They were young girls free to be whoever they want to be. That’s why the fanatics hate them...
ON SATURDAY night I hosted a sleepover for ten of my daughter’s 14-year-old friends. Girls this age are a special kind of crazy — a wonderful, maddening, mystifying mix of emotions.
One minute they’re trying to persuade you that wearing fishnet tights under a pair of ripped jeans is a perfectly acceptable ensemble for a trip to church, the next they’re in floods of tears because they’ve lost their hamster.
They are a mass of contradictions: monosyllabic, moody and manipulative, but also gentle and loving, as capable of throwing their arms around you in a heart-stopping embrace as they are of telling you they hate you.
They are an extraordinary mixture of vitality and vulnerability, a life force fizzing with promise and potential.
It takes a special kind of evil to want to snuff that out. A special kind of twisted, bitter loathing to want to kill and maim such life-affirming creatures.
And yet that evil found its expression on Monday night when, as crowds of excited teenagers were exiting the Manchester Arena following an Ariana Grande concert, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the foyer.
As the news of the atrocity began to unfold, I was just getting ready for bed. I was feeling tired and grumpy after yet another teenage altercation.
All that evaporated when I turned on the TV. The news of the explosion had just broken. One piece of footage showed scores of girls, some of them still clutching the pink balloons that had been released at the end of the concert, streaming down a staircase.
It was a strangely surreal scene, the bubble-gum pink of the balloons chillingly at odds with the screams and terrified faces of concert-goers as they ran this way and that in panic.
The next footage showed a group of stunned mums and dads, their backs to the camera, evidently there to pick up their children, as they watched uncomprehending as their worst nightmare became reality.
It was a jolt to the heart. Imagine the anguish of being one of those parents. Imagine waiting for that happy, smiley face to come bouncing down the stairs and into your arms, nagging no doubt for some overpriced piece of merchandise — and witnessing instead this horror.
I have never felt more blessed to have a teenager sulking upstairs, safe in her bedroom. because, make no mistake, this was not just a cowardly attack on innocent civilians by a blackened heart, this was specifically an attack on our girls — all of them.
Our young, beautiful, free, crazy girls — and their right to live life as they choose. Why else choose to target an arena full of Ariana Grande fans?
For those who have never heard of her, Grande is a feisty 23-yearold American, a former child star who has successfully crossed over into mainstream pop.
SHE is sexy and selfassured and genuinely talented (her vocal range has been compared to that of Mariah Carey). Grande is adored by teenyboppers everywhere, has millions of followers on Instagram and Snapchat. The average age of her fans is, I would guess, about 13.
Less risque than Miley Cyrus, more edgy than Taylor Swift, she occupies a pop space in between the two that, while not perhaps every mother’s ideal choice, certainly isn’t as bad as some.
Like the parents of the young girls at Monday night’s concert, I wouldn’t have too many qualms about letting my daughter see Grande perform — life with a teenager is all about finding a workable compromise.
And she’d have been delighted to be there with her friends, all dressed in the same uniform as the Manchester concert-goers: Adidas trainers, crop tops, Topshop jeans, Fjallraven Kanken rucksacks.
Hoop earrings and eyeliner applied away from disapproving maternal eyes. Imagining themselves so very grown up, but in reality not at all. Setting out to murder this particular audience — little more than babes in arms — adds a twisted other dimension to the evil of Islamic extremism. you might as well blow up bambi.
but the awful truth is that for all Islamic State (who have claimed responsibility) and their sordid affiliates like to rail against the unspecified evils of the West, it’s girls like these that the fanatics hate the most.
young women enjoying themselves, expressing themselves, being free to be whoever they want to be. Indulgent mums accompanying them, willing to endure an evening of pop hell in the interests of family harmony. Doting dads, happy to ferry giggling youngsters at all hours of the night and day if it means keeping them safe.
All this is anathema to Islamist fanatics, for whom notions such as sexual equality and female emancipation are an offence.
At the heart of this pernicious creed is not only a fundamental belief that man is superior to woman, but also that non-Islamic girls and women are second-class citizens, barely human, the lowest of the low, for whom no punishment or suffering can ever be enough.
We see this in the treatment of young Nigerian schoolgirls captured by boko Haram and sold into sexual slavery; we see this in the mass rape of yazidi women by Islamic State guerrillas; we’ve even seen it in our own country, in the systematic sexual abuse of young girls in Rochdale by so-called ‘moderate’ Muslim men who wrap their own daughters in the hijab, while simultaneously defiling other parents’ children — the subject of a harrowing, but gripping, TV series, Three Girls.
In a similar case in Rotherham, at least 1,400 girls were exploited between 1997 and 2014.
And in Oxfordshire, seven men were convicted of the sex trafficking of children between the ages of 11 and 15. One even branded a victim, an 11-year-old girl, with the letter ‘M’ for Mohammed, to indicate she was his property.
These men would not describe themselves as extremists. They were criminals simply acting on a belief that is sadly all too common throughout many patriarchal Muslim societies and that draws strength from certain wrongful interpretations of the Koran: that unless women and girls subscribe to a strict set of rules, they are racially, socially and religiously inferior.
If these misguided ideals can be hiding in plain sight in the midst of decent, ordinary Muslim communities in britain, then how much more toxic must they be among those who are self-declared enemies of the West and of our way of life?
It is precisely because our girls have such irrepressible energy and spirit, the fact that they are educated and equal, that those who interpret the Muslim holy book selectively and in the most narrow-minded of ways despise them so much.
TO THE fanatics, the victims of Monday night’s terror — among them 18-year-old Georgina Callander and eightyear-old primary school pupil Saffie Roussos — are part of a corrupt and degenerate way of life they have a God-given duty to destroy.
Who knows what these two poppets — and the others who died or sustained life-changing injuries on Monday — might have achieved in life had it not been for the bigotry and hatred of one sick individual?
Instead, we are left to seek comfort in the small mercies: the fact that Georgina and her mother were briefly reunited before death; the infinite kindness of strangers in the grief-stricken city; the bravery of Good Samaritan Paula Robinson, who ran towards the crowds of terrified children, chaperoning dozens to safety and posting her phone number on social media for frantic parents to call.
Many will now have been reunited with their families. Others will not be so lucky. Pictures of those still missing show typical teenagers with cheeky smiles and braces, some wobbling a little uncertainly in heels. It’s impossible not to feel utterly bereft at the thought that they might not have made it.
None of these girls will have been perfect. All will have, no doubt, driven their mums and dads bonkers from time to time. but all were loved. All had a lifetime of possibilities ahead of them. All were free. And for that they paid a terrible price.
‘ For the extremists sexual equality is anathema’