[Mb-civic] Banality Of the Bombers - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Banality Of the Bombers

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, July 31, 2005; Page B07

<>"The deeds were monstrous, but the doer . . . was quite ordinary, 
commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous."<>
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind"

The banality of evil that Hannah Arendt glimpsed in Nazi war criminal 
Adolf Eichmann lives on in this visual age. It emerges from surveillance 
photographs of four terrorism suspects in London that were splashed 
across the world's television screens, Internet sites and newspapers 
earlier this month.

<>Those police photos, as did Eichmann's words and appearance during his 
1961 trial in Jerusalem, show the face
of evil as all too human and surprisingly mediocre -- a face not of 
mysterious supernatural forces that we cannot comprehend or combat, but 
one of petty criminality and hatred that we can easily recognize. In 
that sobering reality are reasons for comfort, and for anguish.

What you saw in the surveillance photographs released July 22 of the 
would-be assassins may well be different from what I saw. Two of the 
four "looked" to me as if they came from East Africa (I once lived 
there) and, as I remarked, one in particular resembled Somalis I had known.

<>He turned out to be Yasin Hassan Omar, arrested on Wednesday and 
identified as an ethnic Somali. Police also then identified Muktar Said 
Ibrahim, an Eritrean immigrant who was arrested Friday along with the 
two other bombing suspects shown in the photos. The two men fully 
identified by police come from violent homelands -- not comfortable 
British circumstances -- and have records as a petty criminal (Ibrahim) 
or unemployed loser (Omar). That is, in a way, reassuring.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/29/AR2005072901673.html 

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