When
Mental Illness Becomes an Excuse for Terrorists
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
June 11, 2018
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(Youtube) Police close
in on a wounded Malek F.
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It was a warm afternoon in the Netherlands on May 5 as the country
celebrated the 73rd anniversary of its liberation from the Nazi
occupation. Some had gone to the beach. Others picnicked in local parks.
But in the streets beside the Hollands Spoor train station in The Hague,
one man chose a different way to mark the occasion: brandishing a knife, he
slashed at random bystanders, wounding three people,
one seriously. Police rushed to the scene, where they shot the attacker in
the leg to force him to the ground. Yet even as he lay across the sidewalk,
he held tightly to his weapon. "Allahu Akbar," he cried out, the
Arabic that means "Allah is greatest."
Police arrested the Syrian-born attacker, later identified as
"Malek F." But only hours later, authorities were forced to
acknowledge that he had been in their sights for some time – not for
radical Islamism, but for what they called "disturbed behavior."
Media reports described the man as "troubled," and officials
claimed they were searching for a motive. Even The Hague Mayor Pauline
Krikke told the press that "terrorism has been ruled out
as a motive," insisting "there is no sign that there was anything
more to it" than that the man was mentally ill.
Yet further investigation revealed that police had received
an anonymous tip in March warning that Malek F, who has lived in The
Netherlands since 2014, was planning an attack.
This was not the first time this kind of situation has occurred. More
and more, officials are starting to describe radicalized Muslims as
"mentally disturbed" rather than "terrorists," and
question whether their claims to act in the name of terror groups are real
or imagined. At the same time, mental health experts are exploring whether mental
health issues can make people – particularly refugees housed in asylum
centers – vulnerable to radicalization.
Take, for instance, the attack last December, when 29-year-old
Palestinian-Syrian Saleh Ali smashed the windows of a kosher restaurant in
Amsterdam, waving a Palestinian flag and again calling out the battle cry
of "Allahu Akbar." He too was known by authorities who, as with
Malek, ignored warnings that he had radicalized. Overlooking the fact that
Ali had also fought in Syria, they instead referred him to mental health clinics, according to
Dutch news channel NOS.
Yet prosecutors charged him only with vandalism and burglary after the
restaurant attack, and ordered him to continue psychological examinations
while he awaits trial. Infuriated, the restaurant's owner is fighting to
have Ali tried on terror or hate crime charges. His efforts thus far have
failed with the public prosecutor's office citing a "lack of
sufficient evidence."
Or consider the case of Ahmed A, a Palestinian asylum seeker who used a
stolen eight-inch knife to stab several people last July in a Hamburg
supermarket, killing one of them. (Germany, like most European countries,
does not identify those charged or convicted of a crime by their full
name.) According to a Der Spiegel investigation, the attacker –
whose "Allahu Akbar" rang through the supermarket aisles as he
continued his slashing spree – had been previously referred to a
"counseling center" for "psychological problems." At
the asylum center where he lived, fellow residents and counselors simply
called him "strange," and left it at that. Yet an effort by Ahmed
A's friends to alert the authorities to his possible radicalization was
misfiled by police, as happened with Malek F; and in November 2016, Ahmed
reportedly announced at a refugee café that "Terror will come to this
place, too."
But no one paid attention.
A similar story also surrounds the Tunisian-born Mohamed
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who in 2016 drove a truck into Bastille Day revelers in
Nice. He, too, according to the BBC, had a history of psychiatric problems,
though his former psychiatrist told reporters that "he did not think the atrocity
in Nice should be blamed on mental illness." Indeed, evidence shows
Bouhlel plotted the attack methodically, doing extensive research on
traffic accidents and reading up on the attacks by Orlando night club
killer Omar Mateen and others.
