The silence after the bomb
Is not long enough
To say your name
Or say a prayer
Because by then
No one is listening
Not even God
The silence after the bomb
Is not wide enough
To fill with all your love
Or dark enough
To swallow the
Light from your eyes
Or deep enough
To contain all our tears
The silence after the bomb
Is not old enough
To remember the last silence
That we had
To remember
The silence before that
etc etc etc
The silence after the bomb
Is not really silence at all
Is not long enough
To say your name
Or say a prayer
Because by then
No one is listening
Not even God
The silence after the bomb
Is not wide enough
To fill with all your love
Or dark enough
To swallow the
Light from your eyes
Or deep enough
To contain all our tears
The silence after the bomb
Is not old enough
To remember the last silence
That we had
To remember
The silence before that
etc etc etc
The silence after the bomb
Is not really silence at all
Two years before I left London for Australia, in June 2000, a bomb exploded beneath the Hammersmith Bridge which had been a crossing point for Londoners across the Thames since the early nineteenth century. It was pure chance that no passers-by were hurt in the explosion. In 1996, a larger bomb on the south side of the bridge had failed to blow up properly because of a faulty detonator. A message had been given to police that a device had been placed there allowing them to cordon off the area in order to conduct a search. Again, no-one was hurt. This time chance and the warning ensured that the only shock was the one people living in the area got when they heard it exploding.
I often wondered what would make someone who had planted a bomb notify the authorities that a bomb had been planted. Was it their conscience? Was it a sense of media savvy manipulation? Was it always part of the plan? The bomb in 2000 had no such warning. Luck and timing was all that kept people from dying, or worse. It was four-thirty AM when it went off, damaging the bridge enough that it had to be shut for two years for repairs. When it re-opened, it was subject to restrictions on the weight of vehicles travelling across it. You could say, it was never the same again. However, these were not the only times that the bridge had been attacked. In 1939, a man named Maurice Childs, a hairdresser on his way home late one night had discovered a suitcase that appeared to be on fire on its walkway, and when he opened it, he found a bomb packed inside. He threw it into the River Thames and it blew up, shooting a sixty foot spout of water into the air. Shortly afterward, a second bomb exploded further along the bridge, damaging the girders. Hammersmith Bridge has a history of surviving such injuries but then it had been made of wrought iron.
We humans, though, are made from more fragile materials. Which is something I am conscious of now, moreso than I was when our little family of four lived in Hammersmith and Fulham, just a bus ride from the bridge. I used to often cycle across that bridge, in search of the calming hum of my wheels as they turned and the meditative motion of me and my bike, together, heading for Barnes on the south side. It felt like escaping into a village in the middle of London, leafy lanes and a quietness that was more difficult to find on the north side of the bridge.
Once, when I was depressed and drifting through a period of life when everything seemed to be disintegrating, I stood under the bridge and speculated on the pros and cons of suicide. I relented, obviously, and mounted my bike to ride home after an age of listening to the water dreaming as it flowed beneath the structure. I also have a clear picture in my head of the times I would walk underneath the bridge, along the river with friends to find the warm shelter of the pubs that line the path. The Blue Anchor. The Dove. The Old Ship. Years later, it would be walks with our daughter when she first arrived, then with both our children, sometimes in their double buggy, side by side as they squabbled with the birds or ate fruit bars with sticky hands and sticky faces. And other days, when time meant nothing, we’d all stroll together on foot, ambling haphazardly in the unplanned way that only children master. How lucky, were we all, that we did not coincide our walks, or my rides with the explosions, four years apart? Well, the data tell me that dying in a bomb blast in London is less likely than dying from falling down a flight of stairs. As chance would have it, where we lived at the time, had only a few stairs.
It’s 2016 now and I read this week of the blasts in Baghdad, where over a hundred people died and the attacks in Bangladesh, where more than twenty were killed, I wonder just how much of a difference there is between London and places that the Global Peace Index (GPI) notes as more dangerous. Is Baghdad more dangerous than London? According to the GPI, it is. So do fathers stroll along the Tigris with their children and watch them chase birds in circles until they get dizzy? Do they still get the opportunity to wander through the gardens at Abu Nuwas to sit on a bench perhaps, and eat ice cream so quickly that their teeth hurt? Do they want to be oblivious of the ill-hand of probability, that makes one person disappear in that final, blinding sound, whilst another lives on in silence, cursed to hear it forever?
