionary party. “In our rallies she didn’t see the usual party henchmen and the politically appointed executives but people from next door, workers, breadwinners, and that impressed her,” he writes.

Such ordinary people and their struggles made a deep impact on Tasos Papaioannou. He says he has been shocked by a rise in the number of suicides linked to the economic crisis in his home region of Corinth. Papaioannou, in his early for-ties, does not like to be called a taxi driver, unless he is driving Greek clients. For most of his day, he is a chauffeur taking wealthy foreign tourists to ancient Corinth, about 80km west of Athens. His parents emigrated to Australia when he was two years old. Twenty years later he returned for

a holiday and stayed. Papaioannou now votes for Golden Dawn, a

strongly anti-immigrant party, despite the fact that he experienced discrimination as a Greek in Australia. His grandfather, Giorgos, was also a communist guerrilla in the Corinth region during the civil war. “I never met him. I wish I had, even though my views are entirely different,” he says.

When the Greek economic crisis started, Papaioannou says he began to identify enemies: immigrants; corrupt politicians who embezzled the people’s wealth; the International Monetary Fund; those who held the leftist beliefs of his grandfather. He claims that some extreme right-ists in nearby villages have boxes of Kalashnikov rifles stored in their houses. Just in case.

Further south, Nikos Kourakos is a senior official at the Golden Dawn office in Kalamata. His grandfather fought the Germans as part of the communist resistance and was executed by a member of the notorious “security battal-ions” formed by Greece’s collaborationist gov-ernment. He does not feel his decision to join Golden Dawn more than 10 years ago offends the memory of his grandfather.

For some families, however, a child’s decision

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HAUNTING MEMORY: Skulls and bones in an ossuary in the Greek village of Distomo, top, serve as a reminder of the Nazi massacre of 218 civilians, including the family of Maria Sideri-Tsami, above, whose family name, “Sideri”, is written on a memorial plaque, right

to break with long-held values and support the far-right is a source of great anguish. Giorgos Triantafyllou, a pensioner whose name has been changed here at his request, lives in a small com-munity of which the Nazis executed almost half the population, including one of his relatives, during the Second World War. His family has a long history of resistance fighters during the Ger-man occupation – and later, of victims of political persecution during the rule of the military junta in the 1960s and 1970s.

Triantafyllou turned to religion and became a Jehovah’s Witness. He and his childhood sweet-heart raised two children according to their values. But after turning 18, their older child denounced the family’s religious beliefs and eventually joined Golden Dawn, standing as a candidate for the party in this year’s regional elections. Triantafyllou discovered the shocking news while surfing the internet. He was utterly devastated and he has not spoken to his first-born since. His distress is heightened by the fact the Nazis persecuted and imprisoned Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Likewise, pollsters, political analysts and sociologists ponder why Golden Dawn has proved to be so popular in areas formerly dom-inated by the Communist party. In Perama and Nikea, two districts of Athens long considered “red strongholds”, there has been a sharp rise in support for Golden Dawn in recent years. Vassi-liki Georgiadou, an associate professor of politi-cal science at Athens’ Panteion University, who has been carrying out extensive research in these districts, says the impoverishment of the work-ing class and local long-term unemployment – which hovers around 70% – have created fertile territory for Golden Dawn.

The party has blamed the local trade union’s political activity for the decreasing competitive-ness of local shipyards and subsequent loss of jobs. Golden Dawn set up its own trade union and promised work. Some workers signed up.

Politicised youths have used graffiti to turn the neighbourhoods’ walls into a battleground of ideologies. “Our grandfathers were refugees, our fathers were immigrants and we are racists!” one leftist slogan proclaims. “Free all jailed Golden Dawn members!” says another, not far from Korydallos prison, where the party’s leadership is incarcerated.

In another part of Athens, there’s a graffio offer-ing an ironic commentary on the twists of his-tory. An old man smoking a cigarette observes, “I fought the fascists so that my grandchildren could bring them back.” n

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RUSSIAN JOURNALISTS – or at least a great number of them – have become experts in black humour. They have to be if one of their goals is to remain sane. One reporter at a state-owned Russian newspaper joked privately with friends that they would have to scribble the “true story” in milk between the lines of ink, the way under-ground messages from exiles were conveyed

back to Russia in Tsarist times by the future father of the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin.

Press freedom has taken a giant step back-wards since the heady days after Communism’s collapse, when Russian editors welcomed inde-pendent ideas and valued professional reporting. It has become difficult to remain committed to decent journalism without risking your job and your family’s welfare. In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, dissidents invented the word sam-

izdat to describe their scribblings. Now, a new generation of dissidents is starting projects dis-creetly online, or going abroad to reach Russia from the outside.

No wonder. Most journalists in Russia live in fear of the authorities firing an editor or reporter for publishing something disparaging. For Russ-kaya Planeta, a television company covering

regional news, that day came on 27 November when the channel’s main investor fired the editor-in-chief, Pavel Pryanikov, after a report was aired about abductions of Tatars in Rus-sian-annexed Crimea.

Many journalists have created inde-pendent multimedia websites both in Russia and abroad. Blogs have popped up with anony-mous sponsors. “If the Kremlin shuts down five media outlets, 10 will appear online,” says Timur Olevsky, who covers the war in Ukraine for Dozhd TV, an independent channel struggling to survive from viewers’ donations. Last year, the Committee to Protect Journalists honoured Dozhd’s editor-in-chief, Mikhail Zygar, with the International Press Freedom Award for defiance

It has become difficult to remain committed to decent journalism without risking your job

BYANNA NEMTSOVA

@annanemtsova

THE NEW UNDERGROUND PRESS ENRAGING PUTIN’S INNER CIRCLE As the mainstream Russian media continues to be stifled, journalists are defying censorship on the internet

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH: One of Putin’s most vocal critics, businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, top, has condemned the Russian government for exerting control over society through media censorship

New outlets have been created on social net-works within hours. Yelena Vasilyeva’s Cargo-200 posted voices of army families searching for their loved ones, who had disappeared or been illegally deployed to fight in Ukraine. The more pressure the Kremlin puts on journalists, the more the solidarity between them grows.

The case of Lenta, the online newspaper, is instructive. Last march, Ivan Kolpakov was one of 78 reporters who quit their jobs at the high-pro-file site after a phone call from an investor close to the Kremlin prompted the firing of its editor-in-chief, Galina Timchenko. “I simply could not breathe in that stuffy atmosphere,” said Kolpa-kov at his new office in Riga, Latvia, where he, Timchenko and a couple of dozen other self-ex-iled Moscow reporters launched their new outlet, Meduza, in October.

During the war in Ukraine, there has been an unprecedented level of state propaganda in the papers and on the airwaves. It divided journalists into those who would compromise with the new hard line, and those who chose to quit their jobs or protest censorship in other ways. Two state reporters complained that every other article

they wrote was put “on hold” or never published. On December 29, Russian authorities closed down one of the last independent media outlets, Siberian television channel TV-2. In a final video message to viewers, reporters at the station said they had tried to report the truth despite constant pressure to change their editorial policy.

Often, direct intervention by the Kremlin is not needed. Self-censorship is pervasive and cor-rosive – editors know what must be done when liberal-minded colleagues lose their jobs. The Kremlin has made the general line clear: during this time of information warfare against the West, journalists have a duty to defend Mother Russia. Lenta realised that the conflict with Ukraine was “a minefield”, Timchenko said. But she nevertheless assigned reporter Ilya Azar to report from both sides of the front line.

Last summer, the Russian parliament intro-duced a law obliging bloggers with over 3,000 readers to register, allowing the government to review the authors’ personal information. That has not been very effective, according to State Duma Deputy Robert Schlegel, who supports policies to restrain anti-Putin media outlets that are “biased” but says there is no point in banning them online. “Medusa only grows new heads,” he says. Nevertheless, the Kremlin continues to “cleanse the destructive and anti-Russian journalism”, as think-tank analyst Yuri Krupnov puts it. When thousands of doctors and nurses demonstrated against Putin’s medical reforms (which included cuts to hospital budgets), the only news sources that published details of the action were online.

Russian modern art expert and blogger Murat Gelman decided to leave the country last spring. His Cultural Alliance project, a network that involved artists from various Russian cities in 11 regions, was deemed insufficiently patriotic. He came under pressure to give it up. “I could not stop writing my blog, it is a part of me,” Gelman says. The editor-in-chief of Kommersant, Mikhail Mikhailin, had to resign after the newspaper pub-lished an article about one of the most influential figures in Putin’s circle, Igor Sechin.

Losing a job in such a public way can lead to bet-ter things, however. On the night that Prianikov was fired from the Russkaya Planeta television channel, five of his colleagues quit in solidarity. Most of the staff attended a liquid wake for the “death” of news in Russia. Within hours, Open Russia, a news website launched by formerly imprisoned tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has become a persistent irritant to Putin from his base in Switzerland, posted on Twitter: “Guys, send over your CVs.” n

of imprisonment, repression and censorship.It cost reporter Oleg Kashin just $40 to launch

his Kashinguru media project last spring – the monthly fee for the domain and hosting services required for the website. By October, half a mil-lion readers had visited.

Two members of the band Pussy Riot who were recently released from prison, Maria Aly-okhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, launched the website Media Zona, a play on the Russian slang for the gulag (the zone). The site covers news from Russian prisons, human rights viola-tions and various overtly political court cases.

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DEATH WISHHow a young Harry Potter fan from a British suburb became a martyr for Allah in the Syrian desert

BY ALEX PERRY @PerryAlexJ

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Not so long ago, in a land not far away, the British man who would become an icon to a generation of European Isla-mists fighting and dying in Syria and Iraq sat down before a webcam in his parent’s modest home on England’s south coast and filmed a 90-minute tutorial on how to tie a turban. The image was badly lit but sharp enough to reveal the figure of a young man with extravagant black hair. To the back and sides it fell in long, thick loops, tumbling onto the upturned collar of a docker’s jacket where it executed a final exuber-ant ski-jump. The front was more del-icate: single, thin strands spilling like poured water down over his forehead, past his black eyes, his noble nose and full mouth, extending to his black beard.

Ifthekar Jaman looked like a muske-teer. Like Che Guevara. And that was no accident. Staring directly ahead, Ifthekar examined his image, then ran his fingers through one side of his hair before turning to the other and smooth-ing it. “Assalamu alaikum,” he said. “Okay … er … I thought I’d do a little tutorial on, er, turbans ‘cos a couple of brothers – I wonder if he’s watchin’ – er,

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@ReflectionofIslam is a brother that ask can I do a tutorial so I thought, yeah, man, might as well …” Ifthekar checked how he looked again, smoothed his hair several more times and regarded his smartphone expectantly. With no audi-ence, there was no point to the tutorial, and maybe not to anything, so Ifthekar waited in silence, examining himself on screen. “Hair’s really crazy, man,” he tutted, as though someone was watch-ing – which, after several minutes, they were. “Cool, man, ‘preciate it,” said Ift-hekar, smiling at his phone. Then, pick-ing up a white taqiyah cap, he cleared his throat and began. “Alright,” he said. “OK. So. First of all, you need a hat . . .”

