The cult of death and the psychopaths it ensnares

By Michael Burleigh 10 Jan 2015

Twisted morals allow extremists to enjoy killing in incidents which could have been prevented, believes terrorism author Michael Burleigh

Hayat Boumeddiene pictured training with a crossbow

Perhaps the most ghastly moment in Wednesday’s events in Paris came when the 41-year-old French-Tunisian policeman Ahmed Merabet looked up from the pavement where he lay after being shot in the groin. “Do you want to kill us?” asked the shooter. “No, it’s OK chief,” said Merabet before he was shot in the head with an assault rifle. Hold that image as you read further.

Almost before the gun smoke had dissipated, but not before the blood was washed from Charlie Hebdo’s office walls, many people will have been alerted to the not-so-coy apologetics for a massacre in the City of Light. For instance, the BBC felt duty-bound to highlight the salience of Marine Le Pen and the Front National, without considering whether its growing support was a consequence, rather than a cause, of intolerant Islamist rejection of French republican secular values.

Next up were the terrorism-is-a-tactic-rather-than-an-ideology crowd. For sure, most terrorists use violence for its inhibitory effect and to “spectacularly” draw attention to their cause. Both elements may have been operative in Paris, for in addition to trying to kill off free speech, the gunmen may have been trying to put al-Qaeda’s flagging brand back in the limelight after months in which the depredations of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have dominated the headlines.

Violent Islamists are not bereft of ideology, though it is one that Western liberal rationalists are ill-equipped to grasp, for surely the world always moves forwards rather than backwards? This is despite daily evidence to the contrary, such as the 2,000 people reportedly murdered in the small town of Baga in Nigeria during a recent Boko Haram killing spree.

Islamist terrorists believe they are a pure elite, destined to survive the cataclysmic conflict of civilisations they desire to bring about. That is why ISIL’s magazine is called “Dabiq” or Ark. Ideally, as the Egyptian president has courageously commented, they would like to witness an all-out war between 1.6 billion Muslims and the other six billion inhabitants of our planet, but for the time being they’ll just be the vanguard of it.

 

Related Articles

• 'I was freed after helping wounded gunman' 10 Jan 2015

• Dramatic moment Paris supermarket siege is brought to an end 10 Jan 2015

• First pictures of siege factory 10 Jan 2015

• Paris shootings: The backlash begins against French Muslims 10 Jan 2015

This ideology entitles them to kill not just those who oppose them, but also all those whose mere existence offends them. There are words to describe this mentality. The UN’s Human Rights Commissioner, a Jordanian prince called Zeid Raad al-Hussain, was entirely correct in describing ISIL as “genocidal nihilists” for as we see in Iraq and Syria, they want to kill all Shia “heretics” and to violently subject a host of other folk (notably Christians and Yazidis) to demeaning submission.

Top of their kill list would be Jews, although, as the erstwhile ISIL French volunteer Mehdi Nemmouche showed in May, you had to go all the way to Brussels just to murder four of them — until Friday, when a confederate of the Koachi brothers stormed a Parisian kosher deli. But whether it is four visitors to a Jewish museum, an off-duty British soldier in Woolwich or an editorial meeting at a magazine, apologists claim the “real” fault lies with the West for invading Iraq and Afghanistan, though – for we must not be so provincial – that would not account for the gun attack in Mumbai, or indiscriminate knifings in Chinese railway stations. So far, ISIL has confined itself to inciting eager “lone wolf” individuals to hack down or run over their Western victims, though should the so-called Caliphate establish itself as a very retrograde kind of state, they may visit us in a much more premeditated fashion, as Sir Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, has warned.

Organised attacks on the West seem more characteristic of al-Qaeda, with its desire to so terrify the “far enemy” that it abandons the regional allied regimes al-Qaeda seeks to topple. Although there are frustrations in the relationship between old al-Qaeda’s doddery and hunted leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and its more dynamic regional affiliates, personal continuities ensure some branches remain true to global objectives.

That is the case with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (or AQAP), whose leader was once aide de camp to Osama bin Laden. Consisting of a fusion of Saudi and Yemeni jihadists, it has serially sought to bomb Western airliners, using the human bomb Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (otherwise known as the “underpants bomber”), as well as explosives hidden in printers on cargo flights bound for Jewish addressees in Chicago. That is why the CIA and cognate services regard AQAP as the most lethal threat to the West – and at least one of the gunmen in Paris had links with Yemen.

