By Passion – Avijit Roy

Avijit Roy

Born in Bangladesh. 42. US citizen living in Atlanta (Alpharetta). Married. Teenage daughter. It’s all on Facebook – he dug Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins and Big Bang Theory and Glee and Up and Basic Instinct…

“[IT] Engineer by profession and a writer by passion :) Apart from professional activities, I have profound interest in freethinking, skepticism, philosophy, scientific thoughts and human rights of people. I write in the Internet blogs (mainly in Mukto-mona) and occasionally in some newspapers covering my interests. I have written couple of books on popular science and few taboo topics in Bangla.”

Taboo means setting science on religion. It means marking International Blasphemy Day. It means: “Bangladesh is a county where basic rights are ignored, let alone the LGBT rights. But it's nice that some are trying.”

The Mukto-Mona blog Roy set up had several contributors alongside him: academics, names, noticeable, read.

In 2013 atheist bloggers in Bangladesh caused such a popular stink demanding the death penalty when Islamist party leader Abdul Quader Mollah was jailed for war crimes – as well as in reaction to the resultant murder of one of their number – that Islamists counter-protested and called for ‘blasphemy laws.’ The government didn’t agree, but did arrest four bloggers for hurting religious sentiment. Roy helped coordinate some of the US-based protests that called for their release. His ongoing battle against ideology and dogma, championing of secularism, and just maybe his book The Virus of Faith got noticed by Muslim extremists:

I suddenly found myself to be a target of militant Islamists and terrorists. A well-known extremist by the name of Farabi Shafiur Rahman […] openly issued death threats to me through his numerous Facebook statuses.  In one of his widely-circulated statuses Farabi wrote, “Avijit Roy lives in America and so, it is not possible to kill him right now. But he will be murdered when he comes back [to Bangladesh].”

Roy’s most recent books were published at Bangladesh’s National book fair this year. The Virus of Faith had appeared at 2014’s event. Roy travelled to Dhaka on 16^th February.

The Ekushey Book Fair – a month long event in Dhaka.

Thursday 26^th - 9:30pm.

So he does his thing with the books and then he and his wife go off in a rickshaw. Except when they’re passing Dhaka University’s teacher-student centre two men stop the thing and drag Roy and his wife Rafida Ahmed Bonya out onto the pavement. Kazi Nazrul Islam Ave., right by the Coca Cola-branded tea stalls where the students discuss politics and current affairs.

Hacked to death. There’s that gulp.

Two meat cleavers. One goes right into the back of Avijit Roy’s head. Deep. His wife tries to stop them and she gets it too – her finger is sliced off. Gash to the head, leg. The photo taken of them just after (evidence a millisecond before aid) shows her rapidly turning red all over.

There’s some colour left in her blouse and jeans at this point, but she’s marbled with her own blood, head to toe. Roy’s face-down on the ground with his head in a lake of blood. He’s dead on arrival at the hospital. Bonya’s clothes have no colour on the stretcher – totally saturated with blood now. Looks black and crimson: her tan blouse. Blue jeans are black. She has since been taken back to the US for treatment.

View image | gettyimages.com

Both were writers. They typed thoughts on blogs read by handfuls. In seconds they had X-rated war crime injuries, because they TYPED shit. But that’s exactly what war crime injuries are like: attackers torture porn the bodies of people who are living incommensurable and asymmetrical lives from themselves – non-combatants, civilians, children…

Roy was targeted because of his ‘crime against Islam’ – of course the extremists had a Twitter account. Ansar Bangla 7. Though that’s the only place the group’s name comes from. It doesn’t seem to have had much of an existence prior to the attack.

Farabi Shafiur Rahman, who’d threatened Roy last year, has been arrested in connection with the attack – based on his social media reactions, it seems. It’s all speak your brains stuff: “It's a holy duty of Bangalee Muslims to kill Avijit."

And this is how we came to hear of Avijit Roy – his Google presence is pretty slim prior to his murder. But after…

Avijit Roy was an American citizen of Bangladeshi origin who was an engineer by profession and the author of several books on topics including science, atheism and free expression. He founded the Mukto-Mona (“free mind”) blog which supported and nurtured a community of free-thinkers, secularists, atheists and humanists in Bangladesh. Avijit wanted “to build a society which will not be bound by the dictates of arbitrary authority, comfortable superstition, stifling tradition, or suffocating orthodoxy but would rather be based on reason, compassion, humanity, equality and science.”