Ifthekar Jaman was 22. His parents, Enu Miah and Hena Choudhury, were first-generation immigrants from Ban-gladesh. Arriving in 1981, the couple settled in Hudson Road in Portsmouth, a few streets from where Charles Dick-ens was born and a 20-minute stroll back from the old navy docks where Nelson set sail for Trafalgar. Like hun-dreds of Bangladeshi émigrés, Enu and Hena opened a takeaway selling kebabs, biryani, tandoori and spicy chips with

free delivery on orders of more than £6. The name they gave their business, St Mary’s Kebab & Masalla, captured the integration – the multiculturalism – that was the shared hope of the British state and the hundreds of thousands of new citizens it assimilated from its former colonies in the decades after empire.

Portsmouth gave Enu and Hena the essential elements of a new, prosperous life: a decent living, a home, free hospi-tals, and free schools for their four chil-dren. But Portsmouth was a hard place to love. Hudson Road was one of hun-dreds of drab, treeless terraces order-ing human life into neat, grey rows that ringed the city and one of tens of thou-sands like it in regional towns across Britain. Tamannah was their eldest and their only girl, after whom came the boys – Tuhim, Ifthekar and baby Mus-takim – and, of all of them, it was Ift-hekar who was the dreamer.

Like all English kids, as a boy he liked to lose himself in the stories of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. That was fine, as far as it went. But these were English stories about English boys fight-ing English monsters and Hena, espe-

cially, didn’t understand them and as such neither she nor Enu really trusted them. So when Ifthekar was 11 they sent him for a year’s Islamic instruction at a private school in London.

It seemed to work. Ifthekar stuck with his Bengali traditions. He helped out in the restaurant kitchen, preparing kofta and naan and puri, and rarely missed prayers at Jami mosque. By the time he left school and got a job answering phones in a call centre for Rupert Mur-doch’s Sky TV, he was a polite and sober young man, popular with colleagues and calm with customers, even when one asked if his name was pronounced “I’m a fucker”. On Saturdays, he volun-teered at a da’wah stall in Commercial Road, where he and other respectable boys from the neighbourhood handed out Qur’ans to passers-by.

But Ifthekar hadn’t stopped dream-ing. On the contrary, for him Islam had become the foundation for a power-ful new adventure fantasy. Online, he began to sketch out a new narrative for himself as a Muslim warrior-hero facing off against the biggest monster of them all: Satan. Ostensibly this was about reli-gious piety, though often it seemed to be about nothing more serious than Ift-hekar’s love of cats, of which he posted endless pictures. But some would also have spotted signs of radicalism. “I really like Osama bin Laden, I’ll be honest,” said Iftekhar, just like that, in the middle of his turban tutorial. There were also hints that Ifthekar was gay. His blogs and tweets were rarely addressed to girls, and Ifthekar unfollowed any who posted uncovered pictures of them-selves. But when the boys said he looked great, Ifthekar would reply with rhap-sodies about his deep feelings for the brothers. “I swear – you know what? – I love you brothers,” he would say. “I just want you to know. I love you brothers so much. It’s something I’ve never seen before. I wish us lot, us brothers, we could, like, we could get some land and stuff and do Khilafah, all of us. Honestly. Alhamdulillah.”

If these were terrorists, then they were among the least capable, least experienced and altogether least scary the world had ever seen

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Ifthekar Jaman was a self-selected enthusiast with no training who travelled to Syria at his own instigation and at his own expense. There are some similarities between his early life and that of Cherif Kouachi, 32, the French jihadi who, with his 34-year-old brother Said, shot dead 12 people at the offi ces of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. But in other ways Kouachi conforms more closely to the pattern of a militant recruited and trained by others.

Like Jaman, the Kouachis’ parents were immigrants. Like him, too, the brothers were members of a da’wah proselytising group and grew up in a regional city, Rennes in Brittany, western France. But unlike Jaman, who came from a stable family,

the Kouachi brothers were orphans, raised by foster parents. Cherif was also not a pious boy. He was an aspiring rapper and, according to his lawyer in 2008, more a “pot-smoker from the projects than an Islamist”. “He smokes, drinks, doesn’t sport a beard and has a girlfriend before marriage,” said Vincent Ollivier. Cherif himself told the court: “Before, I was a delinquent.”

That early history and Cherif’s subsequent embrace of doctrinaire violence fi ts a well-established progression in which a recruiter targets troubled youngsters and present righteous Islamist militancy as their salvation. Cherif’s transition took a decade. The 2008 trial followed his arrest for attempting to travel to Iraq in 2005, a journey he undertook with the help of a group of Paris jihadis that had already sent several Frenchmen to Iraq with whom he had trained in Buttes Chaumont since 2003. By then, Cherif was also receiving religious instruction from Farid

Benyettou, a young self-styled preacher whose local mosque had ejected him for his radicalism. “I think in Mr Benyettou he found someone who could tell him what to do, like an older brother,” said Ollivier, the lawyer.

At the trial, Cherif was found guilty and sentenced to three years for conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, of which he served half. In 2010 he was arrested again, accused of plotting to free Smain Ait Ali Belkacem, an ethnic Algerian who injured 30 people when he set off a bomb in the Paris metro in 1995. Said was also detained but after three months the brothers were released without prosecution for lack of evidence. One man jailed in that case was Amedy Coulibaly, who was released from prison in November last year. The day after theCharlie Hebdo attack, he killed a policewoman in Paris, then the next day four more people from a group of hostages he was holding at a supermarket, demanding the

police end their pursuit of the Kouachis.

When Cherif was fi rst arrested in 2005, he had no military training. The profi ciency of the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offi ces – in which the brothers executed 10 people in fi ve minutes after reading out their names, then gunned down two policemen in the street outside, then eluded a massive manhunt for two and a half days – suggest that had changed and some reports have claimed that one or both of the brothers travelled to Yemen in 2011 to train with al-Qaida in the Arabic Peninsula.

But in at least one sense, the Kouachis, Amedy Coulibaly and Ifthekar Jaman were the same. They all anticipated a glorious death. “Farid told me it is written in the scriptures that it’s good to die as a martyr,” Cherif said in court in 2008. “Thanks to Farid’s advice, my doubts evaporated. He provided justifi cation for my coming death.”

HOWOO THE STOTT RIES OF JAMAN AND THEPAPP RIS ASAA SASS SSINS COMPAPP RE

The Kouachis, Coulibaly and Ifthekar Jaman anticipated a glorious death

BLOOD BROTHERS: French authorities stoppedtheir surveillance of theKouachi brothers in July,deeming them “low risk”,according to Le Parisiennenewspaper

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But mostly Ifthekar was just trying on a new identity for size. That was the simple and beautiful truth about sur-rendering to Islam, said Ifthekar. With all Islam’s prescriptions on how to be and what to eat and how to appear, how you looked was who you were. And it was like this, steeped in his love for the brothers, and their love for him, and the way they looked, which was the way he looked, which was the same as Osama bin Laden’s look, with bits from The Mummy andThe Prince of Persia thrown in, that Ifthekar came to see himself as a soldier of faith and death. He was a mujahid, a jihadi – even, if Allah called him to it, a shahid, a martyr.

If he was an example to others, he insisted it was not because he was any-thing special but because he was guided through the darkness by the bright light of jannah, a perfect, everlasting para-dise far away from Hudson Road and Portsmouth, far above Middle Earth

and all the Muggles. “I’d love to meet all you brothers in jannah, man, just chilling, smoking some shisha,” he said. “Hey, imagine the cats you can have in jannah! Like massive tigers – or lions! – just walking with you . . .”

Ifthekar Jaman recorded his tutorial on the night of 16 December 2012. A day less than a year later, on 15 December 2013, in the snowy ruins of an eastern Syrian town called Ghazwa al-Khair, Ift-hekar was sent by one Islamist militia to fi ght another and died right there, in the fi rst minutes of his fi rst battle, his legs blown off by a tank, his guts splashed all around, his lustrous long black hair curled back over his head.

THE ROAD TO JIHADIn early 2011, a democratic wave that became known as the Arab Spring swept the Middle East. Though distinctly anti-democratic, political Islam soon learned to ride the wave of protest, chal-lenging for power across the Arab world, even holding it for a year in Egypt. When the turmoil spread to Syria, the protests quickly became a rebellion and the rebels – outgunned by a 40-year-old authoritarian regime led by an Alawite president, Bashar al-Assad – were soon describing themselves as jihadis.

Ifthekar often talked about migrating to the Middle East. Privately, he already considered himself a jihadi. In May 2013, telling his parents he was going to learn Arabic and maybe help Syrian refugees, he booked a one-way ticket to Turkey and caught a bus to Reyhanli on Turkey’s southern border with Syria. Ifthekar had no idea how to cross the frontier. But, as he told Shiraz Maher, a researcher at

ROLE MODEL:Ifthekar Jaman, second fromleft, pictured in Syria, became a“celebrity jihadi” with a strongfollowing on social media

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the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College Lon-don, on the bus to Reyhanli Ifthekar spotted a man with a beard, offered him use of his bottle of alcohol-free perfume and introduced himself. The man sur-mised Ifthekar was an aspiring jihadi. A few hours later the pair crossed the bor-der and were driving in the man’s car to the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

Writing in the New Statesman, Maher said Ifthekar’s aim was to join a Syr-ian rebel group called Jabhat al-Nusra. Among Syria’s insurgents, Jabhat al-Nusra distinguished itself as one of the most effective and, with many former al-Qaida in Iraq members in its ranks, the official al-Qaida affiliate. But Jabhat al-Nusra still used the old ways – vetting, personal introductions, background checks – and Ifthekar was a self-selected jihadi. Presenting him-self at a Jabhat al-Nusra compound in Aleppo, Ifthekar was rejected. Devas-tated, he wandered into a coffee shop, where he met an Algerian fighter who was in another group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis). Ifthekar hadn’t heard of Isis. “But I checked them out,” he told Maher, “and they were great.” Isis vetted Ifthekar for a fortnight, then gave him basic weapons training and, as a first job, guard duty.

Isis’s relaxed attitude to recruitment meant it was attracting thousands of for-eign jihadis. Most were from the Middle East or North Africa but Ifthekar also met Britons, French, Germans, Scandi-navians, Belgians and others from the Americas and Asia. Its commanders were often veterans of Saddam Hussein’s army, with battlefield experience against Iran and the US. Its structure included departments overseeing finance, logis-tics, electricity generation, education and health. It had a media team, which produced videos of fighting and mas-sacres it said had been carried out by Assad’s forces. They also oversaw a steady stream of online broadcasts from foreign fighters encouraging others to join them and denouncing the West on

Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and ask.fm.With his online following and his

good looks, Ifthekar quickly became the team’s star. For his part, Ifthekar revelled in the attention. He assumed a jihadi name, Abu Abdurrahman al-Bri-tani, and began taking pictures of him-self wherever he went, staring seriously at the camera, long hair flying in the wind. Several pictures went viral. One was of Ifthekhar looking stern as he rode across the desert in the back of a pick-up in black turban, a gun on his back and the black flags of Islam flying behind. Ift-hekar’s tweets, meanwhile, were widely celebrated. “There are people who think that the jihad in Syria is 24/7 fighting but it’s much more relaxed than that,” he wrote on 21 September 2013. “They’re calling it a five-star jihad.” Another famous line was about the hypocrisy of Westerners who denied the heroism of jihad. “A man leaves his home to fight for the oppressed people sounds heroic until you add in ‘Muslim Man’,” he wrote on 30 November. “Then he’s a terrorist/extremist.” Ifthekar soon had more than 3,000 followers on Twitter.

