Four young Muslim men with Yorkshire accents are taking turns to address the camera in front of a sagging cloth backdrop. 'Eh up, you unbelieving kuffar bastards,' one of them begins. The struggle to hit the right note continues: the speaker, a bulky man with a sweetly confused look, tries to persuade the others that the toy gun he's cradling looks absurdly small only because he has 'big hands'. His even more confused looking friend, either for doctrinal reasons or from a poorly thought out wish to conceal his identity, wants to make his statement with a cardboard box on his head. We cut to a spotless suburban kitchen, where the sharpest seeming of the four is watching the footage on a laptop. They're our martyrdom videos, he says in response to a question from his pretty, sympathetic wife, but this is sort of the blooper reel. He slumps despairingly, muttering that the whole thing's a blooper reel.

LRB 27 May 2010 | PDF Download