Well, yes, and he also seemed to be rehashing Dawkinisms and was more of a ‘content curator’ – all guest posts and networking. If you sit there and write incessantly about your subject long enough and noisily enough you’re bound to get noticed and quoted and collaborated with – become a ‘thought leader.’

I don’t claim to have come up with any new or novel concept in [The Virus of Faith]. The concept was already there. Those who are familiar with Richard Dawkins’ revolutionary idea of Meme (a concept introduced in his 1976 magnum opus The Selfish Gene) are acquainted with the viral metaphor of religious meme.

Similarly, it’s because extremists trawl social media for references to their niche, do their own content curation and scan the internet for mentions and the core words from their world, that they found Roy’s work and threatened him. The Twitter account associated with Roy’s killing here:

#ParisAttack > #kopenhagenAttack > #DhakaAttack MashAllah..Lovers of Prophet (PBUH) is increasing.... #Dhaka #Bangladesh

Radical Islamists responding to coverage – like a dark version of a business or company dealing with any namedropping complaints on Twitter, taking ownership. Searching keywords and targeting anyone saying the wrong thing. Outrage by Search Engine Optimisation – militants hit Google to find something/someone to get annoyed about.

And Avijit Roy wasn’t subtle. If I showed you an image of a woman in a burqa jammed up against a photo of a child in a Halloween ghost costume you’d imagine that came from a right-wing bellend’s Facebook page, somewhere amongst all the SHARE IF YOU THINK THIS IS A DISGRACE guff about benefit claimants and all the free stuff offered to immigrants.

But that image was actually one of Roy’s. His take was condemning the burqa as oppressing women, obscuring patriarchy/sexism/misogyny with a …veil of tradition.

Islam is a violent religion. That’s another of Roy’s opinions that can cut across both liberal and right-wing readings, depending on the emphasis.

“Of course I know that most Muslims are not terrorists; they are peaceful. The reason is that they do not follow the Qur’an literally. […] Moderate Muslims are, however, quite happy with descriptions such as “religion of peace”; they are similar to rhetoric from seasoned politicians. Osama Bin Laden, Anwar al‑Awlaki, the Kouachis and Coulibaly, Nidal Hasan, al-Qaeda, and ISIS—all of whom follow the scripture literally—are deemed responsible for mass destruction while their cherished dogma remains unquestioned. Those who wish to be factually correct rather than politically correct may be outcast or even physically threatened.”

He quotes the Koran (2:191) “kill the disbelievers wherever we find them” standalone.  So do a lot of people.

A quick Google offers what that’s sandwiched between:  

“Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors (190). And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter (191).”

It’s still not pretty, but it’s less ugly (other translations have ‘begin not hostilities’ as don’t aggress/transgress/exceed the limits).

View image | gettyimages.com

But Roy was doing it for a cause, and with a good context – perhaps a better context than his heroes and inspirations. Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins… He channelled and retweeted their one-liners and critiques and applied them to a country where fanatics are bending reality around their ideology to convert, recruit and scare. Where the main political movers vie for power in an ugly, destructive way and the extremists milk the resentment. Where burkas are a deadly issue as well as a choice. So Roy’s curating is a heroic thing – gathering ideas and thinkers and articulate voices to offer another voice.

And the extremists decide to take these people out. They weren’t aiming high: the bloggers. The free speech-ers aren’t doing anything that great (and that’s what makes them the greatest people in the world), but the militants take them down with the rage and the ‘fuck yeah’ self-righteousness because they want and need to elevate their small role into something important, connected and meaningful.

Putting a meat cleaver through a two-bit blogger’s skull is nothing. It’s a terrible, inhumane crime, but nothing more than that. In the reactions it gets utterly transformed, and by all parties. (Something that actually isn’t) Islam takes down (someone who actually isn’t) a high profile enemy of the religion. In the aftermath it’s all Je suis Charlie valorising of the deceased, giving them a Hollywood level of biographical importance to both condemn the killing and deal with the sadness.

