The Blurry Face of Terror
Last Christmas, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab a 23-year-old Nigerian man from a privileged banking family failed in his attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253. The fact that Farouk was a Muslim who had been trained by Al Queda in Yemen meant that he fit a certain profile for terrorists: Muslim.
After the botched Christmas Day ‘underwear bomber’ incident, the US announced additional screening for US travellers from 14 countries, thirteen of them Islamic thus reflecting the minds of more than 50% of Americans polled in a recent CBS survey who agree with ethnic and racial profiling. Others believe that targeting people because of who they are fuels prejudice and is counterproductive.
Who is right? How many of us hold our purses a little tighter when a young black man in low-slung pants and a hoodie step into our space? Or look away when a woman in a micro mini skirt, bright red lipstick that match the colour of her high-heeled shoes, chewing indelicately on bubble gum sits next to you on the train? How many of us have prayed a little harder when we find a bearded man with an Arab accent wearing a turban checking on to the same flight with our spouse as we wave them off at the airport? Racial profiling and stereotyping is hurtful and hardly makes room for exceptions. Take the Jean Charles Menezes case in which the innocent Brazilian was shot point blank in the head seven times at a London underground (tube) station by the London Metro Police. It turned out that Menezes had been wrongly identified by police due to his seemingly suspicious demeanour and dressing as he entered the station. No warning shots were fired! The murder of the 27 years erupted into a public debate in the UK on racial profiling as Menezes, apparently dark enough in colouring and being dressed in a manner that fitted the police profile for the mand they were hunting that day, was hacked down in a shoot-to-kill policy called Operation Katros that had been introduced to deal with terrorists. It would appear that our preconceived notions and profiling have exceptions and there is hardly a better-suited example than the recent ‘Jihad Jane’ case.
46-year-old Coleen LaRose (AKA Jihad Jane) from Pennsburg a Philadelphia borough with a population of around 3000, currently faces a life sentence for her role in the plot to murder Lars Vilks a Swedish artist on whom Islamists had declared a Fatwa (religious death sentence) for depicting the Prophet Mohammed with a dog’s body in a cartoon. Charged along with Jihad Jane is a 31-year-old blond Colorado woman Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, who faces 15 years in jail for her role in the plot. Both women apparently travelled to Ireland in September 2009 and made plans to attend a terrorist training camp. The younger of the two women married an Algerian terror suspect and co-conspirator in the Swedish murder plot whom she met online and is now pregnant with the man’s child. Paulin-Ramirez was travelling with her 6-year-old son when she was arrested.
When Society Fails
The ‘Jihad Jane and sidekick’ case seems to make no sense at all until you look at less conspicuous aspects of the women’s profiles – facts that are much less obvious than those by which US authorities seem to have profiled terror suspects: religion, location, dressing or name. The story calls to mind the Columbine High School massacre carried out by teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in which they executed a well-orchestrated massacre of their schoolmates in a gun bath that lasted 45 minutes and left 13 people dead. Investigators into the case concluded that at least one of the young men suffered from a messianic complex, hoping by the incidence to demonstrate his superiority to a world that had reviled and rejected him and his friend. The thread continues in the case of the Virginia Tech shooter Seung Hui-Cho, who killed 32 people in a shooting on the school campus. The investigating panel concluded that Cho was a troubled 23-year-old who had been diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety that inhibited him from speaking. The young man was lonely and lived in fear of engaging the real world. To escape, Cho created a fantasy where instead of facing the paucity of his life and relationships, he would be “the saviour of the oppressed, the downtrodden, the poor, and the rejected.” The investigating panel also stated that he became convinced that his destructive plan was actually one in which he was doing good.
