Richard/aka Salahuddin Al-Britani
A working class white boy from Weymouth
[Image Source: Daily Mail]
The PBS documentary My Brother the Islamist (or My Brother the Jihadist in other versions) describes the trajectory of a white lower-middle class young man from his very British background to that of a Muslim bomb-plotter. The full video is on view here, but I tried to understand what would compel Richard Dart, an ordinary young Brit, to leave his family and his society to join a religion where he would train to kill.
Richard Dart was arrested (in 2012)...
after police seized computers from his home address in Ealing following long surveillance.Dart and Mahmood discussed...
Evidence showed the men [Dart and fellow Jihadist Imran Mahmood] discussed targeting [Royal] Wootton Bassett, the Wiltshire town where residents paid their respects to repatriated [bodies of] British troops killed in Afghanistan from 2007 until September 2011.
not only blowing up returning soldiers, but also grieving families as war dead were repatriated through the royal town.A short (partial) transcript below of the film My Brother the Jihadist describes how Robb Leech, the very competent director of the film and Richard Dart's step-brother, started his quest to understand his brother's conversion to Islam. Richard now goes by the name Salahuddin Al-Britanni.
Leech Voice-Over:
[Salahuddin is] no ordinary Muslim. He's a white, middle class twenty-seven year-old from a sea-side town in Dorset. He's also my step-brother.Later on, we get a glimpse into the turning points of other lower-middle class/middle class white British men and their conversion to Islam:
Rich and I are both from Weymouth. We were born and raised here. It is a typical sea-side town. Rich left for London five years ago, and didn't come back. I stayed...
Just a year ago, I could never have imagined how our lives would take such different paths.
This [referring to an interview footage] is Salahuddin. Although I've always known him as Richard...
We were close growing up. Being a year older than me, I looked up to him. But after his move, we grew apart. Our family holiday to Cyprus in 2008 was the last time I saw Richard. we shared a room and talked late into the night about God and the Universe.
He was clearly looking for something. A year later, he'd found it.
I came across an article about radical Islamist Anjem Choudary. Someone who believes in imposing a world-wide Islamic state. And dubbed the most dangerous man in Britain. Four paragraphs down was Richard's name, and that of our hometown, Weymouth. He'd become one of Choudry's newest converts.
Rich talked of his willingness to fight and die for his beliefs, his hatred of the West, and his desire to impose Sharia law and make Britain an Islamic state.
Even now, my family is still struggling trying to come to terms with it all. And its why I'm making this film. To help us understand. [From the beginning of the video to about the 3 minute point]
Leech Voice Over:
I was surprised to find so many Muslim sisters [white women] in veils heading up the protest. But more surprising is the number of white brothers. I honestly thought Rich would be unique. But they're everywhere. So what connects them? And why have they turned their backs on the Western world?Abdullah Dean (formerly known as Dean):
"What actually brought me to Islam was my sister died of a cocaine overdose, at the age of eighteen. And I say that if this society is prepared to look after the youngsters, then you have to look after these people in the society, and not introduce them to that life style.Zakariah (formerly known as Charles):
Basically what spurred me into reading about Islam was George Bush...He said "You're either with us or you're not. Well I'm not with him. He's a liar, for a start. Not long after September 11th, I became a Muslim."Leech Voice Over:
I was struggling, and failing, to think of an equivalent moment for Rich.Rich's malaise was more stretched-out, and a general malaise at his existence and the lifestyle he saw around him. He thought Islam would make it all better.
The film, although purporting to expose "radical Islamism," is a good account of the lives and conversions to Islam of white British men, and their existential crises which directed them to embrace Islam, and to die for Allah.
When humans are bereft of a belief system, a higher order which satisfactorily explains their existence to them, they will invariably look for one. Modern Christianity has done a miserable job of saving people from Islam and safeguarding them from its predatory methods.
I looked at the demographics for Weymouth, the town where Robb and Richard grew up.
Here is some information from various sources:
1. From: The Weymouth and Portland 2009 Office for National Statistics [pdf file: p. 23]:
Ethnicity:
White - 94.35%2. From: 2011 Census, Key Statistics for Local Authorities in England and Wales. Office for National Statistics. 2012.
British White - 91.04%
Black Minority Ethnic groups: 8.97%
Religion:
Bhuddist: 0.4%The most outstanding thing about these demographics is that the town, in 2009, is 94% white, and in 2011 is barely 1% Muslim. I doubt that these demographics changed much over the following few years.
