November 21, 2015
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The brother of the two aforementioned attackers, Mohamed Abdeslam, did only very slightly better when he said in his statement to the press”in which he denied any involvement in the attacks (he said he had a solid alibi accepted by the examining magistrate who questioned him)”that he and his family were thinking of the families of the victims, but added that the most wanted man in the world, his brother Salah, was still the son of his mother, implying that she loved him.
No doubt she did, as the mother of Jack the Ripper probably still loved her son. Yet only for those who deem all and any emotion equally important could this weigh more than a feather in the balance. But Mohamed Abdeslam prefaced his remarks by saying, “You will understand…””an appeal to an audience assumed to be sentimental to offset a mother’s suffering against the monstrosity of her sons” deeds. There was in the brother’s statement not the odor of sanctity but that of self-pity, which is, as Augustus Carp would no doubt have put it, characteristic of our age. Perpetrators are victims, and the mothers of perpetrators are victims; in fact, we are all victims, with no distinction between our various degrees of victimhood. We live in a kind of warm soup of victimhood.
The sister of Graham Young, the thallium poisoner who caused agonizing deaths and injury to many people, wrote a memoir of her brother, published in 1973 and titled Obsessive Poisoner, that managed to convey simultaneously her continued love for her brother (despite the fact that he tried to poison her) and the fact that her love for him was insignificant or of no importance in the public and legal response to the case. Her emotional restraint was of a completely different epoch: Her book might as well have been written 2,000 years ago as just over 40.
