the pundit internationale

Here’s that that jihadi having a row with an Aussie blogger. Quick recap – she linked to a text of his as an example of Al-Qa’ida thinking, he noticed the referral and the traffic, he replied to deny association with the OBL team but to boast of everything else.

Some points on the text.

1) Black humour. Abu Walid certainly likes his snark. Example?

It is relatively easy to believe that the eagle has turned into a canary after a minor facelift. But it is difficult to imagine that academic work can turn a security officer into a natural person, like the rest of God’s creatures.

Something probably gets lost in translation, but you can’t deny the punch of the joke about spooks. And this is hilarious:

If this was the case I would have opened an office for consulting and terrorism and become very rich.

As is this:

But if the reverse is proven, I will donate all money seized in order to build a Jewish settlement in Holy Jerusalem.

It’s like Bernard Manning with much less booze.

2) Self-mockery. You usually expect to find that a fanatic is someone who is utterly blind to the possibility they might be funny. I’ve always thought that the knowledge of one’s own absurdity is a force for civilisation; we’re all bloody ridiculous at some level and we should all probably wind our necks in. Orwell thought this about trying to make people goose-step in Britain; H.L. Mencken’s crack about a good horse-laugh is much the same point. So this is pretty good writing.

Mrs Farrall is looking at the subject of Islamic groups, in particular “Al Qaeda”. I am the only one with the chronic writing disease…

3) A certain amount of the truth. It’s always better to deliver the truth in highly controlled doses than it is to lie.

In general, the security services always deliberately inflate the risks and invent things from scratch. So we can see them exaggerate the ability of people who are against the law so the efforts of their departments will be admired and valued so they will get the awards and admiration. More importantly, they will get more authority and power so they can fully put society and the country under their control, if that is possible. This has actually happened in many countries, whether big or small.

4) Women. On the other hand, there’s something seriously wrong here. The text is laced with a sock-pong of misogyny. He constantly goes on about “beauties”, and he’s obsessed with the figure of Lynndie England – of all the other US war criminals and torturers he could mention, it’s only the woman who gets a jersey. Yoo, Bybee, Addington, Cambone, Feith, Cheney, and Miller are nowhere to be seen. Rumsfeld just scrapes in at the finish.

horrible images of the beautiful female soldiers…the beautiful American…the same beauty with a sweet smile…Today another beauty is researching on a living person and they are a candidate to become the next victim…So we become ready for an intellectual dialogue with the security beauty and the terrorist fighter, Mrs Farrall…The beauty “Leah Farrall” ( the fitna is worse than murder)…our brothers in the Arab media relied on comments in the article written by a woman “Farrall”…the Arab media who only relied on what the Australian beauty said…It is okay because whatever comes from the beauty is beautiful even if it is interrogation techniques approved by the ugly Rumsfeld

The fitna is worse than murder. And then I opened my eyes and saw a cup of tea….

5) Paying the cost to be the boss. It seems that denying the Holocaust is something you have to do in these circles, like saying “trust the people” and promising to do, well, something with the European Communities Act 1972 if you’re a Tory. Abu Walid makes a couple of sick jokes in this line, but I have the impression he doesn’t really believe it; his heart isn’t in it. Which only makes it sicker.

And now they cry over the remains of false tragedies that they invented or made themselves like the holocaust lie or the demolished buildings of New York………..I am fully aware that my picture won’t improve even if they prove I am one of the disciples of Jesus Christ. Also, my picture won’t become worse than it is now, even if they discover I was a consultant to “Adolf Hitler” for the Holocaust.

This doesn’t strike me as a real troofer. Although, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen Hitler in scarequotes. The really sad thing here is that, if you were to swap out some nouns (you can probably guess which ones) and pass the whole thing through a proper spike-helmeted chief sub, you’d end up with something indistinguishable from the average output of, say, Fraser Nelson.

1 Comment on "the pundit internationale"


  1. Overall your observations make sense, but some things definitely get lost in this (rather poor) translation. The quotes around Hitler aren’t scarequotes, they’re a common way to mark foreign names, like italics in English. In the well-known saying “fitna is worse than murder”, fitna means causing internal conflict – it’s an expression to emphasise the seriousness of her allegations against him (from his perspective), not a sudden upswing in his already high misogyny level.

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