It’s tiny, tiny tiny people trying to make themselves mean something in the most abhorrent and inhuman way possible. There’s probably cheap, Big I Am adrenaline thrills involved, too – not being too scared to kill someone. Not being too scared to take on your opponent’s argument: that’s brave. Anyone can kill people; fucking toddlers do it with their parents’ guns in the States.

Yes, your ideology is so strong, so convincing that you… need to devastate the fuck out of people to get them to agree with it. Well done. But then these actions are more about the perpetrators’ terrible mutation of teenage kicks, anyway – a self-absorbed search for adrenaline highs that’s indifferent to anything/one that gets trampled in the process. Only here it’s taken to the extreme: hurting others isn’t the by-product of a tunnel-visioned search for kicks; it is the kick.

It’s so utterly irreligious and centre-of-the-universe selfish that I can’t see how they can keep a straight face when citing any sort of wider cause to be slaughtering people for. It’s just loving yourself so fucking much that you will actually kill others to feel a thrilling variety in your biochemistry.

The Hateful Wait: Spoilers, Speculation and Obsession as Mainstream

“Tarantino's cancelled movie: 5 things we learned from The Hateful Eight script

The screenplay for ‘The Hateful Eight’ has now leaked online, but what would his Western have been like?”


'Hey, isn't Tarantino a dickhead?'

'I don't know. I've only ever seen his films – they're alright.'

Jesus, we're a million miles away from that now, if we were ever there. I can't imagine how geeky and obsessed and sad we would look to the lay audience of the '90s and earlier. They saw finished products, and maybe a couple of short interview clips with one or two cast members that made it onto TV around the release date. It was sickeningly polished PR, but it was brief – acknowledged and moved on from. That general audience took home only relatively small (house-able) VHS tape collections, and sans special features. Movie, album, show, career... spotlight goes on – the production, the final edit – spotlight goes off. Sensationalist/prurient media coverage of the famous personnel involved notwithstanding.

Finished products... Today we know that a film that wasn't even going to be in production for over a year has been ditched for now. It's not even that; it's that we can read verbatim, time and time again, everything Tarantino said about it in all his interviews, stretching the hissy fit blips out into infinity. Because so-and-so must have given the script to his agent who then leaked it to friggin' Hollywood because he's a douche and has spoiled it for everyone. And the agent's company's got a track record for this shit, as you know.

As you know, indeed. People don't bother to find this stuff out – it is no bother. It's just there, all the time. Specific, in-industry notoriety or observed traits and tropes get shared with everyone. Everything from litigious directors and artists to unfortunate newspaper layouts to John McAfee's opinion of his software under Intel to Morrissey's instant Penguin Classic deal to Google +'s existential crisis to the red shirt survival chances of a Sean Bean character. Even the lay audience is exposed to this stuff. Footnote material gets its own article – gets its own PR. Pithy comic headlines knowingly position the content as being both specific and anal and yet ripe for everyone to lap it up because it's still appealing or funny. It's actually funnier because it's obsessively specific. 15 Very Unique Ryan Gosling Items You Can Buy On Etsy, anyone?

Once this was something for fans, for people who 'bought in.' Now it's viral... clickbait. The ordinary viewers like to get the reference – they are expected to be able to. Namechecking an actor in a particular context in an interview, movie or series shoots a circle of recognition round an audience who've all seen the rant, funny dance, captioned screenshot or whatever being referenced (how about a little figure of Sad Keanu?). We're like a creepy friend-by-association-by-research, who knows about and can nod along to everything related by an actor or director: 'oh yes, this is going to be your anecdote about...' But we don't have to stalk; it's broadcast to us – the more specific the information or gag the better. It's the specific as general, on general release. In-jokes that everyone's expected to get – obliterating the dictionary definition.

It's played beautifully, too, by a lot of famous people in the various industries. Acknowledging – whether in polished productions or through their own social media channels – popular perceptions/misconceptions of themselves, references to themselves on Twitter or Instagram or in fan-made videos, or joining in with memes, or maybe those surrounding other celebrities... The result is a kind of peer to peer humour, even if this makes Stephen Fry or Joss Whedon or Dave Grohl or Nick Grimshaw or Barack Obama your 'peer' in the humour.