Christian: 61%
Hindu: 0.1%
Jewish: 0.1%
Muslim: 0.5%
No Religion: 29.3%
Other: 0.7%
Sikh: 0.1%
Not Stated: %7.9
But, there is something equally glaring. When asked their religious affiliation in 2011, close to one third of the Weymouth/Portland population said "No Religion" and 8% did not state a religion. About 40% of the population, close to half, does not associate with any kind of religion. Given the weak nature of the Church of England, the 61% who do say they are Christian (who are most likely predominantly the Protestant British) probably do it for cultural and (weak) traditional reasons.
Host Steve Paiken of the Canadian news program The Agenda recently interviewed Garry Wills in Christianity without Priests (here is the video to the episode).
The table below describing church attendance went up during the interview, from a table posted on the program (around the 27-29 minute points):
Whose Up and whose down:
Christian Orthodox +1:4.8%
Roman Catholic:-0.5%
Anglican: -19.85%
United: -29.3%
Paiken commented on the table that George Weigel, a Catholic writer whom Paiken had interviewed earlier in his show said (here is the video of Weigel's interview: Does Christianity Need a Church):
"The religions that require more from you are doing better. And the religions that are more liberal and...require less from you are fading."Islam knows this very well. And it makes demands, huge demands, on its followers. It also looks for those who are searching for certainties and expectations.
Dart left Weymouth, and his family, for London. It was soon after that he "converted" to Islam. He became an easy target for Islam: a young man in existential crisis, looking for something to fill the void of God.
Islam's proselytism works well within communities and with individuals where religion has been abandoned, or where it no longer has strict expectations. The Anglican community fits this description. Dart and Leech came from a community where 29% of the population says it has no religion. And being an English community, the majority of those that would associate with some kind of religion would be Anglicans, which is seeing a 20% decline in church attendance. So, not only would religion be downplayed in a community like Weymouth, but those who follow any kind of Protestant Christianity would practice is far less often, as seen by general church attendance.
I would think that Dart's and Leech's parents, who lived lived more sophisticated intellectual life of teachers, would not give much importance to religion. They would fit well the statistics of Anglicans who's church attendance has declined, and who would respond to the "no religion" options of the survey. And that is how they would most likely have brought up their sons.
In fact, Leech says in his film:
Our family holiday to Cyprus in 2008 was the last time I saw Richard. we shared a room and talked late into the night about God and the Universe.Dart was twenty-five then. By the time he was twenty-six, he had found Islam, or Islam had found him.
He was clearly looking for something. A year later, he'd found it.
He moved to London, to the Borough of Ealing, where he worked as a security guard.
According to the Office of National Statistics, UK’s largest independent producer of official statistics, the ethnic make-up of Ealing is as follows:
White
White British: 44.9%
White Irish: 4.8%
White other: 9.1%
Mixed
White & Black Caribbean: 1.0%
White & Black African: 0.5%
White & Asian: 1.2%
Mixed other: 1.0%
Asian or Asian British
Indian: 16.5%
Pakistani: 3.8%
Bangladeshi: 0.4%
Other Asian: 3.9%
Black or Black British
Caribbean: 4.5%
African: 3.7%
Black other: 0.6%
Chinese or other
Chinese: 1.2%
Other ethnic group: 3.1%
[The area, population and ethnic breakdown figures (all from the 2001 Census with 2010 mid-year population estimates* revised by ONS). *These statistics were compiled before the release of the 2011 Census data.]
Although Ealing's whites make up a majority of about 2/3 of the population, there is still a large, and most likely vocal and aggressive, Asian population of 24%, or almost 1/4 of the population. This is where the confused, searching, Dart would have found his "answers."
Dart says in My Brother the Jihadist:
The worst of the Muslims is better than the best of the Kaffir...That is why the Kaffar will be held in fire for eternity.Dart:
Not only did Allah create the world, he also gave us a law and a way to live in order to prepare ourselves for the day of judgment.
...changed his name to Salahuddin al-Britani, became involved in extremism after moving from his home town Weymouth to east London and fraternising with radical preacher Anjem Choudary. [Source: Daily Mail]He:
...pleaded guilty to preparing for terrorism or assisting another in terrorism, between July 2010 and July [2012] at the Old Bailey today.[Source: Sun UK]Dart's preparation for the day of judgment has began. His six years in prison will only prepare him for other acts he will perform, violent or not, in order to prove his worth for Allah's paradise.