THE BANGLADESH BAD BOYS BRIGADEIfthekar’s fans wanted to be like him. Once looking like him had been enough. Now, in the summer of 2013, many wanted to join him in Syria. Ifthekar took a personal interest in two groups of British men. There was a trio from Man-chester with whom Ifthekar became close online: Mohammad Azzam Jav-eed, Anil Khalil Raoufi, who would later re-style himself as Abu Layth al-Ko-rasani (meaning ‘the Afghan’, reflecting his ethnic origin) and another man who would take the jihadi name Abu Qa’qaa. There were also five friends from Ports-mouth, many of them from his da’wah group: Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, who worked at Primark; Mamunur Roshid; Asad Uzzaman; Mehdi Hassan, a privately educated body-building fan who was just 19; and Mashudur Choud-hury, 30, who was married with two chil-

The jihadis’ motivation was transparent. They wanted to be adored. But what reason would the British state have for describing these little boys lost as the devil?

Far more dangerous than returnees were prospective jihadis stopped from going abroad

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dren. It was Choudhury who discussed the logistics of traveling to Syria with Ift-hekar and gave the group its nickname: the Bangladeshi Bad Boys Brigade.

Getting to Syria wasn’t complicated. To seem like they were going for a hol-iday, both groups bought return tickets from Britain to Turkey. The Manchester group fl ew out on 5 October, the Ports-mouth group followed three days later and Ifthekar guided them together in Reyhanli. Abu Qa’qaa later described his relief at meeting up with the Ports-mouth group on Tumblr. These were “brothers who understood the deen, brothers who understood the reason we had been placed on this earth and who knew what was incumbent upon them from the commands of Allah”.

The next day the eight men packed and took taxis to the border. Abu Qa’qaa was spooked by the sight of a “random white man” smoking and a holding notebook outside their hotel. On seeing their British passports, the Syrian border guards demanded $6,000 to let them pass. “We returned back to the hotel extremely disheartened,” wrote Abu Qa’qaa. “Tears were ready to fl ow from our eyes. I was lying with my head on the lap of my brother Abu Layth. Your aver-age person would never understand this. This is why the brotherhood in Islam is so beautiful, something unique.” Sud-denly, Mashudur Choudhury received a call from Ifthekar saying a van was com-ing shortly and the group must make ready. The van took them to a Turkish village and dropped them. A second pick-up then took them a further fi ve minutes, at which point they ran into a Turkish army patrol. The Turks ordered the men out, searched their luggage, stole a pair of gloves, then discovered their British passports. At this, said Abu

Qa’qaa, “they smiled, were inspired by our presence and let us go on our way on foot”.

The group walked across the border and immediately ran into a rebel fi ghter from another group who took them into the nearest town in his van. “As soon as we jumped out, a pick-up swung round the corner and out jumped Abu Abdu-rrahman al-Britani [Ifthekar]. He seemed as eager to meet us as we were to meet him. Instantaneously love was stored between our hearts and we hugged each other tightly with the biggest of smiles on our faces ... so much the muscles in our face began to hurt!” After another two hours’ drive, the men arrived at Ifthekar’s Isis base. They were given a place to rest then taken to see the bodies of six jihadis killed that day. “To my amazement it was if they weren’t dead,” wrote Abu Qa’qaa. “Wallahi, it was as if they were sleeping but more paler. This reminded me of the ayat in the Qur’an: ‘Do not think of those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead. Nay, they are alive!’”

The British jihadis began their train-ing in Syria with religious study and gun safety. But within days, they suff ered their fi rst disappointment when Mashudur

Choudhury announced he was quit-ting. Though his age gave Choudhury some authority, among the brothers he was both the biggest fantasist and, ulti-mately, the least convinced. As Kings-ton Crown Court would later hear, after the collapse of a business in 2012, Choudhury pretended to have stomach cancer and persuaded his sister-in-law to give him £25,000 to spend on treat-ment in Singapore. Choudhury did fl y to Singapore but spent the money on hotels and prostitutes and a series of other holidays. Going to Syria as a jihadi was his masterplan to escape the past and impress the world. The training, he wrote on Twitter, “sounded proper hardcore, like running for 10km with-out stopping”. But confronted by the reality of war, Choudhury lost his nerve. He travelled back to Turkey and caught his return fl ight to Gatwick, where he was arrested by counter-terrorism offi -cers who had been following his travels online. In May he was convicted of ter-rorism off ences and in December sen-tenced to four years.

At least one of the British jihadis was now exposed as a spectacular fantasist. The others appeared undeterred, how-ever, embracing their new identities with new jihadi names and posting mes-sages online saying war was awesome, and just like the movies. Abu Layth al-Korasani claimed a fi refi ght he saw “was like a scene from star wars with all the ‘zing’ noises and red lights”.

Of all the foreign jihadis, Ifthekar remained the star. In November 2013, his fame hit new heights when he appeared on Newsnight, the BBC’s fl agship eve-ning show, via camera phone. This time Ifthekar seemed to be attempting a spe-cial forces look: black beanie, beard, kohl eyes, long hair, black scarf around his neck. He confi rmed he was with Isis and said he had travelled to “the land of Sham” to establish “the law of God, the law of Allah”. He added that Isis’s insur-gency was “fully, fully” justifi ed, despite its habit of executing and beheading unarmed prisoners. “That’s why I am so

CALL OF JIHAD:While battling its way into Iraqicities, Isis and its supporters alsoset out on an off ensive social mediacampaign to recruit young menwith “inspirational” posters, left

The full version of this article is published as part of the Newsweek Insights

series currently available at newsweekinsights.com

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pleased to be here,” he said. “The way they rule is with justice.”

BRINGING TERROR BACK HOMEIfthekar ended his interview by saying Britain shouldn’t worry about fighters like him returning home. Back home, the press, government and security agencies were discussing plans to refuse them re-entry. The assumption was that in Syria they would have acquired dan-gerous new skills and a terrifying battle ruthlessness.

In truth, Ifthekar posed little threat to Britain, or anywhere else. Though Ifthekar had been in Syria six months, he had yet to fire a shot in anger. He had no combat experience, no medical

knowledge, no understanding of tactics or soldiering and only the most rudi-mentary knowledge of how to use a gun. His lack of scholarship meant he could assume no religious role and his assid-uous use of social media made him a liability to operational security. For the British fighters, jihad meant guarding, cooking and a steady stream of selfies. It was, in the end, an introspective adven-ture. Even if they weren’t doing much, they were in Syria and they looked good. They looked the part.

If these were terrorists, then, they were among the least capable, least experienced and altogether least scary the world had ever seen. But even inept soldiers have one military use. And soon after the Newsnight broadcast – maybe

the British fighters’ fame was making other Isis soldiers jealous, maybe their commanders wanted to test their zeal-ousness, maybe Isis’s battle plan simply required a tactical distraction – the Brit-ish fighters started being deployed as cannon fodder. First to be killed, on 15 December 2013, was Ifthekar. On 3 Feb-ruary 2014, Abu Layth al-Korasani died. In July, Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, the Primark worker from Portsmouth, was killed and Mehdi Hassan was shot in the stomach. Over the summer, Isis captured enough territory that it re-des-ignated itself “Islamic State”. But its successes ended with a costly battle against Kurdish forces aided by US war-planes for a city called Kobane on the

Turkish border. There, on 21 October Mamunur Roshid and Asad Uzzaman were injured when a building collapsed on them during a US airstrike; Roshid later died of his wounds. Three days later Hassan was also killed in Kobane.

In 10 months, five of the nine British fighters were dead. A sixth, Uzzaman, was badly injured. A seventh, Choud-hury was in jail. Of the last two, Man-chester jihadis Mohammad Javeed and Abu Qa’qaa, who was shot in the right foot and leg in the same attack in which Ifthekar died, little had been heard for months. The beheadings of two Amer-ican journalists and two British aid workers between August and October by a masked jihadi with a British accent focused attention on the barbarism

of Isis’s foreign fighters. A more accu-rate picture would have centred on the fighters’ own attrition. In August the US government-funded Western Jihadism Project said around a third of the 2,000 Westerners who travelled to Syria and Iraq since 2011 had died. It predicted that to rise to a half.

OF HEROES AND MONSTERSThe British jihadis cast themselves as heroes facing a monster. Most of Britain – and the world – cast them as the mon-sters. Neither story was true.

The jihadis’ motivation was transpar-ent. They wanted to be adored. But what reason would the British state have for describing these little boys lost as the

devil? For it was largely a fiction, even the part about the threat they posed on com-ing home. Of the 500 Britons who have travelled to Syria and Iraq, around 260 have returned but only 40 are being pros-ecuted for terrorism offences. To repeat: even the British counter-terrorism ser-vices consider a full 220 of them less dan-gerous than Mashudur Choudhury.

A senior counter-terrorism officer told me that far more dangerous than returnees were prospective jihadis stopped from going abroad. He pointed out that the two Canadian converts arrested for attacks in October – one ran over two soldiers in Quebec, kill-ing one; the other shot a guard at the war memorial in Ottawa before he was gunned down inside the Canadian par-

“This is going to sound weird.But I was actually really impressed, masha’allah, by how handsome this guy was. I was jealous. I was like, ‘Man, this guy’s got a turban on, he’s got really great eyes, beard, everything about this guy, he looks like the prophet’.”

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liament – had both been prevented from traveling to Syria. So why such concern over the British jihadis? Cage, a Mus-lim prisoners group, believes the British security services have an incentive not to dampen public fears but raise them to scare them into approving ever more draconian security legislation and drum up extra resources; British politicians want to appear tough at a time when hostility to immigration is electorally popular; and British newspapers faith-fully repeat these stories because they are, after all, good stories, well sourced, and those sell papers.

The one winner to emerge from this confusion of story-telling is the man all sides agree is a true monster: President Bashar al-Assad. In his quest to stay in

power, Assad has torn his own country apart, fl attening cities, making more than three million of his people refu-gees and using chemicals on those who have remained. Assad’s justifi cation has always been that he is fi ghting al-Qaida. It was once a fi ction. But the foreign jihadis not only gave him the enemy he wanted but prompted the most gymnas-tic redrawing of international alliances.

Today Assad’s backers – Iran, Hezbol-lah and Russia – are in eff ective alliance

with Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, all of Europe and Israel. Fantasy has become fact. And, for Europe’s thousands of aspiring jihadis, this looking glass world holds an open invitation for thousands to follow Ifthekar and make their dream reality.