When I was twelve years old, I travelled with some friends into London, late on a Friday afternoon. Our first stop was Denmark Street, near Soho, and a shop called Forbidden Planet, a place which was to become a portal into a multiverse of wonder in my teenage years which I still remember with an aching fondness. Then from there, we walked along Oxford Street, and the crowds of Christmas shoppers. Finally, we made our way to Knightsbridge and Harrods. We ended up in the toy department, as we were still at that age when games of pretend mattered. By the time we had left, we had a bag or two of presents and we headed home. The next day was a Saturday and the first day of the school holidays. As I listened to the news on the radio, I heard that a bomb in a parked car in a side street near an entrance to Harrods had killed several people. I don’t remember my reaction to the news beyond thinking about the fact that I had been there just a day before. Perhaps I’d even walked past the bomb. Perhaps not. What are the chances?
The Global Peace Index states that the UK was recently ranked 28th out of 162 for the impact that terrorism has on its people. Iraq is first. The difference is staggering. And the difference is deadly. People I love, and myself, were so close to dying, all those years ago in London but the people of Baghdad are closer. Every day, they are closer. Just as they are closer in Nigeria, in Afghanistan, in Bangladesh, in Yemen, in India. Closer to terrorism’s singular, meaningless purpose. Closer to the retribution of the armed forces that operate there. It’s difficult to keep track of whose actions are legitimate, any more, if ever it was easy to do so in the first place.
This year alone, there have been attacks and bombings by all manner of forces in Nigeria, Yemen, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Somalia, the USA, in the UK, Russia, Egypt. Will we ever have enough time to change our profile pictures to display the flags of all these countries? Is it perhaps absurd, that we continue to believe that this is not the normal state of human affairs? That this is not what humans have been doing for millennia since we crawled our way into the ascendency on the planet? Imagine if instead of trying to describe the terrorists or the armed forces along the lines of race, nationality, ethnicity, or religion, we instead simply began to name them as humans, would our perspective change? Would it make any difference? Because there is no other species on Earth that can set a timer on a detonator for a bomb. Or one that knows how to pilot a UAV from across the planet. Can you imagine the headlines, if we did replace the words we use to describe the instigators?
“Today in London, a human murdered twenty-five humans, by indiscriminately opening fire on their bus…,”
“A car driven by a human exploded on impact when driven into a checkpoint in the Iraq capital of Baghdad. Humans have claimed responsibility.”
“A drone strike in the Swat Valley in Pakistan was used in an attempt to flush out insurgents. Unfortunately a wedding reception was hit. Twelve people died, including three children. The drone operator, a twenty-seven year old human from Virginia, was suspended from active duty.”
Some of us continue to wring our hands and call out ‘Not in our name. My religion is not like that. My country men do not do this. These people who kill and maim wantonly are not like me. I disown them.’ Others, meanwhile, seem to gleefully encourage the carnage, consuming live, continual feeds of the action as they drink coffee or scroll through their feeds. They apportion blame to the murderous and the murdered because obviously, their religion, their race, their very identity is the fundamental cause of their troubles. If only they were like us, things would be better. Our blindness to the cruelty of our own kind, is a peculiar tribal quirk. When I was a young Muslim boy, growing up, I remember being horrified by the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion and the injustice burned in me so much that I wanted to grow up join the PLO and fight oppression. I can see now though, just how easy it is for the passion for justice to become warped, into the innumerable stories of the ‘nice kid turned jihadist’ or ‘good man turned bad soldier’. These men are everywhere because humans are everywhere. And we are more fragile than wrought iron. I never did join the PLO because it was just a compassionate pipe dream of an eleven year old boy, who didn’t know how else to channel his powerlessness. Not many eleven year olds do.
Sometimes, we are petrified into a numbness by what happens, the perpetual newsfeed of death is exhausting and can easily become debilitating. It seems to seep into us at every turn and still, after millions of years of evolution, we struggle to turn the tide. There are very human limits to our empathy. For those hurt, there is definitely a limit to our compassion for those who caused the hurt. Perhaps it is better, as a friend said to me, that we look at these things as some kind of natural disaster. I added that it was a form of Malthusian check, named after the nineteenth century scholar, Rev. Thomas Malthus who viewed famine and disease as some kind of tragic population controls. Humans then, are a fatal check on our demographics.
