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| Terror Networks |
| Terrorist madness |
| 2016-07-30 |
| [DAWN] Among some shades of opinion, the tendency to investigate the psychological make-up of a killer is a variety of denialism, a studied refusal to condemn religion as the guiding force behind mass murder. This attitude in turn feeds into perpetuating the notion that all Moslems are potential terrorists. It should not be particularly surprising that the latter assumption ideally suits the purposes of the holy warrior Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... group. The fact that Germany has lately allowed in hundreds of thousands of mostly Moslem refugees militates mightily against the notion of a West implacably hostile to Islam. If even a couple of refugees can be persuaded to perpetrate acts of indiscriminate violence, the hostility towards them can reasonably be expected to spread well beyond murderous Moslem outfits such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The axe attack on a train in Wurzberg by a teenage Afghan refugee (some news outlets claimed he was actually a Pak) on July 18 and, in the wake of Sonboly’s outrage, a pair of attacks by Syrian refugees -- one of them killed a woman with a machete and injured five other people, while the other detonated a boom jacket near a music festival and, thankfully, succeeded in killing only himself -- appeared, insofar as they may have been guided by IS operatives, to be directed towards propelling AfD’s agenda. Much the same could be said about the singularly appalling attack in Nice on Bastille Day by Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a French resident from Tunisia, who ploughed his massive truck through crowds celebrating the national holiday, leaving more than 80 people -- a third of them Moslems -- dead and injuring many more. Unlike last year’s terrorist attacks in Gay Paree, which tended to unite the French more in sorrow than in anger, the Nice outrage, amid a state of emergency, has more directly prompted an upsurge in antagonism toTerrorist madnesswards the government of Francois Hollande ...the Socialist president of La Belle France, an economic bad joke for la Belle France but seemingly a foreign policy realist... , who responded crassly to the massacre by decreeing a more concerted military assault on IS redoubts in Iraq and Syria. Should Marine Le Pen win the next French presidential election, a substantial proportion of the blame could be ladled on to IS, but Hollande won’t get away unscathed. Europe’s far-right forces are effectively the other side of the IS coin. They may have divergent motivations, but the essential idea is to perpetuate the belief that there is little or no space for Moslems in Europe. The neo-Nazis are determined that there should be no place for Moslems in Europe. IS is bent upon ensuring that Europe is no place for Moslems, unless it is subsumed into the fantasy of a caliphate -- whose territorial reach in Iraq and Syria is slowly diminishing. There are also reasonable grounds, meanwhile, for questioning the dichotomy between extremism and psychological dysfunction. The latter can, obviously, operate independently of the former, and the vast majority of people who diverge from what is assumed to be the norm in that sphere are obviously harmless, in the same way as are most Moslems. But can murderous fanaticism be distinguished from a psychotic disorder? Such a conclusion may complicate the task of dedicated anti-terrorists, but it’s not one they can afford to ignore. |
| Posted by:Fred |