The unmasking of Jihadi John is much in the news. Here is some advice from someone who has experienced capture and the prospect of imminent and completely illogical execution.
Penelope Tremayne was captured in January 1986 and held for five weeks by Tamil 'freedom fighters', hourly expecting to be shot as a spy. She ends her book Nor Bars an Iron Cage with the following advice:
Never trust anyone who kills and imprisons people while saying he is winning their freedom.
Never believe that the man is a victim who takes his neighbour's house by force and says it is self-defence.
Never take a bully at his own valuation as a hero.'
She goes on:
Don't over-estimate the intelligence of your captors. Terrorism is a moron's occupation: if the killers and bombers had good minds they would be doing better things. Almost every major mistake I made came from supposing that my interrogators had put two and two together and made four. Over and over again it came out that they had not even tried to, let alone succeeded.
And it is fatally easy to suppose that they know much more than they do. They say so all the time, and you slip into accepting the idea. Because in physical terms they have complete power over you, you tend (or I tended) to exaggerate their importance. It is necessary to remember all the time that they are driven by one engine only: the desire to dominate.
Intelligent men may succumb to this as well as stupid ones, but they find more intelligent methods than terrorism. And some of these involve making use of terrorists, of their blind vanity and contempt for others.
I cannot generalize about the the minds of the puppeteers. But it is not they whom you and I are likely to come face to face with, it is only their manikins, who jerk and dangle at the strings' ends, and lob a bomb into a crowd of strangers in the belief that they are reshaping society.
Let us not help to build up their illusions about themselves. The greatest of these is that they are fighters in a noble cause, to whom anything is therefore allowed. They see bullying as heroism, and in their eyes it is not they who are terrorists but those who stand against them. They see the murders that they or their superiors commit as the fault of the government which refuses to give them their way; and if they do not torture their prisoners, that proves to them that they are kind and generous.
At all costs I want to say, never accept the hand of friendship from such people. Do not be deluded by any cant about compassion; it is nether godlike nor humanly right to go along with indiscriminate murder, and that is what you are doing if you make friends with hostage-takers.
Are you tempted to say: Yes, but this man who actually stands talking to me in my cell: he is a human being too, he has not shot me so far, and I don't know if he has shot anyone else. Have I not a duty of compassion towards him? And is there not a chance that he might change his approach to life if I let him see I understand that he too has a point of view? Believe me, he is very much likelier to shoot the next victim he gets in your stead, if you have encouraged him to think that his point of view has attracted your sympathy.
I wonder how she would feel today. The actions of people prepared to do the one thing one never expected of a human being - cold-bloodedly to sacrifice one's life for a cause - was surely a game-changer.
