Them Read online

  Jon Ronson

  Them

  Adventures with Extremists

  2001, EN

  Them began as a book about different kinds of extremists, but after Jon had got to know some of them – Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen – he found that they had one oddly similar belief: that a tiny, shadowy elite rule the world from a secret room.

  In Them, Jon sets out, with the help of the extremists, to locate that room. The journey is as creepy as it is comic, and along the way Jon is chased by men in dark glasses, unmasked as a Jew in the middle of a Jihad training camp, and witnesses international CEOs and politicians participate in a bizarre pagan ritual in the forests of northern California.

  Them is a fascinating and entertaining exploration of extremism, in which Jon learns some alarming things about the looking-glass world of ‘them’ and ‘us’. Are the extremists on to something? Or has Jon become one of THEM?

  Table of contents

  Preface and acknowledgements

  1: A Semi-Detached Ayatollah

  2: Running Through Cornfields

  3: The Secret Rulers Of The World

  4: Bilderberg Sets A Trap!

  5: The Middle Men In New York

  6: There Are Lizards And There Are Lizards

  7: The Klansman Who Won’t Use the N-Word

  8: Hollywood

  9: Living A Diamond Life In A Rocky World

  10: Dr Paisley, I Presume

  11: Ceausescu’s Shoes

  12: The Way Things Are Done

  13: The Clearing In The Forest

  ∨ Them ∧

  Preface and acknowledgements

  This book began its life as a series of profiles of extremist leaders, but it quickly became something stranger. My plan had been to spend time with those people who had been described as the political and religious monsters of the western world – Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, etc. I wanted to join them as they went about their everyday lives. I thought that perhaps an interesting way to look at our world would be to move into theirs and stand alongside them while they glared back at us.

  And this is what I did with them for a while. But then I found that they had one belief in common: that a tiny elite rules the world from inside a secret room. It is they who start the wars, I was told, elect and cast out the heads of state, control Hollywood and the markets and the flow of capital, operate a harem of underage kidnapped sex slaves, transform themselves into twelve-foot lizards when nobody is looking, and destroy the credibility of any investigator who gets too close to the truth.

  I asked them specifics. Did they know the whereabouts of the secret room? But their details were sketchy. Sometimes, they said, these elitists meet in hotels and rule the world from there. Every summer, they added, they team up with presidents and prime ministers to attend a Satanic summer camp where they dress in robes and burn effigies at the foot of a giant stone owl.

  I took it upon myself to try to settle the matter. If there really was a secret room, it would have to be somewhere. And if it was somewhere, it could be found. And so I set about trying to find it.

  This turned out to be a hazardous journey. I was chased by men in dark glasses, surveilled from behind trees, and – unlikely as it might sound right now – I managed to witness robed international CEOs participate in a bizarre pagan owl-burning ritual in the forests of northern California.

  One night, in the midst of my quest to find the secret room, I was back in London playing poker with another Jewish journalist, John Diamond. He asked me what I was up to. I ranted about how the extremists were on to something, how they were leading me to a kind of truth, and so on.

  John, who has throat cancer and consequently needs to write everything down, immediately found a blank page in his notepad and furiously scribbled, “You are sounding like one of THEM.”

  The word THEM was written with such force that it scored through the paper. Was John right? Had I become one of them? Whatever, I’d like to thank him for giving me the idea for the book’s title.

  Many thanks to David Barker, John Sergeant, Peter Grimsdale, Saul Dibb and Fenton Bailey. I could not have written this book without them. Well, I probably could have written it without them. I couldn’t, however, have written it without Ursula Doyle at Picador who commissioned and edited it, and Derek Johns who brokered the deal with aplomb.

  I would also like to thank Janey Walker, Janis Hadlow, Steve McCarthy, David Malone, Emily Fielden, Natasha Fownes, Mike Whine, Vivienne Clore, Sam Bickley and Emma Forrest.

  I would say that my wife, Elaine, possessed all the patience and understanding of a loving wife, etc., but in fact she said to me, “Oh, will you just shut up about it and finish it.”