“This is going to sound weird,” said a young Muslim man with a Scottish accent in an audio tribute posted online after Ifthekar’s death. “But I was actu-ally really impressed, masha’allah, by how handsome this guy was. I was jealous. I was like, ‘Man, this guy’s got a turban on, he’s got really great eyes, beard, everything about this guy, he looks like the prophet’.” The Scot said he wanted to copy Ifthekar. “He made it look cool,” he said. n

CITY OF ANGELSFerocious fi ghting for controlof Kobane has raged for threemonths, above. The town hasbecome a symbol of resistanceagainst Isis

By common consent one of the greatest living satirical cartoonists in the world, Ralph Steadman, at 78, is still raging against the dying of the light

We were sitting in a bar in Aspen, Col-orado, almost 20 years ago, I remind Ralph Steadman, when he fi rst told me that he’d become a cartoonist because he wanted to change the world. It wasn’t the fi rst time he’d made this declara-tion and it wouldn’t be the last. But it’s a mission statement that seems horri-bly apposite this afternoon, as we sit in the living room of his house near Maid-stone, Kent, watching live news cov-erage from the print warehouse where Said and Cherif Kouachi, the killers of the Charlie Hebdo artists, are making their last stand.

“It is interesting that you should men-tion that remark today,” says Steadman, “because, looking at what has been hap-

Exclusive interview byROBERT CHALMERS

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“Distasteful, Unhygienic. Truculent.

pening in Paris, I now feel that I have succeeded. I did manage to change the world, and it is a worse place than it was when I started. Far worse – an achieve-ment I had always assumed would be impossible.”

With the exception of a brief radio interview on the day of the shootings, Steadman had declined to join the throng of commentators jostling to share their opinions on the tragedy. Just as I arrived, he had spurned an invitation from a radio station in Lincoln, Nebraska. “As soon as this thing happened,” he says, “the phone started ringing. I don’t know why.”

“Probably,” I tell him, “because peo-ple perceive you as precisely the sort of . . .”

“. . . bastard who might draw some-thing that would severely displease somebody because they could not see the joke?” the 78-year-old interrupts.

It’s more likely that, given his reputa-tion for images of grotesque irreverence, typifi ed by his illustrations for his friend Hunter S Thompson’s demented novella Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, people see him as eminently qualifi ed to assess the splenetic defi ance in the work of revered cartoonists like Cabu and Wolinski, who died in the assault. I was with Stead-man when he last saw Thompson, a few months before the writer’s suicide, which occurred 10 years ago next month and, as I tell the artist, I can remember the intense emotional impact that par-ticular death infl icted on him.

“What was your fi rst reaction when you heard about the attack in Paris?”

“I thought, ‘Oh, bloody hell, this can-not possibly be true.’ Disbelief. After that, I think I was in shock.” Steadman explains that he heard the news from his wife, Anna, when he came in from his daily swim in the outdoor pool behind his house. “And then, as I say, the phone calls started. And I just said to myself, ‘I am not going to respond to this now. I’ve got to let some time pass. I can’t start handing down judgment on this yet.’

We put the television on, as I guess most people did. We saw the hideous sight of that wounded policeman on the fl oor.”

“Ahmed Merabet: a Muslim.”“Yes. There are so many terrible and

perverted dimensions to this aff air. Can you imagine if the killers were to walk in here right now? We say, ‘Right. Explain why you did this thing.’ And they say, ‘We felt that we were being ridiculed in France.’ When you think about it in rational terms, the whole thing is sur-real.”

STEADMAN, AS I REMIND HIM, IS HARDLY UNFAMILIAR with the power of gross and off ensive imagery created with subversive intent. But the caricatures of Allah and Muhammad, I suggest, take any moral debate into rather more complex territory than do, say, his merciless depictions of Richard Nixon, George W Bush, or Tony Blair.

“Obviously there’s a long tradition of work in which satire and vulgarity col-lide,” I suggest. “But is it always legit-imate to cause off ence?” The Charlie Hebdo artist I’ve had most contact with over the years, I explain, is the 86-year-old anarchist Maurice Sinet, known as Siné, who was fi red from the magazine

after contributing, in 2008, a column and drawings which had him accused of inciting hatred against Jews; the kind of editorial sanction the paper has not always extended to artists satirising Islam. You hardly need a degree in reli-gious studies to know that depicting the prophet Muhammad as a dog (as the Swedish artist Lars Vilks did, in 2007) will cause most Muslims to take off ence and, most would agree, with good rea-son. Does Steadman ever fi nd himself looking at such images and thinking: what’s the point?

“There can come a stage where what you are producing is just irresponsi-ble graffi ti. For which – yes – there is no point. But working as . . . I don’t often fi nd myself using the phrase ‘a respon-sible satirist’ . . . you would seek to pro-duce something that is very funny in some way.”

“Which Charlie Hebdo could be.”“Yes,” Steadman replies. “It is quite

reasonable for a reader to be off ended. It’s slightly less reasonable to enter an offi ce armed with two Kalashnikovs and a grenade. Most people would regard that as something of an overreaction.”

STEADMAN HAS AN APARTMENT IN PARIS, not too far from that address. He knew Georges Wolinski, Cabu, and several others of the victims. “It does bring a peculiar focus to these events,” I suggest, “when you realise that there is a real, if very remote, possibility that you could have been a guest in the building that day.”

“And when you imagine that,” Stead-man says, in a remark that curiously anticipates an interview which will later be broadcast with Michele Catalano, the owner of the print warehouse who off ered the Kouachi brothers coff ee, “you fi nd yourself wondering how you would have reacted in those circum-stances. What could you possibly say? ‘How can I help you? Can I get you a drink? Milk and sugar? Or would you prefer that I served as a target?’”

One of the stranger aspects of the

Moody. Provocative towards bastards.”

George W Bush, 2004

“I did manage to change the world, and it is a worse place than it was when I started. Far worse.”

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tragedy is the way in which solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, a publication not known for its conservatism or subtlety, has been effusively expressed by the kind of people with whom its staff would have struggled to empathise, among them David Cameron, headline writers for The Sun, and Marine Le Pen, who was once represented by the paper as a pile of faeces.

Ralph Steadman, by contrast, says he struggles to find the kind of language

appropriate to describe the events in Paris. “In the case of the killers,” he tells me, “it’s far easier to find adjectives that are inappropriate. Like ‘anodyne’. And ‘atheistic’. ‘Apathetic’. And ‘Anglican’. I’m still on the As. We could go through the whole dictionary’.”

I should probably say that I have never met a more compassionate person than Steadman before mentioning that this last remark, dark as it is, strikes us both as extremely funny. We’ve been talking for an hour or so and this is not the first time we’ve found ourselves laughing. I don’t know, I tell the artist, what that says about us as people.

“Tragedy provokes different offshoots of thought,” he replies. “Even at a wake,

you can’t keep sitting there saying, ‘Oh, it’s terrible you know. I feel terrible. Do you feel terrible? You must do, I know, but I can tell that you don’t feel anything like as terrible as I do’. As humans we just can’t do that.”

Some years ago, when we were travel-ling in Utah, Steadman told me that he feels interviews sometimes risk sound-ing like posthumous tributes. What adjectives, I asked him, would he like to see in his own obituary?

“Distasteful,” he said. “Unhygienic. Truculent. Moody. Provocative towards bastards.”

“How about long-lived?”“Oh, yes. I’d like my obituary to say:

‘He was very long-lived. Endlessly. We thought he’d never go away’. A pause. “And we were right: he didn’t.”

Since then, his painting has contin-ued to resonate with a new, younger audience. He recently completed the artwork for a limited edition Blu-ray release of Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, which goes on sale next month. His dis-tinctive labels for Jim Caruso’s Flying Dog Brewery have helped turned beers such as “Raging Bitch” into globally rec-ognised brands. And Steadman’s long-standing friendship with Johnny Depp was the focal point of Charlie and Lucy

Paul’s acclaimed 2012 film about Stead-man, For No Good Reason. “In many ways,” Depp told me, “I look upon Ralph as a kind of miracle. It is just a gas to go down and see him in Kent; an incredible privilege. He really is just so gentle and so nice. And yet at the same time he is, as you know, a psychopath.”

RALPH IDRIS STEADMAN WAS BORN IN WALLASEY and grew up in Abergele, North Wales, from the age of five. He dropped out of an engineer-ing apprenticeship at aircraft manu-facturer De Havilland after less than a year, “because I couldn’t stand factory life” and went to work at Woolworths supermarket in Colwyn Bay. He began drawing seriously while completing his military service.

“I enrolled in a correspondence course,” he says, “taught by Percy V Bradshaw, called ‘You Too Can Learn To Draw And Earn £££s’.”

His principal mentor was a high-ly-gifted art teacher at East Ham Techni-cal College, Leslie Richardson, who died last month. People often struggle to rec-oncile the benevolence of Steadman’s character with the extreme vicious-ness of the work. If there’s one crucial impulse that drives him, I suggest, it’s his ferocious detestation of the bully.

“My parents were kind people,” says Steadman, “with a strong sense of the need to defend the defenceless. I was brought up to be honest by my mother and father. They were very concerned about that. They believed that honesty should be the foundation of anyone’s life. That ideal was ingrained in me.”

“I can’t imagine you having ever been involved in a fight.”

“No. I can’t do it, which naturally risks putting you at the mercy of bullies. At school I can remember flapping my arms around, in some attempt at defence.”

“Of course part of that awkwardness relates to physique. Had you been built like – I don’t know, Johnny Weissmuller [the best known Tarzan] – you would have had a very different experience of Richard Nixon, 2004

“It is quite reasonable for a

reader to be offended. It’s slightly less reasonable to

enter an office armed with

two Kalashnikovs and a grenade.”

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the world.”“Undoubtedly. The thing is that, tem-

peramentally, I’m less like Tarzan, more like Jane.”

His international reputation was established in 1971 by his illustrations for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which Thompson took the Wodehousian bachelor’s blithe and incautious atti-tude to alcohol and extended it to LSD

and munitions. Thompson brought the hubris of a delinquent rock guitarist to the normally sedate world of American letters.

The two men’s relationship was a curi-ous one to say the least. The softly-spo-ken Englishman contributed generosity, patience and good-humour. Thomp-son responded with theatrical abuse that sometimes crossed over into real

meanness. I saw him reduce Steadman to tears on two occasions, and that was just while Thompson was still alive. And yet if, like Steadman, you appear to pro-duce your best work when anguished, Thompson’s was a useful number to have in your contacts list.

STEADMAN’S ARTISTIC RANGE IS SUCH THAT IT WOULD BE UNFAIRto describe him simply as an illustrator or cartoonist. He is, as his friend Bruce Robinson, director of Withnail and I and The Rum Diary told me, “A supremely talented artist. I feel it is a privilege to know him, because at his best he has the power of fucking Goya. I mean that. There is no one else in his league that I know of.”

Steadman’s own satirical targets have tended to be men abusing positions of power, and consequently very diff erent people from the Charlie Hebdo assassins, who came from the class commonly described as the urban dispossessed, and who would undoubtedly have expe-rience of scorn and racism.

