Suicidal Tendencies
Empathy as societal self-harm
In October 2018, a group of passengers on a flight from Heathrow to Istanbul stood up to save a fellow human being from a terrible fate. The young man was being taken onto the Turkish Airlines flight, accompanied by four officials from the Home Office, when he started screaming that he was being sent to Somalia where he would be unsafe and separated from his family.
A number of those on board were disturbed and upset by the poor man’s cries. Someone shouted that they should ‘take him off the plane’. Others followed, and over three and a half minutes, a dozen passengers hurled insults at the man’s captors and whistled at them.
Some began filming, and footage shows one man telling an officer that ‘people die in Mogadishu’. A bearded man with a T-shirt approaches the young Somalian before telling the other passengers: ‘He says they’re separating him from his family, his family’s here.’ Another man is seen jabbing his finger at an official and drawing his hand across his throat as a gesture of execution, barking ‘when he gets to Mogadishu, they’re going to kill him.’ Passengers continue arguing with the Home Office staff until the captive is eventually removed from the plane: the passengers cheer and one is heard to shout joyfully that he is now ‘a free man’. The deportation is prevented; the young man is saved and can return to his family.
The man they saved was called Yaqub Ahmed. In 2007, Ahmed and a group of three other men had found a 16-year-old girl who was lost in Leicester Square, separated from her companion and without her bus pass or phone. They invited her back to a flat in Crouch End, north London, where – they told her - her friend had already gone with one of their number.
When the girl arrived, she realised that her friend was not there. Ahmed and his three accomplices held her down and took turns to rape her. She fiercely resisted, biting and clawing her attackers; after one of the men punched her in the face, she managed to escape, falling down a flight of stairs and alerting neighbours to the sounds of her desperate screams.
Police arrived immediately and arrested the four men on the spot but, despite the overwhelming evidence, they denied the charges, forcing the woman to relive her agony in court. The cross-examination was brutal, and she recalled how the four barristers allocated to her rapists ‘were saying some awful things to me. The things they said to me messed me up for years.’
The men were from the Somalian diaspora in Britain, the majority of whom arrived as refugees; most likely they were living in housing at taxpayers’ expense in some of the costliest neighbourhoods in the country. Britain had given them protection and life; they repaid the kindness by raping a girl.
Ahmed’s victim was left too traumatised to travel far from home, too overcome with anxiety to work: when she saw footage from the aeroplane rescue, she was devastated. ‘You think that was a bad scream?’ she said of the passengers: ‘Try hearing the screams that I made. How could you defend a rapist? How could you intervene? He was in handcuffs, he was being taken out of the country… who are you people to interfere with justice?’
None of Ahmed’s rescuers have ever been charged or prosecuted, despite being clearly identifiable on video, and air passengers often being fined or jailed for much less serious disturbances. The English law works in mysterious ways.
Many people who saw the footage will echo the woman’s sentiments about their motivation. It is incredibly hard to deport people to Somalia, and only a handful were removed during the 2010s; one has to wonder if the passengers ever questioned why the man they chose to save was considered a priority, and if the authorities perhaps had good reason. They might be excused for their ignorance, but the same cannot be said for the BBC journalist who helped Yaqub Ahmed, along with 14 other Somalian criminals, fight deportation.
Mary Harper, who worked as Africa editor for the World Service, was paid to give evidence for Ahmed during the rapist’s five-year battle to remain in Britain. She also stood as expert witness for three other sex offenders trying to avoid deportation. The Daily Telegraph reported how ‘in one case, she reportedly cautioned that the criminal’s repeated history of offending in the UK – 39 convictions for 80 crimes over a period of 17 years – would result in him being shunned by his clan if he was returned to Somalia. In another, it was reported that Ms Harper warned that a 29-year-old Somali man who sexually assaulted a deaf girl aged 17 would be at “severely heightened risk” if he was sent back to Somalia because he had committed a sex crime.’
God forbid that a compulsive criminal is ‘shunned by his clan’.
Several deportation appeals in recent years have involved rapists or paedophiles who might suffer ‘stigma’ back in their own countries; some have won their cases on human rights grounds. Many face the wrath of the societies they have shamed, and Harper warned that Ahmed faced ‘punishment’ at the hands of militant Islamists Al-Shabaab. I’ve no doubt that jihadis take a firm line on crime, but one might still question why, in a world full of suffering and injustice, someone would go out of their way to help a rapist. I don’t think it’s the money. More likely it’s a mindset referred to as ‘suicidal empathy’, a term coined and popularised by the Canadian academic Gad Saad: empathy directed at people who not only won’t reciprocate, but will actively cause harm to you, your family and the society around you.
This was not even the only incident of airline passengers blocking the deportation of criminals. A flight carrying a Jamaican man was halted in 2023, preventing the British state from removing an individual with a history of firearms and drugs offences. In July 2019, Swedish student activist Elin Ersson boarded an aeroplane at Gothenburg and livestreamed her pleas to stop the deportation of an Afghan man convicted of assaulting his wife and children.
Such empathy is especially found among the journalistic profession. The New York Times recently lamented the deportation of a Jamaican man, reporting that ‘Nascimento Blair felt like a stranger in a little-known land’ and that ‘this was not the homecoming he imagined’, one’s sympathy slightly diminished by the fact that Blair had carried out a kidnapping the year after his arrival in the United States. ‘They don’t look at you like a Jamaican,’ Blair told the paper: ‘They look at you like a criminal.’ I hate to say it, but that might be because you are a criminal. The New Yorker similarly ran a heartbreaking story about a man whose American dream was ending with deportation, his own crime being armed robbery, theft with a deadly weapon, and murder.