Steve Paiken asks George Weigel:
What is the harm in just being spiritual as opposed to going to church every Sunday and taking on sacraments etc.?"Weigel answers:
Finally, the harm Steve, it doesn't take you out of the great loneliness of modernity. Modernity and post-modernity tend to be very lonely places.Paiken:
Not for everybodyWeigel:
Well, for a lot of people. I've walked up University Avenue today in Toronto, from City Hall to the Provincial Parliament, and fully half of the people walking past are living in their own little pod world with ear things in their ears. There's no human connection there...This has been a constant theme of philosophers, psychologists, sociologists for two hundred and fifty years. There is some, there is a break down of human community throughout the Western world, in all of its various forms. The phenomenon described by Robert Putnam in that famous article Bowling Alone, and that is part of what the church can offer people, I mean the Church in its broadest sense. It offers a community of people, many of whom are confused, not fully convinced, searchers, as the lingo would have it, but who nonetheless find in the presence of others a way to satisfy that yearning for the transcendent. That wish for an attachment to something larger than "me, myself and I."It was this desire for something bigger than "me, myself and I" that induced the searching Dart to give himself over to Islam.
I would expect that over the years, conversions of white, nominally Christian men and women to Islam will only increase.
Cleric Anjem Choudary presides over Richard's conversion to Islam.
Choudary called Dart's Jihadist actions as "an act of resistance" and
that Dart was victim of the Britain's "oppressive" legal system.
Anjem Choudary is a British-born former solicitor, and head of the banned group Islam4UK which he formed after its predecessor, al-Muhajiroun, was also banned. He became the Islamic cleric that guided Dart's spiritual life.
Dart had tried to obtain terrorist training in Pakistani camps
...having been told by [Choudary] that ‘Jihad training’ is a duty for Muslim men.Dart had consequently visited Pakistan
...for terrorist training, although [he] were unsuccessful in that aim.The most recent news on Dart is from his court appearance where
...Dart refused to stand when he was sentenced, saying: "I don't wish to stand up. I believe ruling and judging is only for Allah."Dart was preparing to travel to Mecca for Hajj:
The documentary finishes with Dart travelling to Mecca to go on pilgrimage, talking about a demonstration called "British Soldiers Can Burn In Hell," planned while he was away.He was a good Muslim.
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Richard Dart (left), before his conversion to Islam,
with Robb Leech, his step-brother and filmmaker of My Brother the Islamist.
Dart looks like the "proper" of the two, with his well-groomed hair and
shaved face. His Western religion and culture ultimately betrayed him,
leaving him to look for structure and stability elsewhere, in Islam.
[Image Source: Daily Mail]
Robb Leech (left) with his camera, while filming the documentary My Brother the Jihadist
Richard Dart in Muslim clothes.
The brothers are still "close"
[Image Source: Daily Mail]
Weymouth, where Richard Dart grew up
[Image Source: Coastal Connect]
Weymmouth's Queen Victoria's Jubilee Clock
[Image Source: Wikipapia]
Erected in 1887 to mark the 50th year of Queen Victoria's reign the Jubilee Clock was originally positioned on a stone base on Weymouth sands, but in the 1920s the Esplanade was built around it to protect the sands from the encroachment of shingle from the eastern end of the beach. [Source: Wikipedia]
The Royal Hotel on Weymouth seafront, showing Georgian architecture
[Image source: Regency History]
Formerly a port city and bathing place of George III, Weymouth has now expanded into the second best resort in England with its safe bathing beach, picturesque harbour, new shopping centre, wide choice of accommodation, restaurants, pubs, cafes and ice cream parlours. The sandy beach is superb offering facilities such as swing boats, trampolines, volleyball court and Weymouth's famous sand modeller. With excellent wind conditions all year round the waters of Weymouth Bay and Portland Harbour attract wind-surfers, dinghy sailors, and divers. The Sea Life Park's marine displays reveal the fascinating under water habitats and at The Deep Sea Adventure and Sharky's children can jump, swing, slide and climb in the adventure play zone while adults take in the Titanic exhibition on the upper floors.
Weymouth is located 199 km away from London. [Source: TravelOnline]
Richard Dart, with his step brother filmmaker Robb Leech as young boys, close friends
growing up in the sea-side town of Weymouth. Dart is on the right.
[Image Source: Daily Mail]
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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