“I am quite sure that people must have treated them like shit,” Steadman says. “But I also think they were bullies, in not so diff erent a way than certain pol-iticians. Think of the mechanics of the killing. They call out the names, perhaps with those terrible pauses you get in reality shows. ‘And the contestant leav-ing us today is . . .’ I hope those deaths were quick, but in the minds of the kill-ers it was probably the slower the better. I imagine they would have preferred to use a single shotgun, which required careful reloading each time, or a chain-saw. I think they were seeking to pro-duce a very particular kind of shock.”

In many ways, Steadman argues, “I think that terrorists and some political leaders share a similar mindset, in that they consider themselves to be believers. They are devoted to a cause and they’ll go to any lengths to uphold their chosen position. They are not completely stable, as the word is usually understood.”

“So you can see a kind of similarity

“I think – I know–

that satire does

frighten fascists.

Fascists don’t like

satire. They don’t

like it at all. And

they especially

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between terrorist operations and the rationale that led to the excursions to Vietnam or Afghanistan?”

“I can, and a big part of it is that sense of pride. Once they start the war, or the mission, they feel they can’t stop. That would mean losing face. In the Rue Nicolas Appert they tried to give the whole thing a veneer of organisation by calling out the names, the death list, which must have been rehearsed. These are people who obviously have no sense of humour.”

“It would be interesting to know what they would have laughed at.”

“The helpless, the broken and the lame,” Steadman replies. “Bullies. That is what they were.”

“There’s an odd confluence in all this: what these murderers represented was everything you have opposed all your life, and their victims were working, broadly speaking, in the same trade that you practice.”

“And killers express their desires with blood. Very often my ink has the appear-ance of splattered blood. It’s a recurrent theme; I don’t know why.”

Steadman’s thoughts turn to the prob-able backlash against the wider Islamic community in France, once the prevail-ing spirit of national unity begins to dis-solve, and the extreme right identifies the resulting tension as a commodity.

“Not that these two brothers were religious,” Steadman says. “Who could argue that they were devout? My own view of all religion is that, if it brings people comfort, why deprive them of it? But I do think that, with certain people, belief can pervert morality.”

“You were close to Kurt Vonnegut – didn’t he once say that the only proof he required for the existence of God was music?”

“He also said that life is no way to treat an animal. And I think I know what Kurt Vonnegut would have said about all this, and not in an uncaring way: ‘So it goes’. Meaning that, very sadly, these things happen. My father was in the first

war and it was a hideous bloody affair. But of course those in that war, broadly speaking, never wanted to shoot. They were ordered. By some poncey bloody general, or Duke.”

Would it be absurd to ask whether any good might come out of the events of 7 January?

“The only thing that you could possi-bly say that has not been entirely neg-ative in this affair is that it hasn’t half provoked a lot of discussion. Moral tur-pitude is high on the agenda. People are questioning their own stance on a whole range of things in a way that they might not have done previously.”

“I didn’t come here meaning to quote my own work,” I tell Steadman, “but there is a psychopathic character in one of my books who is described as dan-gerous ‘because he believed that the pen was mightier than the sword, but didn’t always have a pen to hand’. Peo-ple all over the world, on the streets and on social media, are finding all kinds of visual ways to rework that old proverb. These shootings could place cartoonists at the heart of contemporary conflict rather in the way that poetry became the

most important form of artistic expres-sion in the First World War.”

“Or in the Spanish Civil War. I think that’s very possible. It’s also possible that, in some people’s minds, becoming a cartoonist might seem like a heroic thing to do. Either heroic or suicidal.”

“You’ll know that Peter Cook once joked about the way that all of those satirical night clubs in 1930s Berlin ‘did so much to prevent the rise of Adolf Hit-ler’. Can all of these new cartoons have any effect?”

“I think – I know – that satire does frighten fascists. Fascists don’t like sat-ire. They don’t like it at all. And they especially don’t enjoy visual satire. Because of its unique power to com-municate. As Wittgenstein [Ludwig] asserted, the only thing of value is the thing you cannot say. Sometimes you can’t communicate the idea or the emotion, but a drawing can. You draw something, and people say: ‘Oh, I see what you’re getting at now’.” And that thought, Steadman says, “brings us back to what happened in that room at Char-lie Hebdo. Some things,” he adds, “there are no words for”. nTony Blair, 2001

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ONE NIGHT, DURING her first year at the Univer-sity of Sheffield, Rachel Waddingham struggled to fall asleep at a friend’s house. She could hear three middle-aged men whose voices she didn’t know talking about her in another room. “They were saying, ‘She’s stupid, she’s ugly, I wish she would kill herself,’ ” she says. “I was angry and went downstairs to challenge them, but no one was there. They kept laughing and saying, ‘She’ll never find us.’ ”

The voices became a recurring presence, pro-viding an aggressive, unsettling commentary on her life. Waddingham came to believe they were disenfranchised workers, forced to film her around the clock, and she interpreted her world through that scenario.

When her neck ached, she assumed a tracking device had been planted under her skin. At the supermarket, the voices would ask each other questions – for instance, “Does she know what she’s buying?” – leading Waddingham to reach

sinister conclusions. “I’d wander from aisle to aisle feeling quite anxious,” she says. “I worried they might have poisoned the food. I’d come back with orange juice, milk, bread and cheese, because it’s all I could work out was safe.”

As with so many others struggling to make sense of their voices, Waddingham turned to alcohol to cope, and avoided friends because she feared “the three” would secretly film them as well. Months later she dropped out of univer-sity and moved into a bedsit, too afraid to eat or bathe. A doctor eventually admitted her to a psy-chiatric hospital, where staff diagnosed her with schizophrenia and put her on a cocktail of drugs that expanded to include Olanzapine, Sulpiride, Risperidone and Venlafaxine, among others. The voices faded, but the side effects of the medica-tion made life intolerable. Waddingham gained more than 30kg, developed diabetes and lac-tated. Her eyes would roll involuntarily, and she struggled with akathisia, an overwhelming sense

BY WILLIAM LEE ADAMS

@willyleeadams

‘SHE’S STUPID, SHE’S UGLY, I WISH SHE WOULD KILL HERSELF’Around 40% of people hear voices at some point in life. But the solution can be surprising – to talk back

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ALMOST FRIENDS: Rachel Waddingham, right, has learned to stay in dialogue with the voices in her head instead of silencing them with medication

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of restlessness that caused her to shuffle from foot to foot. Suicide attempts followed, and she felt “like a walking zombie”.

“Up until I got into psychiatry, I didn’t try to kill myself,” says Waddingham, who is now 36 years old and runs support groups for voice-hearers. “I was terrified and I was overwhelmed, but I was still fighting to stay alive. I gave up when I handed responsibility to the doctors. They were going to fix me, give me the right meds, but it didn’t work out quite as simple as that.”

LIFE WITH THE NOT-YETS In October, Waddingham and more than 200 other voice-hearers from around the world gath-ered in Thessaloniki, Greece for the sixth annual World Hearing Voices Congress, organised by Intervoice, the international network of people who hear voices and their supporters. Part of the Hearing Voices Movement, these voice-hearers reject the traditional idea that voices are neces-sarily a symptom of mental illness. They recast voices as meaningful, albeit unusual, experi-ences, and believe potential problems lie not in the voices themselves, but in a person’s relation-ship with them.

By acknowledging their voices and staying in dialogue with them, members can wrest back control of their lives – and even start to appreci-ate the messages they carry. They seek to do this without an over-reliance on medication, which can leave people numb to their emotions. As Dutch voice-hearer Jim van der Wal says: “You can’t heal if you can’t feel.”

The road to recovery often begins in small sup-port groups run by the Hearing Voices Network (HVN). The first group formed in the Netherlands in 1987, and, since then, groups have cropped up in 30 countries, including Bosnia, Canada, Japan, Tanzania and the US. Members share their sto-ries and exchange coping mechanisms, which can include setting appointments to talk with the

voices, so the voice-hearer can function without distraction the rest of the day. Above all, these groups give voice-hearers a sense of community and togetherness where they can be seen as peo-ple rather than patients.“I feel as I do every year – that I’ve come home to my people and my tribe,” an Australian woman said at the opening event in a lecture hall inside the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. “I feel like I belong somewhere. I thank you for giving me my place.”

Research suggests that up to one in 25 people hears voices and that up to 40% of the population will hear voices at some point in their lives. Many will never experience any form of distress, some-thing that is mediated by one’s perception of the phenomenon. “If people believe their voices are omnipotent and can harm and control them, then they are less likely to cope and more likely to end up as a psychiatric patient,” says Eugenie Georgaca, a senior lecturer at the university, and the organiser of the conference. “If they have

explanations of voices that allow them to deal with them better, that is a first step toward learn-ing to live with them.”

A central premise of HVN is that voices fre-quently emerge following extreme stress or trauma. Research bares that out: more than 70% of voice-hearers are thought to have experienced some form of trauma in their lifetime, which could take the form of extreme abuse or bully-ing. The characteristics of voices vary widely from person to person, but the voices sometimes mimic the sound and language of past abusers. In other instances, they may personify character-istics of the victim at the time of their abuse – or bear no similarities to anyone at all. They can be demonic and frightening, angelic and friendly, and can take every form in between.

Waddingham, for instance, now hears the voices of 13 people, some of whom reflect her past experiences. Among them are Blue, a fright-ened but cheeky three-year-old; Elfie, an angry

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teenager; The Scream, a female voice that is filled with pain and suffering; and The Not-Yets, an artificial grouping of voices that Waddingham is not yet ready to engage with fully. “They say very nasty things about me – abusive, sexual, vio-lent things, which echo what was said around me when I was little,” she says. “I try to think of them as frightened children that don’t yet know that it’s not OK to say those things. I think they’re just caught up as if that’s still happening. I’m trying to be quite compassionate towards them.” When the younger voices can’t fall asleep she reads them bedtime stories from her iPad. When voices suggest she’s going to be harmed by a stranger, she thanks them for their concern but lets them know she is being vigilant about her safety.

PHANTOM CHOIRS Traditional psychiatry discourages patients from engaging with voices, and prefers to silence them through medication. But HVN members say that

recalls. Her mother asked for their predictions and pointed out they were not more accurate than chance. Another time, a voice threatened to kill her family if Longden didn’t cut off her toe, and Longden could hear a “phantom choir” laughing along with it. She refused to obey. Her family didn’t die – but the choir did go silent.

She tried to deliver her messages with respect: the less belligerent she was to the voices, the less belligerent they became to her. “I started to see my experiences as a sane reaction to insane circumstances,” she says. Voices that called her weak and pathetic were actually encouraging her to be strong and assertive. “I told the voice, ‘I don’t want to be victimised again either, but when you shout at me and call me an embarrass-ment it has the opposite effect and makes me more timid and less happy,’ ” she says. She later bought a book on assertiveness. “I would say, ‘You can help me practice,’ and the voice was like, ‘Alright.’ ” Some voice-hearers speak out loud to their voices, while others use internal dialogue. Regardless of the form of communication, voices can manifest at any time of day, which means voice-hearers must think of practical solutions to deal with them without alarming colleagues and passers-by. Some choose to wear Bluetooth headsets so they can speak aloud to the voices in public without causing alarm, while others talk into their mobile phones.

