The Spiders of Allah Strike Again

Posted by Tim McGirk Friday, March 27, 2009 at 10:26 am

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How do you end a conflict when everybody fighting thinks that God is on his side? It's impossible, especially when the line between faith and superstition wobbles and breaks apart. Shortly before I came to Jerusalem, Israel's seemingly indestructible Prime Minister Ariel Sharon fell into a coma. Many Israelis are convinced that Sharon was struck down because rabbis put a curse on him for pulling out of Gaza. That was three years ago, and Sharon –-lying in a hospital bed, half-man, half-machine-- still languishes in a coma.

Want more proof of divine intervention? During the Gaza war, Israeli newspapers solemnly reported that Rachel from the Bible appeared to warn a platoon of soldiers to stay away from a booby-tapped house.

I cite two Jewish examples. But there are plenty among Muslims and Christians, too. Take the Spiders of Allah. James Hider, the Middle East correspondent for the London Times and a self-confessed arachnophobe, was covering the U.S. Marines' campaign in Fallujah where he heard reports that the city's preachers would boost the Islamic fighters' morale with tales that Allah had sent in legions of “chair-sized arachnids, whose poisoned hairs could make a human body turn blue and explode in a shower of corrupted blood.” Oh, and the spiders also scream along at 40 kms an hour.
spiders-us

Hider is more afraid of spiders than of God's wrath. (He's an atheist and says he has seen nothing while reporting various Middle Eastern wars to convince him otherwise). He's also just written a book “The Spiders of Allah: Travels of an Unbeliever on the Frontlines of Holy War” (published in the U.K. by Doubleday and in the U.S. in June by St. Martin's Press), which challenges that famous WWII phrase “there are no atheists in foxholes.” Everything Hider sees in Iraq, Gaza, and the West Bank makes him question the madness of men killing, and dying, for their gods. “It is when the mild opiate of mainstream religion is distilled into the crack cocaine of fanatical fundamentalism that the problems really start,” he writes.

‘Spiders' is, by turns, hilarious sardonic, and visceral. It's a first-class war memoir, with a bow to Vonnegut and Brecht. Lately, a rash of journalists' Iraq war diaries have appeared, but Hider spares us the swagger and chest-thumping. Thankfully, he doesn't brag about his reportorial heroics; in fact, he makes light of the danger he faces. At Fallujah, he takes a piece of shrapnel through the arm. The medic who pulls out the metal chunk gives it to Hider in a zip-lock baggie as a souvenir. Hider takes it back to the Baghdad bureau and forgets about it. Coming back from a vacation, Hider finds a note from his replacement correspondent who had “mistaken the shrapnel for a lump of hash and burned his fingers trying to smoke it. By my bed was a handwritten note.

“'Dope here is crap. No wonder everyone here is so f____king tense.'”

Hashish is nothing, as Hider writes, compared to the nihilistic buzz of fanaticism. In this age of Internet-sped fatwas, Kabalistic curses and Christian outrage, it's a relief to find a writer like Hider who doesn't pussyfoot around the murderous sensibilities of zealots.

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem