‘Going Postal’ for Islam
Sent on July 11, 2005

 
Here’s a theory for you: the London bombers were merely about to 'go postal' — until some opportunistic terror strategist enlisted them to do what they were going to do anyway (die) but gave them a seemingly better reason (reward in Paradise) and a convenient rationalization for their own failures (it’s not your fault: those lousy infidels hate you and discriminate against you). Hardly far-fetched at all, these days.

We're told in a variety of reportage that at least three of the London Bombers had been banned from all three of their local neighborhood mosques, for reasons nobody seems to want to share; that at least two were college dropouts, having failed as students; that one seemed to lose himself after the close of his local cricket pitch (field) where he'd been an enthusiastic sportsman until then (sports, ostensibly, had kept him out of trouble before, but his sport of choice was apparently no longer available locally; also, his father is in bad health and can’t hold down a regular job); and that at least one of the others may have had some lingering, stinging life disappointment recently. Two were unemployed or underemployed, and a third had traded university for working in his father’s fish and chips shop.

Sudden hard-line “conversions” to radical Islam notwithstanding, by bombing London these four were responding less like traditional terrorists and more like garden-variety American or European or Canadian hostage-takers and murder-suicides, who turn the rage of failed hopes, lost jobs, etc., on their own families, coworkers or neighbors. Think of Michael Douglas’s character in the film Falling Down. These are people who have lost all hope but who also, upon closer examination, have developed absolutely no coping skills to deal with whatever sudden, major misfortune life has handed them (we can argue another time about how much rationalization is involved and whose job it is to develop such coping skills in the first place). They are stunted personalities, perhaps. Occasionally, they become snipers. Here, we just call them lone gunmen and nuts – probably because they haven't become pipe-bombers yet. But if our murder-suicide nutcases had suddenly become suicide bombers in big public areas instead of simply despondent wackos who take it out on the closest available people (i.e., the ones they know best), we'd be calling them terrorists, too — and perhaps missing the point because of it.

It seems to me that here and elsewhere, deeply disappointed, disillusioned, out-of-work types (overwhelmingly male; you've noticed this?) will reach for a gun or a knife and just go after either whoever is closest to them, so that no loved ones are left alive after they themselves die, or shoot or take hostages whom they blame in some way for their own disappointments, i.e., colleagues or other handy yet somehow related targets. This is what we mean when we talk about someone 'going postal.'

On the other hand, when disillusioned, disappointed women go for the murder of those close to them, it'll usually be either the kids they hurt (could be post-partum depression, but more likely a revenge thing against a husband or ex; remember Medea) or an abusive or straying husband or ex himself. These women rarely successfully commit suicide afterwards, if they even attempt it. Suicidal-homicidal women also rarely take unrelated hostages — and female Islamic suicide bombers are the very rare exception among despondent, murderous women, not the rule. Not nonexistent, mind you, just rare.

What Islamic terror strategists have done, perhaps, is to identify people like this — people alienated for largely personal reasons — and make use of them for political ends, cementing the likelihood that these recruits will really kill themselves by promising them forgiveness in Paradise and by granting whatever ails them enough to want to die over it some attention and, thereby, some legitimacy. The true (and still alive) terrorists merely acknowledge the pain of the already suicidal individuals and validate their murderous intentions while at the same time co-opting these suffering individuals’ deaths for their own quasi-religious and political reasons. The seeming romance of martyrdom provides not only cover for an otherwise cowardly act (suicide, aka taking the easy way out) but also appears to give not only purpose but blessing to an otherwise unforgiveable act, the murder of innocents. All this the potential suicide bombers are willing to do, to gain a false — and very temporary — sense of self-esteem.

Now, before we get too glib or superficial in our analysis, let’s stop here: two of the four bombers might have been categorized as ‘losers’ on paper, but the other two had wives, children, work, a reason for being. Why abandon their young families and go on a suicide run, taking loads of uninvolved strangers with them? Again, terrorist hunters need to look for whatever might have alienated an otherwise seemingly happy man. Consider how he might have felt marginalized even in a society where he seemed to fit in and wherein his family members are moderate in outlook and trying to assimilate.

Then look even further: do any family members belong to a group or Islamic sect that would have been marginalized or persecuted back in Pakistan, the country of their origin? Have they encountered some particular difficulties in their new country of residence? Are there other relevant influences? (Hint: British newspapers reported that Mohammed Sidique Khan, the suspected organizer of the quartet, supposedly suffered from depression, which may or may not have gone untreated, and was reportedly angry over the rising death toll in Iraq. Depression is sometimes described as unresolved or denied internalized anger. The personal and the political overlapped for him, perhaps.)

It won’t be that simple, of course. Yes, Khan could have been depressed, but suicidal depressed people don’t usually try to take complete strangers with them. Yes, he frequented an Islamic bookstore, but so did others who aren’t violent, let alone murderous. That’s not enough in itself. That he either refused to go to his local mosques or was banned from doing so may or may not be a better place to start looking for reasons. All four bombers met at the radical Stratford Street mosque in Beeston; they were likely recruited by someone there, but that wasn’t the source of their personal alienation. The young men’s reasons, whatever they were, got their start elsewhere; Beeston is merely where someone else capitalized on them.

None of this is meant to excuse what suicidal individuals do, in the end: no matter how depressed, they’re not insane — and the only way they can justify committing murder along with suicide is through rationalization, either personal or the quasi-religious variety that the terror strategists offer. But this may be a new way to look at how Islamic radicals recruit some of their suicides: find disillusioned people who are about to go postal anyway, and use them.

It should also give the terrorist hunters and policymakers a new way to parse the intelligence they gather: look for the deeply disillusioned and alienated, the marginalized individuals, research them, track them, and see who tempts them into martyrdom. Better still, get to them before the radical strategists can. If you can find any way to give these disaffected cause for hope (preferably while you’re teaching them some coping skills), you may yet turn them away from bombing their disappointments into oblivion and taking others with them.

This is not a prescription for giving therapy to would-be terrorists instead of forming a good defense against terrorism, merely a way one might identify potential suicide bombers — but in keeping such vulnerable individuals out of the grasp of extremists, one can deprive Islamic extremists and insurgents of some cannon fodder along the way. We should take our small victories wherever we can.