But can you consider that the players in this global drama are much like you and I, do we not on some fundamental level, share an evolutionary heritage? We are units of the same species, fumbling our way through an existence that we are still trying to comprehend. We are the victims and the victimiser, we are also the bystander, with our innocence presumed but not yet earned. Our denial that the killers are just as much a part of humanity as the victims is a precious conceit that we use for self-elevation. I am better than those savages. Sometimes, perhaps we are. But how much better? I do not kill people. That could be true, but are you and I still responsible in some sense for the deaths of people that we know nothing about? And where does our responsibility end, and theirs begin? Do our taxes pay for the weapons that do kill people? I cannot ignore the fact that my taxes helped to pay for the bombs that were once dropped on Baghdad by coalition forces. And for the drones that killed children at a wedding? Wasn’t some of the money I earned used to support troops that that drowned looters in the Tigris River, or tortured prisoners in Iraqi jails? Our many apologetics for the brutality of religions, of races and for nationalities are at risk of becoming a defining element in our sense of identity. Our people. Our religion. Our race. Our solidarity is giving justification to those who seek out destruction as a twisted means of self-expression. Are we more worried than we acknowledge publicly, that normal people, from normal families can be capable of such things? We fret, secretly, that given the right or even the wrong circumstances, we too could be humans doing the work of monsters.
I found I was unable to watch the news reports on the recent attack in Dhaka, Bangladesh where twenty people were killed. The events were broadcast like some hyperreality show on certain channels, one in which there was no winner. The Holey Bakery, where the attack took place, is in Gulshan, a suburb of the city that has always been considered as upmarket, one where many foreigners live and work, where they eat and play. As a child, I loved going there with my family because of the restaurants that reflected the eclectic, international nature of its residents.
Several men, from middle class, Muslim, Bangladeshi families carried out the siege and the subsequent murders. One of them has been identified as the son of a prominent politician. One victim, Farraz Hossain was also from a middle class, Muslim, Bangladeshi family. He refused to abandon his friends who had been marked by the killers for death, choosing instead to die alongside them. The attackers had tested Farraz’s knowledge of the Quran and told him that he was free to go, based on his recitation. To them, his faith meant he was valuable. The others in the bakery, however, were not valuable in the eyes of their god. Life and death has always hung on such malicious logic. During the Bangladeshi Liberation War in 1971, Pakistani troops had torn off the lunghis of men to inspect whether they had been circumcised in order to prove they were Muslim. If they were uncircumcised as Hindus usually are, they were often killed on the spot.
It is disturbing for me to consider that I come from a similar background to both the murderers in the Holey Bakery and the murdered man, Farraz. When the security forces stormed the building, they managed to save some people and killed all but one of the attackers. Which of them were greater scholars in the Quran? Farraz or the gang? Both Farraz and the attackers died for their friends, but only the attackers sacrificed others based on their reading of the same book that Farraz quoted from. What kind of malign coin flip is that? Heads I justify the killing from my book. Tails, I would rather die with my friends than be free because my book is my guide. It seems that both are possible. The religion of peace and the religion of death, simultaneously. This is not a paradox, maybe only because luck plays a greater part in our lives than we know.
I think of how I used to walk across a bridge that was almost blown up three times. Once I even contemplated suicide whilst sitting and staring at that very bridge, a structure built to last centuries being gazed at by a person who is not. My friends and I visited the most famous department store in the world the day before a car exploded outside it. As a child, a bomb from a plane crushed the house next door to my family. I walked around Gulshan when I was a child. I grew up in a Muslim family. I come from Bangladesh.
