Mohammad Sidique Khan

Mohammad Sidique Khan’s video performance exemplifies the downside of religion. People of religious conviction, whatever it is, will deny this, they’ll say, no, that is only a perversion of religion; the true religion (whatever it is) has no part in these extreme, outrageous and criminal beliefs and acts. But clearly murder and partial genocide are as much a part of any effective religion as love and charity. Not that the religious would want them to be, but that they are. All you have to do is look at the corpse count racked up by any major religion.
Robin Dunbar in The Human Story ascribes four functions to religion:

Providing coherence for the world in which we live
Allowing us to feel we have greater control
Enforcing rules about how we should behave in society
Allowing a minority to exert political control over the community

All this is arguable, but it looks accurate to me. And from this it is pretty clear that religion and politics are difficult to distinguish once you leave out the bollocks. Tony Blair, George Bush, Mohammad Sidique Khan, Arial Sharon all sing from the same hymn sheet. It’s just that Sidique, having no armies or missiles, didn’t have the technology to kill nearly so many people.

So it’s worth looking at what Mohammad Sidique Khan was saying, for it’s major logical flaw.
He said, in a nutshell, that “you” - meaning me - are responsible for the death of “my” - meaning Sidique Khan’s - brothers and sisters, his co-religionists. And therefore "I" am going to kill "you" (clearly not the actual me in this case, or not yet, because I am alive and listening to Sidique’s video). "I" am going to go on killing "you" (clearly not I, Sidique Khan, since he is now dead, but the “I” of what he pretends to be true Islam) until "you" stop killing my brothers and my sisters.
It sounds logical. And yet there flows directly from it the unforgivable stupidity of killing not only the infidel, but Sidique's own “brothers and sisters”. Whatever his apologia for his acts, they in practice constitute, not glory, but the hysterical fascism of the adolescent male in emotional extremis.
And yet, by all accounts, Sidique Khan, except for this one deviation - and clearly it was a deviation which built over the years - was an admirable, kind, generous, well liked man.
The logical flaw in his argument, compared to what he did, is trivial, and I’m sure if it had been pointed out to him it would have made no difference. But it is this.
If I am responsible for Blair’s invasion of Iraq, for Blair’s enthusiasm for the policies and person of George W Bush, by extension for the extremes of Israeli policy - and I am - how does that responsibility come about? It comes about because I was born into an electoral democracy (the severe limitations on our elective dictatorship is another question.) You cannot choose where and when you were born. You cannot choose who you are. Sidique acknowledges this in his unconditional assertion that I am responsible.
And where was Sidique born? West Yorkshire. By his own argument he is as responsible as I am. And his own argument is correct.
And this is where the fascism of religion comes in, the legitimising of racial or religious exceptionalism and a higher calling which overrides all other ethical codes, charity, love, neighbourliness, which overrides every human virtue. And all effective religions share this fascism as a central component, a “special power”.
So Mohammad Sidique Khan, this kind and admirable man, appealed to this “special power” in order to justify his project - like Blair, like Bush, like Sharon, like the House of Saud, like bin Laden, like the Pope, like all true religionists. Mohammad Sidique Khan is no better than the rest of them.