  The loving wife in this situation was Adam Curtis.

  All the words within are my own, except for the paragraphs I have appropriated from Neal Gabler’s An Empire Of Their Own (How The Jews Invented Hollywood).

  Shorter versions of A Semi-Detached Ayatollah and Dr Paisley, I Presume were published in the Guardian Weekend magazine (in 1997 and 1998). I’d like to thank Deborah Orr, my editor at that time, Kath Viner, my current editor, and whoever it was at the Guardian who came up with the title A Semi-Detached Ayatollah. Before that it was called Tottenham Ayatollah.

  A question I’ve been asked is by what criteria I have defined the people within this book as extremists. The answer is, I haven’t. My only criterion is that they have been called extremists by others.

  One thing you quickly learn about them is that they really don’t like being called extremists. In fact they often tell me that we are the real extremists. They say that the western liberal cosmopolitan establishment is itself a fanatical, depraved belief system. I like it when they say this because it makes me feel as if I have a belief system.

  Jon Ronson July, 2000

  ∨ Them ∧

  1

  A Semi-Detached Ayatollah

  It was a balmy Saturday afternoon in Trafalgar Square in the summertime, and Omar Bakri Mohammed was declaring Holy War on Britain. He stood on a podium at the front of Nelson’s Column and announced that he would not rest until he saw the Black Flag of Islam flying over Downing Street. There was much cheering. The space had been rented out to him by Westminster Council.

  The Newsroom South-East TV reporter talked the afternoon’s events up with a hard, fast, urgent but cool-headed voice. She was a Muslim. In his speech, Omar Bakri referred to people like her as Chocolate Muslims. A Chocolate Muslim is an Uncle Tom.

  (The next day, the Daily Mail would run a photograph of a cold-eyed Omar Bakri on their inside front page under the headline, Is This The Most Dangerous Man In Britain? From his cold eyes, he looked as if he could be.)

  There were maybe 5,000 of Omar Bakri’s followers there in Trafalgar Square. After his speech, their plan was to release thousands of black balloons, carrying the call to war on little attached postcards. The balloons would fly high into the London sky, painting it black and then falling across London and the Home Counties. The balloons were being stored in a net, underneath the podium from which Omar Bakri was outlining his post-Jihad vision for the UK. He who practised homosexuality, adultery, fornication or bestiality would be stoned to death (or thrown from the highest mountain). Christmas decorations and shop-window dummies would be outlawed. There would be no free mixing between the sexes. Pubs would be closed down. The landlords would be offered alternative employment in something more befitting an Islamic society, like a library, and if they refused to comply they would be arrested. Pictures of ladies’ legs on packets of tights would be banned. We would still be able to purchase tights, but they would be advertised simply with the word ‘tights’.

  ♦

  I very much wanted to meet Omar Bakri and spend time with him while
he attempted to overthrow democracy and transform Britain into an Islamic nation.

  I visited Yacob Zaki, a Muslim fundamentalist who often shared a platform with him.

  Yacob Zaki is white and Scottish, a former Presbyterian who converted to Islam when he was a teenager. He lives in Greenock, a port near Glasgow. He is Greenock’s only militant Muslim convert. He said he had suffered much bullying at school as a result of his conversion, but it was well worth it.

  “Do you think that Omar Bakri might succeed in overthrowing the western way of life?” I asked him.

  “Well,” said Yacob, “Omar is our best hope at this time.”

  “Why him?”

  “Charisma,” said Yacob. “He’s the most popular leader of the disaffected youth. People queue around the block to see him talk. Although we disagree on some matters.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well,” said Yacob, “one time I wanted to release a swarm of mice into the United Nations headquarters. Women hate mice, you know. I thought it was a brilliantly simple idea. One swarm of mice would have crushed the whole UN process, don’t you think?”

  “Women standing on chairs,” I agreed.

  “But Omar said no,” said Yacob. “He said it was a stupid idea.”