Of course 'behind the scenes' is funny – pitched perfectly by cast, crew and/or marketing and still feeling genuinely personal to you as the the eager audience. Of course when you're waiting months for a movie or a series to come out you want to see Benedict Cumberbatch's hand on his morning coffee or X-Men director and cast fooling around or whatever's appearing with a wink from the set or recording studio or wherever and go all to jelly. But then what about a ditched movie, a failure? What about this 'gather round me, my fans' thing when it's forwarding, en masse, the unguarded, heat of the moment stuff: '"I gave it to three motherfucking actors. We met in a place, and I put it in their hands. It's got to be either the agents of Dern or Madsen. Please name names."'

Immortalizing a director or any personality when they're pissed off, immortalizing a short-lived mood and the opinions it created – obviously it's still captivating and amusing on some levels, whether you're giggling with or at. But it does start to feel like all concerned, producers and consumers (cynical or otherwise), have fallen into a YouTube comments section, unselfconsciously rising above the morons by... arguing with them and adding the last word every few seconds. I mean, getting to the end of a movie that did something to you and then connecting actors' or directors' names forever with that feeling, that reassurance that your mind can find inspiration and mirrors out there – that's quite nice. Feeling you have to defend or attack famous strangers after they've had an episode of being a whiny little bitch – really?

There's something about showing all of the production process, and about having our cultural producers accustomed to having to show all of that process, that can go wrong. Look what happens when you give people the time and space to think too much about a delayed project, a void – freed from any information that might rain on their speculations:

“...Ben Affleck has pulled out of directing Fox’s high profile drama project, The Middle Man, because of scheduling issues with Batman vs. Superman. While Warner Bros recently pushed the release date from 2015 to 2016 […]

With Ant-Man taking Batman vs. Superman’s old date, does this mean that Batman vs. Superman will be reclaiming it’s [sic] old date or does this mean that Batman vs. Superman and Justice League is indeed filming back-to-back? There are so many questions and what ifs involved with this movie that it’s starting to become a little unsettling.”

I bet you felt the earth shudder, waking up this morning in such a state of flux, right?

And fan forums are great, for the fans. Delayed albums and films and changes of plan and trailers and cliffhangers and posters and rumours and leaked/fan-gained images of whatever it is can create months... years of scrolling speculation. It bubbles up and down between rage and rationality. The specifics of the speculation too, like the girl who knows the firm that's making the DVD cover and how, since they changed their ink supplier last month, I think we can expect that season four of Blah won't be out until third quarter at least... Or the guy who's done some work with the cameras that Blah is using for the location shots on Blah: Blah, who knows that if they try and do the kind of scenes they did in the first movie with those cameras it will look BAD – I'm not even planning on going to the theatre to see it if they do that. Now, whether you're salivating or recoiling in horror at this sort of conversation, it's fine when it's there. What happens now is that pithier versions end up on your FB feed. You might even crack a smile for some of it and click on the Like, or at least empathize with the humour of the specific material the jokes and the rants are constructed out of.

For God's sake, I hadn't even seen the movie, hadn't ever even googled it, and I knew there was too much lens flare in Star Trek. I knew that it was popularly known that there was too much lens flare in Star Trek. I saw JOKES, galleries of comedy Photoshopped images, about how there was too much lens flare in Star Trek. If I travelled back to the '90s and said that to myself... Despite little me having a bedroom that had been sellotaped into a crap cardboard bridge of the Enterprise, he would have said: “get a life, dad” – before one or both of us went up in a puff of paradoxical smoke.

What if I kicked away his crutches?

There are some wonderful choice quotes to be had from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [the above is not one of them], and we can draw even more wonderfully vague analogies between that novel/concept and our world. These might be society-minded (the checks to free speech and our right to protest = Big Brother) or more personal and financial complaints (speed cameras = Big Brother). Magnificent. What doesn’t seem to invite as much criticism is our trend for Big Brothering each other - although the media will condemn happy slapping (and what an infantilising and innocent tag that is) as truly evil, and illustrative of the sorry state of upcoming generations’ moral frameworks.