The ‘Bombing Boxers’ case is even more intriguing. Farouk Abdulmutallab, one of 16 children born into a very privileged African family enjoyed play station and basketball as a child. He was sent off to a British school out of his native Nigeria at when he was about 11 or 12 years and it was there that his sense of isolation began due to his Muslim faith which he struggled to practice in the midst of an international mix of privileged brats. Media reports indicate that the young man was apparently lonely and conflicted. His convoluted feelings at finding the balance and maintaining his Islamic beliefs while also living the life of a normal teenager among the revelry that tends to be the trade mark of youth in private international schools led him to abandon games and pursue his faith devoutly. Farouk began to criticize his father’s livelihood (something he would probably not have done had he attended local schools where he would undoubtedly have been constantly reminded of his privileged status by the grinding poverty all around him), condemning the banking profession that paid for his cushy lifestyle as “immoral” and “un-Islamic” because they charged interest. Mutallab’s frame of mind made him a prime candidate for radicalization during his time at the University of London where he would have been even lonelier in a ‘cold and repressive’ British society. It was there that he met Muslim clerics sympathetic to the Al Qaeda cause. He was subsequently recruited and trained in Yemen at a terror camp.
Westernization, Individualism and Isolation
While this is no attempt to hold brief for Terrorists, local or foreign it is striking that without exception, the factors that created the perfect condition for the radicalization of all these individuals took place in the west. Western societies make no small deal of the right of individuals to pursue their own happiness at all costs and while deviancy is legislated against, obligation to the extended family and larger society is often sacrificed on the altar of individual interest. It would appear that this sense of individual entitlement propelled these individuals to turn on societies for which they felt no obligation. Life in the West is as synonymous with individualism as it is with isolation – a crushing loneliness made more excruciating because it is found in the midst of a teeming crowd. Human societies are to nurture and protect but when those same institutions reject and eject, then we create monsters of those we reject.
The common denominator between Abdulmutallab, LaRose and Paulin-Ramirez, Harris and Klebold as well as Hui-Cho is that these were all lonely people who, for reasons incomprehensible to them felt they had been shut out by the societies to which they wanted to belong. All the principal players in these cases felt an ever-increasing anger at the world and had tried to create an alternate reality for themselves. They found this alternate reality online, in a virtual world where they made friends with people who did not judge them.
Equally to blame is the virtual world created by video games and the internet, which provides an enabling environment for individuals experiencing difficulties in engaging in the reality of their own lives. As a child, my family was shaken to its core by the news of a family whose sons had found their father’s loaded gun and proceeded to play cops and robbers. After one son fatally shot the other, he proceeded to try to wake his brother up telling him the game was over and it was time to stop playing dead. This led to debates about parents informing children and wards that acts seen on the television should not be replicated at home: ‘Children, don’t try this at home’. All we had to contend with as children was the television. Now, young people grow up in a world replete with violent virtual games in which individuals take on the persona of video game characters. In cases where personality disorders are already latent, individuals are able to create an alternate reality which becomes an escape even outside of the game. A troubled individual might see himself as invincible when he takes on his video game persona, failing to appreciate the difference between fantasy and reality and the consequences of the same.
The journey of making sense of one’s isolation might have caused these individuals to be drawn to the lives of others equally rejected by their societies, resulting in a growing empathy for the wronged and the misunderstood. This is where profiling feeds on itself. It is easy for anyone to see that many of the people shut out by western society as ‘outsiders’ were so labelled simply due to the fact that they fitted a certain profile, which seems random and unjustified. This glaring injustice perhaps fuelled the sense of affinity by the perpetrators, which was nurtured by the more conniving members of the terror networks, who themselves prey on unwitting members of their own societies. Newcomers, especially Africans moving to the west for the first time always describe the pain of the isolation and loneliness that they face as aliens. Conversely, westerners are unarmed by the outpouring of warmth and love that they feel when they visit Africa. Unfortunately, rather than appreciate it as one of the greatest strengths of our people, many westerners feel entitled to this welcome due to their misguided sense of superiority. Incidentally, it is this sense of entitlement that caused the British to exploit Africa’s openness and make way for the incursion of the Slave Trade back in the day. (That is another conversation). Combine an unmitigated sense of entitlement with a descent into virtual escape created by an individual who is angered by their increasing exclusion from society and you have a profile of the perfect home-grown terrorist. Legislate that!