  “What other disagreements have you had with Omar Bakri?” I asked Yacob.

  “Well,” he said, “Omar got very angry with me when I announced that Hillary Clinton was a lesbian. But I have the proof.”

  ♦

  Yacob and I spent the day together. It was that afternoon I first heard about the Bilderberg Group, the secret rulers of the world, a tiny group of pernicious men and one or two pernicious women who meet in a secret room and determine the course of world events. It is they who start the wars, Yacob said, own the media and destroy – by covert violence or propaganda – anyone who gets too close to the truth.

  “One mysterious case,” said Yacob, “is that of the peanut farmer who attended a Bilderberg meeting and overnight became the most powerful man in the world. Yes. I’m speaking of Jimmy Carter. So you can see that they are extremely secretive and powerful.”

  I didn’t really take it in. I stared blankly at Yacob. I didn’t realize that the people Yacob spoke of would come to occupy – in the most unpleasant ways – a tremendous part of the next five years of my life.

  Yacob looked at his watch. He wanted our meeting to end. He had a tip on where he could purchase Hitler’s binoculars, and he didn’t want another collector to beat him to it. He gave me Omar Bakri’s address. I got his telephone number from the phone book.

  ♦

  It turned out that Omar Bakri lived a couple of miles away from me, in Edmonton, north London, in a small semidetached house at the end of a modern, fawn-coloured council-built cul-de-sac. His offices were at the Finsbury Park Mosque, at the bottom of my road, not far from Highbury football ground.

  I wrote to ask him if I could follow him around for a year or so while he attempted to transform Britain into an Islamic nation. He called back straight away. There were so many anti-Muslim lies, he said, generated by the Jewish-controlled media. So much misinformation, in the newspapers and the movies. Perhaps this would be an opportunity for the record to be set straight. So, yes. I was welcome to join him in his struggle against the infidels. And then he added, “I am actually very nice, you know.”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Omar Bakri, “I am delightful.”

  ♦

  At 9 a.m. the next morning I sat in Omar’s living room while Omar played with his baby daughter.

  “What’s your daughter’s name?” I asked him.

  “It is a difficult name for you to understand,” said Omar.

  “Does it have an English translation?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Omar, “it translates into English as ‘The Black Flag of Islam’.”

  “Really?” I said. “Your daughter’s name is the Black Flag of Islam?”

  “Yes,” said Omar.

  “Really?” I said.

  There was a small pause.

  “You see,” said Omar, “why our cultures can never integrate?”

  The Lion King was playing on the video. We watched the scene where the warthog sings ‘Hakuna Matata’, the song about how wonderful it is to have problem-free philosophies and no worries. Omar sang along, bouncing the baby on his knee.

  “We always watch The Lion King,’” he said. “It’s the only way I can relax. You know, they call me the Lion. That’s right. They call me the Lion. They call me the great warrior. The great fighter.”

  Omar showed me his photo album. His teenage photographs make him look like a matinee idol. He came from a family of twenty-eight brothers and sisters. His father had made a fortune selling sheep and pigs and cows. They had chauffeurs and servants and palaces in Syria, Turkey and Beirut. Omar escaped Saudi Arabia in 1985. He had heard that he was to be arrested for preaching the Jihad on university campuses. So he ran away. He escaped to Britain. Now he is a big man with a big beard.

  “I was thin because I always worried,” he said. “I was always on the run. Now I live in Britain, I never worry. What’s going to happen to me here? Ha ha! So I got fat. A leader must be big in stature. The bigger the body, the bigger the leader. Who wants a little scrawny leader?”

  Omar’s plan for the morning was to distribute leaflets outside Holborn tube station entitled: ‘Homosexuality, Lesbianism, Adultery, Fornication and Bestiality: THE DEADLY DISEASES’. He said he’d planned to travel by public transport, but he couldn’t help but notice my car in his driveway, so perhaps I would give him a lift instead?

  “OK,” I said.

  I dropped him off near the tube station. I went to park the car. Ten minutes later, I found him standing in the middle of the pavement with a stack of leaflets in his hand.

