10 reasons why became Mohammed Emwazi became Jihadi John
So. Why did Mohammed Emwazi become Jihadi John? How does a “humble” schoolboy in a pink jumper became an alleged seriel killer and snuff movie star? This is what we’ve been told so far:
Mental Illness:
Mohammed went to St Mary Magdalene primary school in West London with Emwazi. He tells LBC radio:
“We were in the playground and Mohammed was running away from someone. He was just about to get into a fight and he was running away from someone. As he was running, another kid tried to block off his path. He had nowhere to go and he basically ran into the goalposts, hit his head and fell to the floor.”
After that he “was not the same”.
After secondary school I never had much contact with him. He was one year older than me. But my relationship with him – I told my mum, he was acting a bit weird. And my mum told me “If he’s acting a bit weird, stay away from him.”
Spelling Emwazi was annoying:
Another former classmate says:
“It was a Church of England school and he was the only Muslim in our class. One time we had an RE lesson and he got up and talked about his religion. He wrote Arabic on the board to show us what it looked like and how it went in the other direction. He showed us a religious text and spoke about what his religion was about. That was when we were eight or nine. He mentioned fasting. His English wasn’t very good throughout primary school. He could only say a few words at first – like his name and where he was from.”
E.M.W… Oh, call me John.
Anger Issues:
A teacher who taught Emwazi at Quintin Kynaston school in Queens Park, London, a decade ago tells BBC Two’s Newsnight Emwazi had had therapy for his anger issues:
“We’d find that he’d get very angry and worked up and it would take him a long time to calm himself down, so we did a lot of work as a school to help him with his anger and to control his emotions. It seemed to work. He had a lot of respect for all of the work that had been done for him at our school. He didn’t come from a troubled background. He didn’t leave school with no qualifications. He had every chance of doing well. I just can’t believe he’d do that.”
MI5 hate animals:
Emwazi exhanged meails with Cage, which campaigns against “state policies developed as part of the War on Terror”. Emwazi says he was questioned by a British official at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport after trying to visit Tanzania under the name Muhammad ibn Muazzam. He was going on ‘safari’. He wrote:
“He knew everything about me; where I lived, what I did, the people I hanged around with. He also believed that I was lying [about the holiday in Tanzania] and I wanted to go to Somalia. Then he made a face and said, ‘I am going out of the cell now and by the time I come back, I want you to think about what do you want to say to us’. I said to him that before you go out you have to tell me that what you want from me. He said that he wanted the truth. I said, ‘Bloody hell! I just told you what was our plan and where were we [are] going and you still think that I am lying. What do you want from us?’ He pointed his finger at me and said to me, ‘Don’t try to play smart and lie on my face. Don’t try to fool me. YOU WANTED TO GO TO SOMALIA’.”
Love:
According to Cage, Emwazi blamed UK intelligence services for being prevented from traelling to Kuwait to meet his true love. He wrote:
“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started. But know [sic] I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person in-prisoned [sic] and controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace, and my country, Kuwait.”
“It was four months before the police visited the family home. They explained that they had information that he had entered into Syria. The father said that this could not be true, as far as they were concerned; their son was in Turkey assisting refugees with the limited contact they had managed with him during that period.”
He wasn’t violent:
One of Emwazi’s former teachers said: “He was a diligent hard working lovely young man, responsible, quiet. He was everything you could want a student to be.
“I’m just absolutely shocked that appears to be him. It’s just a 100 miles away from where I thought he’d be. It makes you wonder what can happen in the years when you don’t see these young people. It’s really scary. He was religious and I think as he got older he did become more devout. He would go the mosque and pray, but then a lot of the kids did that.
“He was somebody who would always seek the correct way of handling something. There was never any indication of any violence at all.”
He was violent:
According to the classmate, there was nothing to suggest Emwazi was religious during his teenage years. He was quiet, rarely made eye contact, and always wore a baseball cap – but was known to get into the occasional fight.
Fashion:
Graduating in his early 20s, he is described by those who knew him as a “polite” young man with a “penchant for wearing stylish western clothes” while at the same time “adhering to the tenets of his Islamic faith”.
Those black and white ISIS clothes and flags always would attract the fashonable:
He want to be one of the guys:
Asim Qureshi who works for Cage:
“You might be surprised to know that the Mohammed that I knew was extremely kind, extremely gentle, extremely soft spoken, was the most humble young person that I knew. When are we going to finally learn that when we treat people as if they’re outsiders they will inevitably feel like outsiders and they will look for belonging elsewhere.”
What we do know is that it has nothing to do with free will.
Posted: 28th, February 2015 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