Marina, a voice-hearer in Athens, works as a web designer and at some points has heard up to 60 voices. They sometimes make her laugh in her open-plan office (she’ll simply say she is reading something funny online), and other times they’ll tell her that her brother has been in a severe acci-dent. “I’ll say I am going to the bank and I just go somewhere quiet to deal with them.”

Her voices are not always hurtful. They some-times encourage her to add new ingredients to her recipes and ask her questions about new acquaintances, which she uses to determine whether they can be trusted. But sometimes she doesn’t want to be bothered. At night, when she feels the voices coming, she can envision a hand and they will stop talking before they start. Sometimes when the voices call on her she says, “I’m not Marina. I’m a rabbit. Let me eat my carrot.” When they become threatening and overbearing, Marina can change the topic by dis-tracting them with rhymes. “There was a period when they would not allow me to eat,” she says. “They were telling me there were cockroaches in my food.” In Greek, the word “cockroaches” rhymes with the word “eyelashes”, so Marina would bring up the latter, leading to a conversa-tion about cosmetics.

SMALL TALK: From left to right: Marina, who has learned to trick her voices into submission; Jim van der Wal, who dislikes the numbing emotional effect of medication; Sandra Escher and Marius Romme, who encourage sufferers to embrace their voices; and Dimitris, who has made friends with his voices

listening to voices is vital to calming them down. Eleanor Longden, a voice-hearer and psycholo-gist at the University of Liverpool, uses the anal-ogy of sitting in a room with a mix of people who are angry, intimidating and out of control. “You have two options,” she says. “The first it to sit down with them and set useful boundaries, and to try and understand why they are so upset. The second is to lock them in another room hoping they will calm down. Most of the time they will start banging on the door and shouting louder. Behind the door they are more intimidating because you don’t know what they are thinking.”

After leaving a psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of schizophrenia at 18, Longden was assigned to work with a psychiatrist who encour-aged her to overcome her fear of her voices. Her mother helped her test the boundaries of what these voices could actually do. “They said they could forecast the future and would predict the colour of the next car to pass the house,” she

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Dimitris, who runs a self-help group in Thes-saloniki, says that his voices emerged not from any form of trauma, but after he went to a hypno-tist to explore his interest in telepathy and other ways of communicating with the divine. “I heard one voice calling me God,” he says. “That had to do with my fantasies that I am actually God. It’s the thing that gets me high.” Over many years he has learned to avoid certain triggers, including a particular woman he is attracted to. When he saw her, voices would gossip about his attraction and put him down. “If I drink alcohol or coffee, smoke or masturbate the voices are more intense,” he says. He now avoids these activities as well. He has also “stopped expanding the scenario” of his fantasies that he is God. “It’s easy for the dream to turn into a nightmare,” he says.

THE ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESSStanding by the pool at the Hotel Philippion, the venue for this year’s symposium, a photog-rapher asks Marius Romme to lean in closer to his wife Sandra Escher. “It’s been a while since we did this,” she jokes. “We used to do it all the time,” Romme says, before the two lock lips. They’ve spent a lifetime listening to the trauma suffered by voice-hearers. Yet Romme, now 80, and Escher, 69, remain optimistic in their beliefs, which gave rise to the hearing-voices movement three decades ago. “Voices have significance in the lives of voice-hearers and can be used to their benefit,” Romme says. “It’s not a handicap, it’s an extra capacity.”

Romme hasn’t always thought like that. Start-ing in 1974 he ran the social psychiatry depart-ment at the Medical Faculty of the University of Maastricht. “All my career, I worked with people who hear voices, and I regularly prescribed med-icine,” he says. “As all psychiatrists, I thought the voices were meaningless.” He took a diagnos-tic approach, asking patients only if they heard voices, not what the voices said, and dismissed

them as symptoms of mental illness. His think-ing began to change when a patient named Patsy challenged his approach. Patsy started hearing voices as an eight-year-old after being severely burned. By the time she came to see Romme, she was 30 years old and her voices had forbidden her from seeing friends, leaving her isolated and severely depressed. Tranquilisers relieved some of her anxiety, but did not silence the voices. They did, however, leave her less alert and unable to feel her emotions.

“She was exceptional because she did not agree with me,” Romme says. “She was more critical of my approach, saying, ‘You don’t help me with my problems. The voices are more pow-erful than I am.’” She questioned why he consid-ered her mentally ill and yet saw nothing strange in religion. “You believe in a God we never see or hear,” she told him, “so why shouldn’t you believe in the voices I really do hear?”

Eventually she gave Romme a copy of The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by the Princeton University psychologist Julian Jaynes. In it, Jaynes argued that hearing voices had been common until the development of written language. He believed the voices heard by the heroes of Homer’s Iliad were not literary metaphors but real experiences. “They were voices whose speech and direc-tion could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients,” he wrote, “or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices.”

Attributing meaning to the voices gave Patsy comfort, and Romme encouraged her to speak with other voice-hearers. They weren’t always easy to find, so Romme enlisted the help of Escher, then a science journalist whom he had met years earlier. A Dutch broadcaster ran an interview with Romme in which he asked voice-hearers to send him postcards with their respective stories. Around 700 postcards arrived, including more than 500 from people who experienced auditory hallucinations – and got on with life just fine. “We thought that all people who heard voices would become psychiatric patients,” Escher says. “That simply wasn’t true.”

They began to think of voices as a common human experience, and one that needed to be brought into the open. They invited all the post-card-senders to attend the first hearing-voices conference in the Netherlands, to share sto-ries and coping mechanisms. The research of Romme and Escher, who eventually married, struck a chord with the public and stoked interest from the media – though not always for the rea-sons they had hoped. “Sometimes the journalists

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Famous voices through history

were terrible,” Escher remembers. “They would phone and ask, ‘Do you have seven schizos and seven dissociatives?’ I started asking for the questions in advance. Some saw the interviews like looking at monkeys on show.”

A COLLECTIVE VOICERomme and Escher do not accept that voices are a symptom of schizophrenia, but rather that they are a response to troubling life experiences. That idea – and their broader approach to voices – remains far from mainstream, however.

Russell Margolis, director of the Schizophre-nia Programme and a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University, accepts that voices can manifest from trauma. But he is quick to point out that they can also be part of broader syndromes such as bipolar disorder and schizo-phrenia, which demand specific treatments.

“One of my great concerns about an organisa-tion focused on a symptom is that people can get so wrapped up in their symptom that they don’t move forward,” he says. “I’m sure the approach can be helpful for some, but I can see some instances where it could be destructive.”

Yet for many, the hearing-voices approach remains an important counterpoint to the dom-inant psychiatric model. Waddingham’s voices forced her to confront her past and have helped her push past her pain.

She now takes care of the voices that once tor-mented her. “I can feel a lot of what that voice is feeling,” she says. “So I might be pretty chilled out and if I get this sudden jolt of anxiety it might be one of my voices reacting to something. If I can chill them out, and they can feel safe, then I feel safe. Years ago I would have interpreted these feelings as evidence of me being watched. Now I have a way of making sense of them that gives me some autonomy and control.”

Waddingham is now helping others do the same. She runs the Voice Collective, a Lon-don-wide project supporting children, young voice-hearers, and their parents. And, in 2010, she began establishing hearing-voices groups inside English prisons, where according to the UK Ministry of Justice, 25% of women and 15% of men demonstrate psychotic symptoms, but are left to cope on their own. The challenges they face – alone in a prison cell – make Waddingham even more thankful for how far she has come.

“I feel so privileged,” Waddingham says. “I’ve travelled. I’m married. I’ve got cats. And I’ve started my own business. People always say I work too much, and I say, ‘I spent a good decade drugged up with no life. I’m recapturing some of what I lost’. ”

Sigmund FreudThe founding father of psycho-analysis wrote of “an unmistakable and beloved voice” calling his name while he worked abroad. He tried to rationalise these voices, noting the times and places where the hallucinations occurred, but upon returning home he realised that nothing had actually happened.

Winston ChurchillChurchill admitted that during bouts of depression he was prone to hearing voices commanding him to “sit here” or “sit there”.

Mahatma GandhiGandhi spoke of a “voice within”, which he believed was the “still small voice [of God]” manifesting itself in his everyday life. He admitted that he could not prove that such a voice was not just “an echo of [his] own heated

imagination” – however, he did place considerable trust in this inner moral guide.

Charles DickensDickens wrote that he actually heard the voices of, and had conversations with, the characters in his novels. Mrs Gamp, the old nurse from his novel The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, would, supposedly, tell him such raunchy tales during church, that he was left in fits of laughter.

John NashThe mathematician and subject of the film A Beautiful Mind described how he, in the early 1960s, began to hear voices. While some embrace such voices, Nash saw them as symptomatic of his mental illness, and soon afterwards started trying consciously to reject them.

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COURTROOM DRAMA: Gett, a story about male domination in Israeli culture, explores the struggle of a Jewish woman against her husband and the country’s rabbinical courts

RARELY DOES a film integrate a social and polit-ical message within a forceful drama as master-fully as Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem. The impossibility, for a woman, of obtaining a divorce without her husband’s consent in today’s Israel is portrayed with chilling power in a story that fol-lows a case that lasts for five years. It will shock many people to learn that Israel, despite being a secular state, has no civil procedure for marriage and divorce, except when the two people differ in their religious affiliations.

Released in Israel to widespread acclaim and box-office success in September, the film has since been released theatrically in France and Italy. In Britain, despite well-received screenings at the London Film Festival and the UK Jewish Film Festival, it missed a distribution window

and was instead released in November on DVD. Though it failed to earn an Academy Award nom-ination, Gett is in the running for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Golden Globes.

Its star, Ronit Elkabetz, has been described as “the face of Israeli cinema” by the UK’s Jew-ish Chronicle. She also co-wrote and co-directed this film with her younger brother Shlomi, as well as two earlier features in a trilogy of themati-cally-related tales, To Take a Wife (2005) and 7 Days (2008). “In the first film,” Ronit explains, “the issue is Viviane’s freedom in the face of her family, in the second film it is her freedom in the face of society, and in the third it is her freedom before the law.” In each film, the French-Arme-nian actor Simon Abkarian plays the role of her husband, Elisha.

ISRAEL’S DRACONIAN DIVORCE LAWS IN THE SPOTLIGHT‘Gett’, nominated for a 2015 Golden Globe, exposes ancient marital rules on ‘chained women’ that still exist

BYCHRISTOPHER SILVESTER

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FEMALE LEAD: Ronit Elkabetz, who also co-directed the film, as Viviane Amsallem, an Israeli woman who spends five years trying to obtain a divorce. Below: a panel of rabbis sits in judgement in a still from the film

Under halacha (Jewish law), a “get” (also spelled gett) is the name for the bill of divorce-ment that a husband may give to his wife. Any woman who decides to end her marriage and yet has not received a get from her husband is deemed to be an agunah – a chained woman. Even in those countries in which she might obtain a civil divorce, she remains an agunah until she is granted a get.

The consequences are immense. If she remar-ries under a civil procedure she remains an agu-nah, and any subsequent children she might have are deemed to be mamzerim (illegitimate).

