It is almost certain that the Sweden suicide bomber was resident of the city of Luton in the UK. I have written about Luton in this context during the London Bombings and have slightly modified it for today:
The news reports that one bomber comes from the Luton area... Between 1998 and 1999, I took a postgraduate science course at University of Luton (now renamed University of Bedfordshire).
I remember exactly what my impression of that place was, to friends I described it as "full of Hyper-Ethnics!"
People went beyond their identities. They dressed over-exaggeratedly up for their ID tag, mingled exclusively with their own and projected themselves against all who were not like them. It was a sort of "Identity Phantasia-Land," also fed through reciprocal hatred from Others. The hyper-ethnics were equally BNP and EDF "Europe for the Blondes," supporters, "Islamic Mullahs", as well as "Nubian Kings and Queens." Skin-heads in full uniform, with British bulldogs and England tattoos, Muslim men that looked like they came out of the deepest Afghanistan mountains, fully veiled women, African Caribbean men dressed in Sahelian Desert dresses ready to face a desert storm, it was all there.
Alongside were a lot extremely poor economically disadvantaged people of any sort of background, who 'got on' beyond the ID tag. They were simply poor.
Personally, I also remember a grounded intellectual disagreement with a science tutor, who promoted racial reading of science in the classical pseudo-scientific classifications, Blacks are more likely to suffer x, Caucasians more Y. When I questioned the categories she named on their "racial" validity, she got very agitated and marked me down considerably in my forthcoming essay.
My conclusion was that much of Luton looked upon the world without intellectual spectrum. Here the common versions of history, science and religion were based on narrow monotone outlooks, sometimes lacking the foundations it claimed it stood upon. I am hardly surprised, it became the home of extremists who would go the extra mile.
A version of this article appeared first in 2005 on Daniels Counter Blog
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Sweden suicide bombLutoncommunity friction![Creative Commons Licence]()
This work by Daniel Zylbersztajn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://daniel-zylbersztajn.blogspot.com/.
The news reports that one bomber comes from the Luton area... Between 1998 and 1999, I took a postgraduate science course at University of Luton (now renamed University of Bedfordshire).
I remember exactly what my impression of that place was, to friends I described it as "full of Hyper-Ethnics!"
People went beyond their identities. They dressed over-exaggeratedly up for their ID tag, mingled exclusively with their own and projected themselves against all who were not like them. It was a sort of "Identity Phantasia-Land," also fed through reciprocal hatred from Others. The hyper-ethnics were equally BNP and EDF "Europe for the Blondes," supporters, "Islamic Mullahs", as well as "Nubian Kings and Queens." Skin-heads in full uniform, with British bulldogs and England tattoos, Muslim men that looked like they came out of the deepest Afghanistan mountains, fully veiled women, African Caribbean men dressed in Sahelian Desert dresses ready to face a desert storm, it was all there.
Alongside were a lot extremely poor economically disadvantaged people of any sort of background, who 'got on' beyond the ID tag. They were simply poor.
Personally, I also remember a grounded intellectual disagreement with a science tutor, who promoted racial reading of science in the classical pseudo-scientific classifications, Blacks are more likely to suffer x, Caucasians more Y. When I questioned the categories she named on their "racial" validity, she got very agitated and marked me down considerably in my forthcoming essay.
My conclusion was that much of Luton looked upon the world without intellectual spectrum. Here the common versions of history, science and religion were based on narrow monotone outlooks, sometimes lacking the foundations it claimed it stood upon. I am hardly surprised, it became the home of extremists who would go the extra mile.
A version of this article appeared first in 2005 on Daniels Counter Blog
Tags:
Sweden suicide bombLutoncommunity friction
This work by Daniel Zylbersztajn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://daniel-zylbersztajn.blogspot.com/.
