‘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.