Once a mamzerim, always a mamzerim. If a person labelled as such, male or female, remains

an Orthodox Jew, they may only marry converts or other illegitimates. The stain is passed down from one generation to the next in perpetuity.

It is not only female spouses who may suffer from this process. If a woman refuses to accept a get from her husband, for whatever reason, he has to invoke the Heter Meher Rabbonim, or the permission of 100 rabbis. No woman, though, has access even to that remedy if her husband chooses to withhold a get.

It is the same for all Israeli Jews – the Ashken-hazi and Sephardi, the secular and the religious. “In Israel you have to encounter the rabbinical authorities at three stages: birth, marriage and death,” Ronit says. “A lot of people who are sec-ular do not want to marry in front of rabbinical authorities. Some Israelis go to Cyprus to get married. But in Israel you have to go in front of the rabbinical courts to obtain a get.”

According to the film’s Paris-based producer, Sandrine Brauer, this is not a phenomenon that is confined to Israel. “Last May in France there was an incident in which a woman who had obtained

a divorce in the civil courts wanted to remarry within the orthodox community, so she needed a get,” she explains. “The rabbinical court told her, we might consider your case if you help the com-munity. They blackmailed her for €100,000.”

Ronit Elkabetz gives her character a luminous presence on-screen, but nonetheless Viviane seems to carry her troubles in her facial features. Off-screen, those same features, still without any make-up, seem unrecognisable in their delicacy.

“This was a story of our mother,” Elkabetz explains. “In my childhood I always felt my mother’s very strong will for something better in her life. As a girl this was very important to me. When I got bigger, without knowing it, I felt there was a very heavy weight on her shoulders.

“It was very simply that my mother wanted a better life with her husband, she wanted to be his companion in public. It was a simple demand, but it was very hard for him, even though the request was very light.

“My father gave my mother freedom to do whatever she wanted – she had more freedom than most women had – and on top of that he was religious. But my mother didn’t want to do things on her own, she wanted to share them with him. In spite of being a joyful and independent

woman, she would wake up every morning with a heavy burden.

But she never gave up on herself. Thirty years later I woke up and told the story of this woman who seeks her liberty and wants to leave her husband but he won’t let her go.”

Apart from one shot, the entire film takes place within the claustral atmosphere of a rabbinical court building, with its austere, drab decor.

Still, there is not one of the film’s 115 minutes in which the screen is not fraught with tension, sometimes inviting the audience’s disbelief at the absurdity of Viviane’s predicament. Nor is the mood always downbeat: there are moments of absurdist comedy, and at one point even Vivi-ane is impelled to laugh.

Viviane radiates a dignified stillness, remain-ing silent for much of the film’s duration, dress-ing in a sombre and modest way and appearing to show respect for the presiding rabbis. In two scenes, though, she unleashes her emotions: first in a display of furious scorn and second in a moment of imploring desperation.

Gett belongs to the well-established cinematic genre of courtroom drama, and therefore its the-atricality seems natural, yet resolution comes in a moment of tenderness between the adversaries in a waiting room.

Ronit Elkabetz was born in 1964 in Beersheba,

“ A lot of people who are secular do not want to marry in front of rabbinical authorities.”

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the “capital” of Israel’s Negev desert, to work-ing-class Moroccan parents from Essaouira. Her father was a postal worker and her mother a hair-dresser. Later, the family moved to Kiryat Yam, a suburb of Haifa.

As an adult, she was contemplating a career as a fashion designer when she began model-ling and appearing in commercials. “I always loved being on set, but I didn’t think I would be an actress. I didn’t learn acting. It all started when I was 24. Someone saw me in a commer-cial.” When she auditioned for her first film, The Appointed (1990), she thought she was just audi-tioning for another commercial, not for a leading

role in a film. “My entire life changed completely after that,” she says. In 1997 she moved to study with Ariane Mnouchkine of Le Théâtre du Soleil, and made her first French film, Made in France, soon afterwards.

Yet acting was not enough. She yearned to write and direct, to tell a story. “I like the process of creating a character,” she says. “Until the age of 20 or 21, I would not talk very much, but I was always making up stories and I was convinced they would become films.”

But how did she make the transition from being an actress to co-writing and co-directing with her brother? “Shlomi and I were so close that when I was 18 and he was 10 I already felt that one day we would be working together. In 2000 he was living in New York and I was living in Paris. I called him and said, ‘I’m ready to do something with you.’ The day after that, I took the plane. Another day later I told him, ‘I have three stories about a woman – our mother – and I want to do them with you.’ ”

In Late Marriage (2001), another Israeli film in which she starred, Ronit played not an agunah but a divorced woman who is rejected by the Rus-sian immigrant family of the man who loves her. “Israeli society is very ambivalent about things,” she says. “A lot of things change but there is a lot of conservatism. In the same street in Tel Aviv girls can walk half-naked but if they want to get a divorce they have to seek this remedy through the religious courts.”

Although Ronit expected Gett to have an impact in Israel, the scale of it took her by sur-prise. “We thought we would let the film have its life and then deal with the politics later, but it was taken up so quickly,” she says. “All the female ministers in the government, including Tipi Livni, the minister of justice, Facebooked about the film. Some think we have won already, with everyone speaking about change. If so, it will be the first time ever that a film has changed some-thing in Israel.”

In some liberal Jewish communities in Amer-ica and Europe, when a marriage contract is issued there is a clause that says that if a civil court grants the woman a divorce, her husband will not refuse her a get. Perhaps a similar solu-tion could be found in Israel and for Orthodox Jews around the world.

Ronit has been married to an architect for four years and together they have twin sons. She con-fesses that she is very happily married, but she knows that her freedom is circumscribed by a legal disadvantage: “Any Jewish Israeli woman who says yes to marriage knows that she is becoming a possible agunah.” n

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MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL isn’t much of a TV per-son. Not much lately, at least, she confesses. She names just one series, Olive Kitteridge, that she watched recently on HBO.

But she made an exception for The Honorable Woman, a taut, eight-part spy thriller in which she plays Nessa Stein, an ambitious business leader caught at the moral and political edges of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Which is lucky – her performance won her a Golden Globe last week. Written and directed by the Welsh actor-turned-director Hugo Blick, the series, which lands on American Netflix this month, finds Stein navigating business, bombings, rape and a very troubling kidnapping against a back-drop of international intrigue. Gyllenhaal takes on an upper-crust English accent for the part, as her character vacillates between political poise and private anguish.

Not a typical role, maybe, for the actress who first found fame as the older sister (along-side real-life brother Jake Gyllenhaal) in the polarising weirdo-sci-fi classic Donnie Darko (2001) and then as the self-mutilating secre-tary-turned-BDSM-partner in Secretary (2002). But, at this point, more than a decade removed from those roles, is there such a thing as a typ-

MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL: THE HARDEST THING WAS THE KIDSLast week she won a Golden Globe for ‘The Honorable Woman’. Here she recalls the stresses behind the triumph

BYZACH SCHONFELD

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HONOURABLE WOMAN: Gyllenhaal won the Golden Globe for best actress in a limited series last week for her role in the eight-part spy thriller, The Honorable Woman. She says the hardest part of filming was looking after her two daughters, Ramona, below, and Gloria Ray, at the same time

ical role for her? She’s appeared in mainstream blockbusters ranging from World Trade Center to The Dark Knight, and recently in starring roles in independent dramas like Frank and Won’t Back Down. And yet ....

“I’d never done anything like this before, eight hours of work playing the same character,” Gyllenhaal says of her first serialised television role. The episodes were filmed all at once and in order, a stark break from the rhythm of a movie. “You might have four really emotional scenes in one episode and then have another episode that feels very protected, and maybe if you’re making a movie you’d say, ‘Oh, I just wept, I’m not going to weep in the next scene’. But when you’re doing this it feels much more human, where you could feel emotional where you never expected to. You could feel nothing where you thought you would feel emotional. I really liked that.”

It was the fastest she’s ever worked, too, an exhilarating and yet frightening speed: there was little time for extra takes and no space for over-thinking. That it all worked she attributes in large part to director Blick, though their relationship was at first frosty. “I think I was scared,” she says. “I’m not easily trusting. It takes a little while with me .... That’s always a kind of leap of faith with a director you haven’t worked with before. Now I would do anything with him. Because I trust him.”

We are seated at a corner table in the restau-rant of the Greenwich Hotel, a luxury spot owned by Robert De Niro in the Tribeca neighbourhood of Manhattan, where the Goodfellas actor also owns a restaurant and production company. Gyllenhaal is dressed casually, in a grey sweater and jeans, though her hair remains as boyishly short as it is in Honorable Woman. She orders the roasted salmon, joking about how doing a play each night means having to consider what she eats. She’ll be on stage five hours from now, starring in a Broadway production of Tom Stop-pard’s The Real Thing. It’s a busy day, and week, and year.

Gyllenhaal, who has two daughters with long-time partner Peter Sarsgaard, has spent the morning taking her eight-year-old, Ramona, to school and then looking after two-year-old Glo-ria Ray. The demands of parenthood seem to be on her mind when I ask about the hardest part of making the series. Never mind the English accent, the intense violence sequences, the mod-est budget: “The hardest thing, really, was doing it and having two little kids,” she says. The girls came along for the three-month filming sched-ule but weren’t allowed on the set (Sarsgaard played babysitter part of the time). Gyllenhaal

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D O W N T I M E

says she won’t let them watch most of her work until they’re older – the exception was the 2010 Nanny McPhee sequel. On the flip side, it is tough to imagine having to watch your mother play the title role in Secretary at any age.

Which isn’t to say the kids haven’t taken in their mom’s stardom. “When Crazy Heart came out and a lot of people had seen it, people would stop me on the street a lot,” Gyllenhaal says. (Gyllen-

haal got an Oscar nomination for the 2009 role.) “And Ramona – I didn’t realise how much she was taking that in. At one point she said, ‘Mama, what’s Crazy Heart?’ And I found a little piece of it that I could show her and explained it to her.”

The violence that makes The Honorable Woman less than kid-friendly has, of course, a fraught political history. Nessa – Gyllenhaal’s charac-ter – lives and breathes Middle Eastern politics, and the obligatory research dive posed another challenge for the actress. She eschewed text-book history lessons and took a more unortho-dox approach. “I went to people very far over on each side, but very intelligent people – people I trust and respect – and asked for sources,” says Gyllenhaal, who is Jewish but says her religion doesn’t influence her politics. “That way, I could come up with my own opinion about what I felt was happening.”

By the time the show aired on BBC and Sun-danceTV in July, real-world tensions in the Mid-dle East had boiled over into another extended cycle of violence. It was one of those periods when cordial dinner parties could explode into Israeli-Palestinian screaming matches, and though Gyllenhaal spent the month obsessively reading the news, she kept quiet about the con-flict. “If I said on a talk show any of the things

that Nessa says, I would have had 200,000 hate emails,” she says. Honorable Woman, then, proved inadvertently timely. Perspectives on Israel “were heard and accepted in the context of the show in a way that they just would not be in any other context”.