Some of these things could be controlled by me, and some could not. I had no responsibility for being Muslim until I became older and rejected the religion. Had no hand in being Bangladeshi. Had little forethought in being in the wrong place at the right time, or the right place at the right time. It was chance that meant I would survive, just as it was chance that meant I was made from the same stuff, was built on the same foundations as the men who killed in the bakery and the people who died in it. If luck played a part in the fact that I did not become a victim of a bomb blast, then does it also play a part in the fact that I did not become a killer, like those middle class Muslim men, who were educated, knowledgeable, privileged and deadly. I can’t say that my humanity is what has stopped me from following their path, I think I’ll say it was just luck. “There but for the grace of god,” is often invoked to signify that randomness which permeates our lives, makes one man a pauper and another a king, makes one man a wolf and the other a lamb. But does the pauper also not think the same, "There but for the grace of god go I," as he looks at the king? It’s an elegant way of struggling to understand the capricious nature of probability. Another way would be to say that humanity and inhumanity are just two sides of the same coin. When it gets flipped, we have no idea which side it will land on. We still strive though, to make our own luck, or to wrestle for control of our lives. Just as Farraz did in that bakery, when he chose which side of the coin he wanted to be on.
I often wondered what would make someone who had planted a bomb notify the authorities that a bomb had been planted. Was it their conscience? Was it a sense of media savvy manipulation? Was it always part of the plan? The bomb in 2000 had no such warning. Luck and timing was all that kept people from dying, or worse. It was four-thirty AM when it went off, damaging the bridge enough that it had to be shut for two years for repairs. When it re-opened, it was subject to restrictions on the weight of vehicles travelling across it. You could say, it was never the same again. However, these were not the only times that the bridge had been attacked. In 1939, a man named Maurice Childs, a hairdresser on his way home late one night had discovered a suitcase that appeared to be on fire on its walkway, and when he opened it, he found a bomb packed inside. He threw it into the River Thames and it blew up, shooting a sixty foot spout of water into the air. Shortly afterward, a second bomb exploded further along the bridge, damaging the girders. Hammersmith Bridge has a history of surviving such injuries but then it had been made of wrought iron.
We humans, though, are made from more fragile materials. Which is something I am conscious of now, moreso than I was when our little family of four lived in Hammersmith and Fulham, just a bus ride from the bridge. I used to often cycle across that bridge, in search of the calming hum of my wheels as they turned and the meditative motion of me and my bike, together, heading for Barnes on the south side. It felt like escaping into a village in the middle of London, leafy lanes and a quietness that was more difficult to find on the north side of the bridge.
Once, when I was depressed and drifting through a period of life when everything seemed to be disintegrating, I stood under the bridge and speculated on the pros and cons of suicide. I relented, obviously, and mounted my bike to ride home after an age of listening to the water dreaming as it flowed beneath the structure. I also have a clear picture in my head of the times I would walk underneath the bridge, along the river with friends to find the warm shelter of the pubs that line the path. The Blue Anchor. The Dove. The Old Ship. Years later, it would be walks with our daughter when she first arrived, then with both our children, sometimes in their double buggy, side by side as they squabbled with the birds or ate fruit bars with sticky hands and sticky faces. And other days, when time meant nothing, we’d all stroll together on foot, ambling haphazardly in the unplanned way that only children master. How lucky, were we all, that we did not coincide our walks, or my rides with the explosions, four years apart? Well, the data tell me that dying in a bomb blast in London is less likely than dying from falling down a flight of stairs. As chance would have it, where we lived at the time, had only a few stairs.
It’s 2016 now and I read this week of the blasts in Baghdad, where over a hundred people died and the attacks in Bangladesh, where more than twenty were killed, I wonder just how much of a difference there is between London and places that the Global Peace Index (GPI) notes as more dangerous. Is Baghdad more dangerous than London? According to the GPI, it is. So do fathers stroll along the Tigris with their children and watch them chase birds in circles until they get dizzy? Do they still get the opportunity to wander through the gardens at Abu Nuwas to sit on a bench perhaps, and eat ice cream so quickly that their teeth hurt? Do they want to be oblivious of the ill-hand of probability, that makes one person disappear in that final, blinding sound, whilst another lives on in silence, cursed to hear it forever?
When I was twelve years old, I travelled with some friends into London, late on a Friday afternoon. Our first stop was Denmark Street, near Soho, and a shop called Forbidden Planet, a place which was to become a portal into a multiverse of wonder in my teenage years which I still remember with an aching fondness. Then from there, we walked along Oxford Street, and the crowds of Christmas shoppers. Finally, we made our way to Knightsbridge and Harrods. We ended up in the toy department, as we were still at that age when games of pretend mattered. By the time we had left, we had a bag or two of presents and we headed home. The next day was a Saturday and the first day of the school holidays. As I listened to the news on the radio, I heard that a bomb in a parked car in a side street near an entrance to Harrods had killed several people. I don’t remember my reaction to the news beyond thinking about the fact that I had been there just a day before. Perhaps I’d even walked past the bomb. Perhaps not. What are the chances?