Asides from those videoed attacks, we do generally like to film ourselves and film others, and show it to a third party. There is little to complain about here; for the majority this practice is cheery enough - traditional home video content, or whatever creative filmmaking you choose to do, with the opportunity to show it to the Internet-using world. That acknowledged, other videos are clearly not so positive, and should be considered equally as abhorrent as top down surveillance. Some camera wielders film people because they think they look funny (how they talk, act, dress, or - in more ignorant cases - because they have tics or mental disorders). They then upload the footage to the Internet with a ‘look at this idiot’ angle suggested in the title and tagging. Sure enough, a lot (but rarely all) of the viewers that comment will agree that the person must be an idiot, LOL etc.

A few years ago an acquaintance showed me a video on his phone. It showed an old man threatening him, and his mid-teen friends, with a raised walking cane. By carefully turning on the camera phone only after they’d stopped taunting him, the group had produced a video that was perfect for a paying newspaper - a mad old guy who hates and hits kids. Charming…terrifying…I thought then. I fully expect phones with CGI rendering capabilities to be putting my generation behind bars by the time we reach pensionable age, miscarriages of justice abounding as throngs of vindictive jokers conjure up robbery, assault and paedophile video evidence out of thin air.

For more video evidence we have Mary cat-meets-wheelie-bin Bale. Who has done something that understandably upsets people (smothering news of triumph, tragedy and endeavour in the rest of the world with a story that should have gone no further than the Coventry Telegraph).

What has happened to Mrs Bale is that she has had CCTV footage and descriptions of her actions posted on the Internet by the owners of the cat, apparently for practical identification rather than vengeance. This allowed the producers and consumers of the Internet to see it, and then of course the rest of the media furthered the story's passage. A large audience has thus viewed and judged Mrs Bales' actions, and a noticeable and unadvisedly vocal minority have commented on them - and on her very existence - in all-talk expletives. For those in agreement and local enough, they can tell Mary Bale what they think directly, or show her what they think.

ARBITRARY, random, one of them. These bullshit people are mad at a woman who, very visibly, offered a lesser example of the sort of behaviour that the vast minority in every community get up to almost invisibly - from disturbances to vandalism to manslaughter. Perhaps the reaction to her comes from hitherto suppressed rage at all the anonymous, uncaught and un-shamed local terrors people are aware of: the nocturnal defecators, grave vandals and animal torturers. For my local area, there was the person or persons who took cats off the street, allowed a couple of days for concerned owners to put up missing posters, and then returned the sometimes mutilated bodies of pets to the place of snatching, for either the owners or their friends and neighbours to find.

Since being threatened Mary Bale has had police protection. If anything happens to her then it is arbitrary and hypocrisy. It’s lashing out at what we can see, and only when it’s convenient for us to look, irrespective of the greater and lesser things that might be out there - things we can’t be bothered to look at outside of YouTube or myface. We are apparently mad at Mrs Bale because for some reason she, momentarily or otherwise, decided to be asinine or malicious toward a cat and drop it in a bin. If somebody attacks Mary Bale or her property in reaction then they will have repeated the behaviour that we are condemning her for.

We are Big Brother, and as an only child I’m both appalled and intrigued by that. I don’t mind that our Big Brother comments have trouble with spelling and grammar (For one, people seem to confuse spelling/grammatical errors with typos, citing all three as examples of mental retardation online. For another, people in glass houses…); I object to the discriminatory, the sexist, ageist, racist, xenophobic and homophobic (or at least heterosexist) thoughts and remarks that can accompany our Big Brother comments. More than that, I dislike where Big Brotherliness tends to take our interest. It seems easier to turn a slanging match with the lady down the street into a public shaming than to round our Big Brotherly gaze on troubled communities or countries – what might start to happen if the gangs who stab were caught on CCTV, uploaded for Facebook rage and YouTube culprit recognition, and finally mass media repulsion?

One good thing about the Mary Bale story, though, was that it got Virginia Ironside to admit to having fantasies of attacking elderly gentlemen in the Daily Mail this morning:

I've occasionally had strange and unwelcome thoughts which seem to come from nowhere, though I don't like admitting to them. For example, I might see an old man coming down the street on crutches and suddenly a thought comes into my mind: 'What if I kicked away his crutches?'

The Daily Express crusade, Respect for the Elderly would have you for breakfast, madam.