But we still have to explain the casual dispatch of Ahmed Merabet by a man whose last known job was on the fish counter of a supermarket in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. While some Islamist terrorists come from normally aspiring backgrounds, many number among life’s losers, like the orphaned and semi-criminal Kouachi brothers. In France, as in the UK, a failure to tackle drug and gang crime in what are no-go areas, and a complacent tolerance of clerical spouters of hatred has come back to haunt us.

Short spells in jails mean recruitment into the biggest (Muslim) prison gang, followed by the resentful being exposed to some streetwise clerical charlatan. The latter invariably provides the simple binary matrix of universal Western aggression and global Muslim victimhood that licenses believers to murder “Kufar” infidels. Any number of university post-colonial seminar rooms – dominated by useful “liberal” idiots – provide more ambient sympathy for this Manichean world view, while self-righteous lawyer activists fill their heads with “rights”. The essential is then forgotten.

^{Brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi}

What amounts to a death cult empowers the psychopath lurking within these people, offering the power of life and death over a limitless supply of terrified victims. You are the boss man after a lifetime of dependency and squalor on some peripheral housing estate. In ISIL's incipient state let, young men and women whose prospects might be stacking boxes of cat food in a fetid mini-mart in the 19th arrondissement, or Poplar in east London, can avail themselves of sharia to perpetrate barbarism and cruelty. For the death cult is also a youth cult in which traditional hierarchies and mores are abandoned, as one can see from ISIL's licensing of reducing Yazidi girls to sexual slaves for its fighters. Not for them the hard graft of millions of Chinese, Indian, Sikh or Vietnamese immigrants who have adjusted to life in the West without losing their identities, and whose voices we should hear far more in these times.

Like many other forms of totalitarianism, violent Islamism is paradoxically liberating. A Saudi law student can progress quickly to handing out daily amputations, crucifixions and whippings once he has become a judge in Raqqa or Mosul. Any crime, from looting, paedophilia, rape and smuggling to murder, is approved of in this inverted moral universe, while drinkers and smokers are killed. Some of these people evidently take a sadistic relish in their actions. Why else would you spend 10 minutes sawing off a victim’s head rather than shooting them? And through social media amplification you can show “it’s for real, inn it”. Clearly, some of these terrorist incidents could have been prevented were it not for intelligence failures and/or limited manpower. If Chérif Koachi was on a US list of terrorists not allowed to fly, then why was he at large on the streets of Paris? But there is also a deeper failure of strategic imagination at work.

^{Gunman Amedy Coulibaly was killed in Paris}

There needs to be a more thorough-going approach to the urban gang cultures that generate so many of these “losers”. If New York or Singapore can practise zero tolerance, so can we. Otherwise the mentality of impunity becomes endemic, quickly escalating from a bit of backchat to the police. How and where criminals are incarcerated needs to be examined, too, perhaps emulating Spain, where Eta convicts were put as far away from the Basque region as possible.

Instead of being sucked into a perpetual and pointless “dialogue” with “the Muslim community”, a disturbing number of whom seem to “understand” the murder of Charlie Hebdo’s staff, why not use indirection to focus on the millions of immigrants who have made a success of their transposition to Europe? Relativistic talk about the resurgent Right (far or moderate) should not be used to compare what are legitimate political parties (or in the case of Germany’s Pergida, peaceful protesters) with those who use AK-47s on our streets.

There will be a lot more shooting the messenger, so to speak, in coming days. It has happened already with the Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh, butchered on an Amsterdam street in 2004 (his collaborator, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was threatened too); and is likely to afflict the novelist Michel Houllebecq, the best little ratty chronicler of our times. How dare he, critics seem to say, even envisage a near future of an Islamic Europe from an already grim present? A society confident in itself does not appease or cringe in the face of monstrous assaults on its essential values by those we could quickly regard as just visiting, if they continue to provoke us as they have done this week.

Michael Burleigh is the author of Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (Harper Press)

The cult of death and the psychopaths it ensnares - Telegraph