  “How’s it going, Omar?” I asked.

  “Oh, very good,” he smiled. “The message is getting across that there are some deadly diseases here and there.”

  He turned to the passers-by.

  “Homosexuality!” he yelled. “Beware the deadly disease! Beware the hour!”

  Some time passed.

  “Homosexuality!” yelled Omar. “Beware! There are homosexuals everywhere!”

  I expected to see some hostility to Omar’s leaflets from the passers-by. But the shoppers and tourists and office workers seemed to regard him with a kindly bemusement.

  Nonetheless, after ten minutes nobody had actually taken a leaflet.

  “Beware the hour! There are homosexuals everywhere! Beware the hour!” continued Omar, cheerfully. “Be careful from homosexuality! It is not good for your tummy!”

  Omar Bakri was unlike my image of a Muslim extremist.

  Then he told me that he had a good idea.

  “Just watch this,” he said.

  He turned the leaflets upside down.

  “Help the orphans!” he yelled. “Help the orphans!”

  “Omar!” I exclaimed, scandalized.

  The passers-by started to accept his leaflets.

  “This is good,” chuckled Omar. “This is good. You see, if I wasn’t a Muslim I’d be working for…how you say…Saatchi and Saatchi.”

  ♦

  At lunchtime Omar said he needed to buy some collection boxes for his regular fundraising endeavours for Hamas and Hizbullah. Hamas had orchestrated a bus bombing in Jerusalem three weeks earlier which had killed eleven people.

  “There is a Cash and Carry just off the ring-road near Tottenham,” said Omar, “that sells very good collection boxes. Could you give me a lift?”

  “OK,” I said.

  So we drove to the Cash and Carry. Omar sat in the back seat, which made me feel a little like a taxi driver.

  “Left,” said Omar. “Left at the junction. No. Left!”

  At some traffic lights, I asked Omar where his wife was when I was at his house.

  “She was upstairs,” he said.

  “Really
?” I said. “The whole time I was in your living room, watching The Lion King?”

  “Yes,” said Omar. “She wouldn’t come down until after you left.”

  “What would happen if I tried to interview her?” I asked.

  “I would declare Fatwa on you,” said Omar.

  “Please don’t say that,” I said.

  “Ha ha!” said Omar.

  “Even as a joke,” I said.

  ♦

  We arrived at the Cash and Carry to discover that the only collection boxes they had in stock were large plastic novelty Coca-Cola bottles. Omar paused for a moment. He scrutinized the collection boxes. He furrowed his brow. Then he placed half-a-dozen of them in his trolley.

  “These are good collection boxes,” he said. “Very big and lightweight.”

  “It seems strange to me,” I said, “that you plan to collect for Hamas and Hizbullah in novelty Coca-Cola bottles.”

  “Ah,” said Omar Bakri. “Very good. I am not against the imperialist baggage. Just the corruption of the western civilization.”

  “But nevertheless,” I said, “Coca-Cola is such a powerful symbol of western capitalism.”

  “Yes, indeed,” mumbled Omar.

  “So you are utilizing our symbols in your attempt to destroy them?” I said.

  “Oh yes,” he murmured, distantly.

  Omar didn’t seem too keen on this line of questioning. He seemed uncomfortable talking about his allegiance to Hamas and Hizbullah. He was in the process of applying for a British passport, and the Conservative government was attempting to pass a law criminalizing those who raised money at home for terrorists overseas – a law that was widely believed to be targeted primarily at Omar.

  “I do not collect only for Hamas,” said Omar. “I collect for all the Muslims worldwide.”

  He wandered away, pushing his six large novelty Coca-Cola bottles in a trolley through the Cash and Carry. He stopped at a shelf full of picture frames. The manufacturers had filled the frames with a sample photograph, portraying a sunny beach. A young woman in a one-piece bathing costume lay on the sand underneath an umbrella. She was licking a vanilla ice-cream cone in a borderline-suggestive manner. Omar shook his head sadly.