The Global Peace Index states that the UK was recently ranked 28th out of 162 for the impact that terrorism has on its people. Iraq is first. The difference is staggering. And the difference is deadly. People I love, and myself, were so close to dying, all those years ago in London but the people of Baghdad are closer. Every day, they are closer. Just as they are closer in Nigeria, in Afghanistan, in Bangladesh, in Yemen, in India. Closer to terrorism’s singular, meaningless purpose. Closer to the retribution of the armed forces that operate there. It’s difficult to keep track of whose actions are legitimate, any more, if ever it was easy to do so in the first place.
This year alone, there have been attacks and bombings by all manner of forces in Nigeria, Yemen, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Somalia, the USA, in the UK, Russia, Egypt. Will we ever have enough time to change our profile pictures to display the flags of all these countries? Is it perhaps absurd, that we continue to believe that this is not the normal state of human affairs? That this is not what humans have been doing for millennia since we crawled our way into the ascendency on the planet? Imagine if instead of trying to describe the terrorists or the armed forces along the lines of race, nationality, ethnicity, or religion, we instead simply began to name them as humans, would our perspective change? Would it make any difference? Because there is no other species on Earth that can set a timer on a detonator for a bomb. Or one that knows how to pilot a UAV from across the planet. Can you imagine the headlines, if we did replace the words we use to describe the instigators?
“Today in London, a human murdered twenty-five humans, by indiscriminately opening fire on their bus…,”
“A car driven by a human exploded on impact when driven into a checkpoint in the Iraq capital of Baghdad. Humans have claimed responsibility.”
“A drone strike in the Swat Valley in Pakistan was used in an attempt to flush out insurgents. Unfortunately a wedding reception was hit. Twelve people died, including three children. The drone operator, a twenty-seven year old human from Virginia, was suspended from active duty.”
Some of us continue to wring our hands and call out ‘Not in our name. My religion is not like that. My country men do not do this. These people who kill and maim wantonly are not like me. I disown them.’ Others, meanwhile, seem to gleefully encourage the carnage, consuming live, continual feeds of the action as they drink coffee or scroll through their feeds. They apportion blame to the murderous and the murdered because obviously, their religion, their race, their very identity is the fundamental cause of their troubles. If only they were like us, things would be better. Our blindness to the cruelty of our own kind, is a peculiar tribal quirk. When I was a young Muslim boy, growing up, I remember being horrified by the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion and the injustice burned in me so much that I wanted to grow up join the PLO and fight oppression. I can see now though, just how easy it is for the passion for justice to become warped, into the innumerable stories of the ‘nice kid turned jihadist’ or ‘good man turned bad soldier’. These men are everywhere because humans are everywhere. And we are more fragile than wrought iron. I never did join the PLO because it was just a compassionate pipe dream of an eleven year old boy, who didn’t know how else to channel his powerlessness. Not many eleven year olds do.
Sometimes, we are petrified into a numbness by what happens, the perpetual newsfeed of death is exhausting and can easily become debilitating. It seems to seep into us at every turn and still, after millions of years of evolution, we struggle to turn the tide. There are very human limits to our empathy. For those hurt, there is definitely a limit to our compassion for those who caused the hurt. Perhaps it is better, as a friend said to me, that we look at these things as some kind of natural disaster. I added that it was a form of Malthusian check, named after the nineteenth century scholar, Rev. Thomas Malthus who viewed famine and disease as some kind of tragic population controls. Humans then, are a fatal check on our demographics.
