His family called him “Ned.”
Like the July 21, 2005 London train bombers, he was as British as cricket.
And like the London bombers, Ned, young, intense and often scowling, with beady, deep-set eyes, blew up trains.
He killed people, destroyed millions of dollars of property, and caused populations to panic.
He sought to topple some governments, some kings and princes, and to place his friends into power.
What would Great Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair do about Ned?
Go figure.
On the surface, Ned seemed an unlikely terrorist. Born in Wales, he was the second son of English-Irish parents. His father was a lesser aristocrat and his mother a schoolteacher.
They lived in genteel but somewhat impoverished circumstances in Oxford, where Ned and his four brothers attended the City of Oxford High School for Boys.
A bright but intense and reserved child, Ned distinguished himself there and went on to read history at Jesus College, Oxford, on a scholarship. As with the 2005 London bombers, nothing in his background then indicated any anti-social tendencies that might have fed his urge to murder, maim, blow up trains, and aid Middle East insurgents.
But there were little hints of trouble.
There was, firstly, Ned’s family’s dark secret. Ned’s father had not divorced his first wife, and Ned and his brothers were illegitimate. In fact, the whole family lived under a false last name.
Ned’s mother had been the childcare giver to the daughters of his father’s legitimate family, a great trust she breached.
For love.
But still.
Much of Ned’s early youth was basically a hugely orchestrated lie. It must have knawed at him, for he never married, and he remained a loner for most of his life.
Just as many terrorists are.
Secondly, there was Ned’s great interest in the early Christian Crusades. In fact, Ned wrote a brilliant college thesis on French Crusader castles.
He especially studied medieval garrison architecture, including the huge fortress complex of Carcassonne in southwest France.
Avoiding all suspicion and interest, he conducted his investigations of these ancient military strongholds by traveling on bicycle from the extreme north to the extreme south of France, making notes and numerous photographs.
Who would suspect that the gangly youth with the rickety bike and boxy camera was anything but a casual tourist?
Authorities had no idea that Ned would later use the knowledge he’d gleaned from studying French crusader castles to target very similar fortresses still in military use in the Middle East.
Most notably in Carcassonne, Ned learned the art of distracting a defending army at the front of a garrison while then stealthily striking from behind without warning.
He surely had also heard the legend of Dame Carcass, a Muslim princess whose Saracen husband, King Balaak, had conquered Carcassonne.
Charlemagne himself besieged Carcassonne and Dame Carcass, then widowed and armed only with a long bow and a handful of starving soldiers, called upon a Christian subject to surrender his pig, to which she fed her last handfuls of grain.
She then tossed the bloated sow over the ramparts, where it exploded at Charlemagne’s feet, scattering the grain before the astonished Christian soldiers who reasoned that if Dame Carcass could still feed her pigs on grain, they’d best move their siege elsewhere.
Dame Carcass then called Charlemagne to parlay — a discussion — and so impressed was Europe’s greatest conqueror by the Muslim queen’s cleverness that he not only agreed she could keep her castle fortress and its lands, but he arranged her marriage to a Carolingian noble, founding the Trencavel dynasty.
Does Muslim blood still course through the veins of Europe’s great ruling families?
Something in this early experience stirred Ned’s own blood. Moving closer to the Middle East, he next embarked upon a “walking tour” of Palestine and Syria.
Like many terrorist types, Ned was un-and under-employed most of his adult life. He got a job of sorts working in the Middle East as an archaeologist — without any such credentials — unearthing the Hittite City of Carchemish along the Euphrates River. There he discovered nothing so great as his “talent” for making friends with Arabs.
When the global war against terror first began, the British government gave Ned a dull little job in its Geography Department before it realized he could speak some Arabic. Unable to quell growing dissent in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and the Hejaz region of Saudi Arabia, Britain sent its young “geographer,” Ned, on a “Middle East fact-finding mission.”
But somewhere along the way, Ned crossed a line. He started wearing Arab clothing, speaking Arabic and tribal dialects, eating Arab food, and following Arab laws and customs. Some people say he even secretly converted to Islam.
All we really know is that at some point, Ned procured explosives, guns and other supplies, and began aiding Arab insurgents. Together, they blew up trains.
Unpredictably.
The anti-Arab occupying powers became so busy protecting and repairing the trains, burying the dead, and caring for the wounded that militarily, they became unable to move.
Then, Ned crossed another line. He used his Arab “people” skills to martial hordes of local Arab and Bedouin tribesmen, whom he armed with the deadliest weapons he could find.
Ned set up a private Arab Army of God.
And against enormous odds, Ned and his army toppled the occupying powers.
Did Ned belong to Al-Qaeda?
No.
But he’d understand it very well.
Was Ned a terrorist?
Ask the Turks.
Was Ned a freedom fighter?
Ask the Arabs.
Was Ned a good British citizen?
The British were never quite sure about Ned, the man they knew as T.E. Lawrence.
Lawrence of Arabia.
Go figure!
