Warning: this blog post contains recycled material.
Thank you to The Guardian for running an article today about Mohammed Emwazi. No one can be in any doubt about the sheer evil perpetrated by Emwazi and certainly no one will be fooled into somehow blaming MI5, of all people, for ‘radicalising’ him, but this is an item that dispassionately outlines his background in the years before he became a sick, cowardly murderer. But I am not thanking The Guardian just for that article: I am thanking them for, at no point, referring to Emwazi as ‘Jihadi John’.
I am not suggesting that I have an extensive and diverse group of family and friends who form a reasonable snapshot of how we think in Britain, but I have not yet come across a single person who talks about ‘Jihadi John’, not one. People have talked about him all right, but never in a positive sense. In fact, he is despised by everyone I know. He is not seen as some sort of hero. And no one is referring to him by using a jokey, almost affectionate nickname.
The media is right up its own arse with this one, talking to itself in a language that no one else is using. For instance, the BBC yesterday referred to Emwazi as “known as Jihadi John”. I would argue that is not true and a far more accurate comment would have been, ‘known by the media as Jihadi John’. Somehow, I doubt that the family and friends of innocent people killed by ISIS are happy to see that the public face of the killers is casually encapsulated by a made-up nickname. I do not care where the nickname came from. It is said that the nickname came from hostages taken by ISIS and we know that is a nickname based on the Beatles, arguably the greatest band in the history of music, and that Jihadi John is an oblique comparison with John Lennon. Now, I find this extremely distasteful on all manner of levels and an absolute insult to Lennon, the Beatles and anyone who loves their music. Are we seriously meant to refer to his colleagues, by extension of this perverted logic, as Jihadi Ringo, Jihadi Paul and Jihadi George? Or if there was another group of murderers, would we have Jihadi Mick and Jihadi Keith?
I put it down to lazy journalism. Attach a nickname for a cheap headline and a grotesque comparison with a man who sang about peace and the man who wrote Imagine.
The Guardian appears to be unique in ditching this absurd nickname with even the Telegraph continuing to refer to Emwazi by his ‘comedy’ nickname (you would expect the red tops to do the same and you would be right).
The world has had a bad habit of renaming repulsive criminals with silly nicknames and this is but another one. Emwazi is Emwazi, not some pastiche of a great musician. Jihadi John is a media invention, nothing more.