But can you consider that the players in this global drama are much like you and I, do we not on some fundamental level, share an evolutionary heritage? We are units of the same species, fumbling our way through an existence that we are still trying to comprehend. We are the victims and the victimiser, we are also the bystander, with our innocence presumed but not yet earned. Our denial that the killers are just as much a part of humanity as the victims is a precious conceit that we use for self-elevation. I am better than those savages. Sometimes, perhaps we are. But how much better? I do not kill people. That could be true, but are you and I still responsible in some sense for the deaths of people that we know nothing about? And where does our responsibility end, and theirs begin? Do our taxes pay for the weapons that do kill people? I cannot ignore the fact that my taxes helped to pay for the bombs that were once dropped on Baghdad by coalition forces. And for the drones that killed children at a wedding? Wasn’t some of the money I earned used to support troops that that drowned looters in the Tigris River, or tortured prisoners in Iraqi jails? Our many apologetics for the brutality of religions, of races and for nationalities are at risk of becoming a defining element in our sense of identity. Our people. Our religion. Our race. Our solidarity is giving justification to those who seek out destruction as a twisted means of self-expression. Are we more worried than we acknowledge publicly, that normal people, from normal families can be capable of such things? We fret, secretly, that given the right or even the wrong circumstances, we too could be humans doing the work of monsters.
I found I was unable to watch the news reports on the recent attack in Dhaka, Bangladesh where twenty people were killed. The events were broadcast like some hyperreality show on certain channels, one in which there was no winner. The Holey Bakery, where the attack took place, is in Gulshan, a suburb of the city that has always been considered as upmarket, one where many foreigners live and work, where they eat and play. As a child, I loved going there with my family because of the restaurants that reflected the eclectic, international nature of its residents.
Several men, from middle class, Muslim, Bangladeshi families carried out the siege and the subsequent murders. One of them has been identified as the son of a prominent politician. One victim, Farraz Hossain was also from a middle class, Muslim, Bangladeshi family. He refused to abandon his friends who had been marked by the killers for death, choosing instead to die alongside them. The attackers had tested Farraz’s knowledge of the Quran and told him that he was free to go, based on his recitation. To them, his faith meant he was valuable. The others in the bakery, however, were not valuable in the eyes of their god. Life and death has always hung on such malicious logic. During the Bangladeshi Liberation War in 1971, Pakistani troops had torn off the lunghis of men to inspect whether they had been circumcised in order to prove they were Muslim. If they were uncircumcised as Hindus usually are, they were often killed on the spot.
It is disturbing for me to consider that I come from a similar background to both the murderers in the Holey Bakery and the murdered man, Farraz. When the security forces stormed the building, they managed to save some people and killed all but one of the attackers. Which of them were greater scholars in the Quran? Farraz or the gang? Both Farraz and the attackers died for their friends, but only the attackers sacrificed others based on their reading of the same book that Farraz quoted from. What kind of malign coin flip is that? Heads I justify the killing from my book. Tails, I would rather die with my friends than be free because my book is my guide. It seems that both are possible. The religion of peace and the religion of death, simultaneously. This is not a paradox, maybe only because luck plays a greater part in our lives than we know.
I think of how I used to walk across a bridge that was almost blown up three times. Once I even contemplated suicide whilst sitting and staring at that very bridge, a structure built to last centuries being gazed at by a person who is not. My friends and I visited the most famous department store in the world the day before a car exploded outside it. As a child, a bomb from a plane crushed the house next door to my family. I walked around Gulshan when I was a child. I grew up in a Muslim family. I come from Bangladesh.
Some of these things could be controlled by me, and some could not. I had no responsibility for being Muslim until I became older and rejected the religion. Had no hand in being Bangladeshi. Had little forethought in being in the wrong place at the right time, or the right place at the right time. It was chance that meant I would survive, just as it was chance that meant I was made from the same stuff, was built on the same foundations as the men who killed in the bakery and the people who died in it. If luck played a part in the fact that I did not become a victim of a bomb blast, then does it also play a part in the fact that I did not become a killer, like those middle class Muslim men, who were educated, knowledgeable, privileged and deadly. I can’t say that my humanity is what has stopped me from following their path, I think I’ll say it was just luck. “There but for the grace of god,” is often invoked to signify that randomness which permeates our lives, makes one man a pauper and another a king, makes one man a wolf and the other a lamb. But does the pauper also not think the same, "There but for the grace of god go I," as he looks at the king? It’s an elegant way of struggling to understand the capricious nature of probability. Another way would be to say that humanity and inhumanity are just two sides of the same coin. When it gets flipped, we have no idea which side it will land on. We still strive though, to make our own luck, or to wrestle for control of our lives. Just as Farraz did in that bakery, when he chose which side of the coin he wanted to be on.