The irony is that Mateen's attack also was described by many as being motivated by emotional
problems, the expression of a man dealing with conflicts over his own
latent homosexuality, rather than terrorism. No evidence ever emerged to
substantiate this theory. Further, even as he was shooting randomly at the
Pulse nightclub, he pledged allegiance to ISIS in a call to the Orlando
police. His ex-wife called him "bi-polar," though there is no
medical evidence to substantiate this diagnosis. Nor would bipolarity
explain Mateen's desire to align himself with ISIS or his fascination with Boston bombers Tamerlan and
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
This distinction matters. By dismissing terrorist attacks as violent
outbursts of the mentally disturbed, we overlook actual threats to national
and international security – with deadly consequences. Intelligence and
policing strategies are doomed to misfire even as the real Islamist threat,
inadequately checked, grows larger.
At the same time, understanding the links that can exist between
psychological problems and radicalization may help counterterrorist experts
pinpoint those vulnerable to terror recruiters, and make them less likely
to ignore the warning signs in people like Saleh Ali and Malek F.
Balancing those facts is crucial, particularly in a time of increasing
so-called "lone-wolf" attacks. As noted in a recent study by the National Consortium for the Study of
Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START),
"The apparent relationship between mental illness and extremist
violence stands against a lengthy and well-evidenced tradition of terrorism
studies showing that most terrorists are psychologically normal." It
is clear, for instance, that the 19 September 11 hijackers were not all suffering
from some sort of psychosis, nor is it believed that Osama bin Laden was
psychologically unwell.
Nonetheless, notes START, "for some individuals, intense feelings
of injustice, outrage, revenge or even love can potentially act as
mechanisms to push people toward extremist violence."
Other studies have confirmed this assertion, including one
by Paul Gill and Emily Corner of University College in London. They found
that of 119 "lone wolf" attackers, almost 32 percent had been
diagnosed as mentally ill, versus 3.4 percent of members of terrorist
groups.
But it is also critical to distinguish between psychological discomfort
and mental illness. Many migrants and refugees face uncertain futures,
which "contributes to mental illness" and anger, German
psychotherapist Mechthild Wenk-Ansohn told Der Spiegel. This may or
may not be true, but certainly cannot explain slicing the throats of
pedestrians on a spring day in The Hague, or running down hundreds of
people celebrating their national holiday in Nice, all in the name of Allah
and the hope for martyrdom and eternal life. Nor does it explain the child
suicide bombers in the West Bank or the marketplaces of Baghdad.
More convincing is the explanation of Weill Cornell Medical College
psychiatry professor Theodore
Shapiro. "Mental illness per se is not specifically associated
with any form of social violence," he told the IPT in an e-mail.
"Rather, some mentally ill (paranoid and impulsive) persons may seek
out and join common radical causes as a vehicle for discharging their hate
and distorted thinking."
In addition, Shapiro added, "Recent findings indicate that
disorders such as PTSD, commonly associated with stress in wartime (shell
shock, battle fatigue,) or terrorism only occur in those who have histories
of significant illness such as anxiety disorders. Thus the stressor is a
trigger for onset of the radical form of the disorder and not the full
cause."
Certainly, insanity has led people to kill – John Hinckley and Jeffrey Dahmer, for instance. But murder, even mass
murder, is not terrorism. Terrorist violence is aimed at a higher purpose,
or the belief in one: martyrdom, an Islamic caliphate, liberation,
political revolution. And while insanity may increase the likelihood of
radicalization, not all radicals become terrorists.
What's more, calling a terrorist "insane" or
"confused" does more than free him of responsibility: it makes
him a victim, a sympathetic character worthy of compassion and concern.
True, if a history of mental illness can signal a potentiality for
radicalization, this is information security agencies should attend to
better than they have to date. But to conflate the two risks normalizing
terrorism as if it were any other form of violence, not the insidious,
ruthless attack on our lives and our democracy that it is.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands. Follow her at @radicalstates.
Related Topics: Abigail
R. Esman, knife
attack, The
Hague, Malek
F., mental
illness, Pauline
Krikke, Saleh
Ali, Mohamed
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, Bastille
Day attack, Omar
Mateen, National
Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, Paul
Gill, Emily
Corner, Theodore
Shapiro
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