And though Gyllenhaal has not typically shied away from political stances – a decade ago she sparked public ire by saying the US was “respon-sible in some way for 9/11” – on this topic she picks her words carefully. “It’s not true about everything, but about some very complicated, deep-rooted conflicts, the more information you have, sometimes the harder it is to have an immovable, unshiftable, one-sided position,” she says. “It’s not true for me about, like, abor-tion rights. I have an immoveable, one-sided opinion on that.” (She’s pro-choice.) “I don’t feel that way about the Middle East.”

Anyway, centuries-old sectarian warfare aside, what’s next for Maggie Gyllenhaal? She isn’t

sure, and while she’s begun looking at scripts, she admits that she mostly needs a break. “You have to sleep a lot when you’re doing a play!” she says. “You have to preserve energy.”

But this momentary shift away from film, between the TV series and the play (her third since 2009), is not

so much a conscious break as it is a reaction to waning support for independent cinema. She mentions that several million people watched the Honorable Woman episodes as they aired. “Frank, the independent movie I made the same year ... I don’t know if that many people watched it ever!” she says, laughing.

“The thing is, it is incredibly difficult to find a distribution life for independent films right now,” Gyllenhaal adds. “I don’t want to make movies that nobody sees. I mean, I’m not inter-ested in that.” She first noticed the shift around the time of the 2008 economic collapse. When Crazy Heart came out the following year, “all the independent branches of all the studios were fall-ing apart. So we made it at Paramount Vantage maybe. And then it fell apart after we’d made it. It was gonna have no life! We were just lucky that Fox Searchlight decided to buy it. Now basically there are a few movies each year that get picked up – a few independents that get picked up for a massive distribution. But it’s not the way it used to be.”

“So much of the interesting work is happening on television,” she agrees. “So I don’t really care if it’s on TV or film.” She pauses. “It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just that I want my work to be seen, if I’m going to take the time to make it.” n

“If I said on a talk show any of the things Nessa says, I would have 200,000 hate emails.”

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NEWSWEEK 62 2 3 / 0 1 / 2 0 1 5

CRITICAL FIGURES:Above: Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams in Tim Burton’s ‘Big Eyes’. Right: Kenneth Tynan, one of the sharpest tongues in criticism and, far-right, critic John Canaday

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CRITICS NORMALLY work anonymously and in the dark. But in two new major movies they are highly visible – and it may not make for a pleasant watch. In the Oscar-tipped Birdman, an ex-Holly-wood hero (played by Michael Keaton) is starring in a Broadway play. He sees the New York Times theatre critic in a bar. Their eyes meet and the sour female theatre critic says with unblinking iciness: “I am going to kill your show.” It’s a scary moment because she hasn’t yet seen the play in question.

There’s a smaller cameo for another New York Times reviewer in Tim Burton’s new film, Big Eyes, about the art fraudster Walter Keane. This time he is based on a real reviewer, John Cana-day, who was the paper’s art critic in the 1960s. Keane (played by Christoph Waltz) posed as the painter – his wife, secretly, was the real artist – of a huge output of highly sellable pictures featuring children with big soppy peepers. Canaday sees

HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TAKE AIM AT THE INDOMITABLE CRITICTwo new films, Birdman and Big Eyes, feature acid reviewers, igniting memories of other ‘twisted assassins’

BYROBERT GORE-LANGTON

the paintings as sickly rubbish. The artist threat-ens to gouge the critic’s eyes out with a fork.

Playing a lethal critic is specialist work, and in both films the producers chose British actors. Lindsay Duncan in Birdman is the Broadway butcher with ice in her veins. In Big Eyes, veteran actor Terence Stamp has a cameo as the dap-per scribe dripping with condescension. Their screen predecessor was another British actor, the great George Sanders, whose performance as the super-cynical Addison DeWitt in the 1950 back-

stage movie classic All About Eve is the benchmark for all critic baddies. His ser-pentine creature is a closeted, cologned operator of the sort that has never really existed.

You wonder whether at this rate we will ever get a mainstream feature film

devoted to a critic. The most colourful prospect would be Kenneth Tynan, patron saint of the-atre reviewers and a true legend. Dead at 53, the stammering, dandyish columnist – keen on bed-room spanking – was the first person to use the f-word on television and he kept on his Observer desk the stirring motto: “Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.”

Tynan’s reviews were adored simply because

“What has to happen in a person’s life that they become a critic, anyway?”

NEWSWEEK 63 2 3 / 0 1 / 2 0 1 5

he wrote such grabbingly good copy. When nec-essary he was merciless, spectacularly to Vivien Leigh, who starred opposite her husband Lau-rence Olivier. Of her Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, Tynan wrote: “Vivien Leigh receives the news that she is about to be ravished on her husband’s corpse with little more than the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred Dunlopillo.”

During his brief career Tynan ushered in angry, un-posh writers like John Osborne, author of Look Back in Anger and a loather of critics. By the end of his career, Osborne had barred Nich-olas de Jongh of The Guardian from his funeral; referred to Jack Tinker of Daily Mail as “Ms Tinker”; and after a bad review sent a threat to Benedict Nightingale of The Times, warning him: “Safer for your health to stay clear of downtown Chichester,” adding, “Fatso Morley’s next!”

“Morley” was the late Sheridan Morley, a critic and biographer who in later years slept through everything he attended. After his death, his wife admitted in print to writing the copy herself under his byline. You couldn’t make it up. But she actually did.

In Birdman, the lead actor cruelly asks of the New York Times woman: “What has to happen in a person’s life that they become a critic, anyway?” The real answer is, not a lot. Most of the greats are simply born to it.

The undisputed doyenne of American film critics was Pauline Kael, who riffed with con-trarian brilliance on late ’60s and ’70s cinema for The New Yorker. She described Star Wars as exhausting – like “taking a pack of kids to the cir-cus” – and demolished a John Cassavetes film for having “the kind of seriousness that a serious art-ist couldn’t take seriously”. Kael’s nemesis was George Roy Hill, director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which she panned. He wrote her a widely-circulated letter that began: “Listen, you miserable bitch . . . ” It was another female critic, Renata Adler, who reviewed Kael’s collected works as, “line by line, and without interruption, worthless”. It was hailed as the New York literary mafia’s bloodiest hit, worse than anything in The Godfather. Kael today sleeps with the fishes, her name, sadly, unknown to the Netflix generation.

Many lead theatre critics today are women, though not at The New York Times – one of sev-eral details Birdman gets wrong. In former days, critics were men in hats. The last hat-wearer to retire from the West End was Milton Shulman of the London Evening Standard. He never liked anything, regarded covering plays in far-flung Wimbledon as the foreign correspondent’s job, but ploughed on for four decades. He had it in for Andrew Lloyd Webber. When there was a

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21st-century professionalsPSYCHOTHERAPY 2.0

T he practice of psychotherapy has remained practically unchanged since its inception towards the end of the 19th

century: two people talking to each other in a room. Dr. Aaron Balick, psychotherapist and member of the UK Council for Psychotherapy, explained that technological advances in the 21st century are provoking the fi rst fundamen-tal challenge to this dynamic since the comfy chair replaced the couch.

‘Where the work of psychotherapy was once limited to the consultation room, today we are bombarded by text messages and emails from distressed patients between sessions, which are vulnerable to viruses and hacking. The new culture creates expectations of an instantaneous reply, placing psychotherapists in confl ict between our sense of duty and our private life.’

Beyond these direct extra-clinical commu-nications is the problem of indirect interaction through the Internet. ‘Traditionally psycho-therapists keep their own lives to themselves to enable the patient to share more of theirs. Today, via overlapping social networks or Goo-gle searches, patients can fi nd more about their therapist than either party is comfortable with. This can aff ect their therapeutic relationship.’

Aaron expressed the challenge succinctly. ‘The therapeutic relationship is the single most important aspect of a successful therapy. Many of the boundaries originally intended to protect it are no longer sustainable. Psychotherapists must adapt and respond.’

He went on to identify current responses. ‘Those working traditionally can create digital policies to help contain their work. By integrat-ing these into their therapy contracts, they recognize the wider world, while proceeding to meet it in a therapeutic and responsible way.’

Some, like Aaron, are actually embracing the new technology. He off ers video conferencing and text-based mental health services. Aaron notes that studies are beginning to show that this may increase access to psychotherapy–shy demographics like young men who could be helped.’By Andy Friedman parnglobal.com

A D V E R T O R I A L

Aaron Balick   Psychotherapist

bomb scare at the New London Theatre at the fi rst night of Cats in 1981, Shulman said: “This theatre’s never had a hit yet.”

Occasionally, playwrights themselves make good critics – Bernard Shaw started as a critic and in Osborne’s eyes ruined himself as a result: “Shaw writes like a Pakistani who had learned English when he was 12 years old in order to become a chartered accountant.”

Noel Coward’s pithy remarks (he said of Peter O’Toole about Lawrence of Arabia, “any prettier and you’d be Florence of Arabia”) were more fun than any of his later plays. Producers can be superbly droll too. Eric Maschwitz once staged a production of Goodnight Vienna in Lewisham. Asked how it was going by a friend, he replied with bleak candour: “About as well as a produc-tion of ‘Goodnight Lewisham’ would be going in Vienna.”

Actors generally don’t read – or pretend not to read – their reviews. Occasionally they do. You can’t help but salute Judi Dench, who, after being told in print her grande dame shtick was getting boring, wrote to the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer: “I used to quite admire you but I now think you’re an absolute shit.”

In Britain, one or two of our quality newspa-pers no longer even employ critics. The online air is thick with bloggers who trade in clumsy, ill-informed abuse. But critics with real expertise have never been more needed, however much Stephen Fry compares them to traffi c wardens or wasps at a picnic.

Playwright Christopher Hampton is one of many who have recycled the lovely saying that asking a playwright how he feels about critics is like asking a lamp post how it feels about dogs. The truth is that critics are fuelled by an appe-tite for the new and the exciting and, generally, regard their job as a combination of privilege and penance. The twisted assassin stereotype is, of course, much more fun, and will help make Bird-man and Big Eyes contenders at the Oscars. n

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N EWS W EEKS

PA ST

16 January 1961 • On the brink of revolutionA

P

I n 1961, Fidel Castro ordered the US embassy in Havana to reduce its staff of “spies”. The US suspended diplomatic relations with

Cuba – a deadlock that remained in place until 2014. Newsweek’s Latin America correspondent, Harold Lavine, reported from the “gun-studded, propaganda-pounded” capital: “Outside the  US embassy, a massive slab of gray overlooking Havana Harbor, the streets are swarming with militia women. Most of them are little more than

kids; almost without exception they are as pretty as a girl can be when she’s dressed in a gray Rus-sian Army blouse, baggy olive fatigue pants, and black combat boots. They are there ostensibly to protect the embassy from what the government calls ‘an enraged Cuban population’,” he wrote.

“Actually there are no demonstrators, only the correspondents who have flocked to Havana. Wreathed in smiles, the girls joke with the visit-ing newsmen and even flirt a little.” n

Conquest

Elegance is an attitude

Aksel Lund Svindal

OFFICIAL TIMEKEEPER

Kitzbühel, Austria23-25 January 2015