War on terror
How to fight the lone wolf
Pakistani human rights activists light lamps as they take part in a protest in Karachi on December 18, 2014, against the attack by Taliban militants on an army-run school in Peshawar. (Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images)
By Charles Krauthammer Opinion writer December
18 at 9:12 PM
The
lone wolf is the new nightmare, dramatized and amplified this week by the hostage-taking
attack in Sydney. But there are two kinds of lone wolves — the crazy and
the evil — and the distinction is important.
The
real terrorists are rational. Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, had
been functioning as an Army doctor for years. Psychotics cannot carry that off.
Hasan even had a business card listing his occupation as SoA (Soldier
of Allah). He then went out and, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” shot dead 13 people,
12 of them fellow soldiers. To this day, Hasan speaks coherently and
proudly of the massacre. That’s terrorism.
Sydney’s Man
Haron Monis, on the other hand, was a marginal, alienated Iranian immigrant
with a cauldron of psychopathologies. Described by his own former lawyer as
“unhinged,” Monis was increasingly paranoid. He’d
been charged as accessory to
the murder of his ex-wife and convicted of sending threatening letters to the
families of dead Australian soldiers.
His
religiosity was both fanatical and confused. A Shiite recently converted to
Sunni Islam, his Internet postings showed not just the zeal of the convert but
a remarkable ignorance of Islam and Islamism. He even brought the wrong
Islamic banner to the attack. He had to ask the authorities to
provide him with an Islamic State flag.
Which
led to a frantic search to find an Islamic State connection or conspiracy. But
for the disturbed like Monis, the terror group does not provide instructions,
it provides a script. It offers the disoriented and deranged a context, a
purpose, a chance even at heroism.
I
suspect this is the case with most of the recent cluster of lone-wolf terrorist
incidents, from the beheading of a co-worker in Oklahoma to the Queens
ax attack on New York City police. We fear these attackers because the
psychopathological raw material is everywhere, in the interstices of every
society. Normally in and out of mental hospitals, in and out of homelessness,
some are now redirected to find a twisted redemption in terror.
Nonetheless,
in the scheme of things, the crazies are limited in what they can carry out.
They are too disorganized to do more than localized, small-scale damage. The
larger danger is the Maj. Hasan with his mental faculties intact and his
purpose unwavering.
The
still greater threat is organized terror, as we were reminded just hours after
Sydney by the Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar that killed at
least 148, mostly children.
This
is evil in its purest form. Consider that many of the children were killed not
by explosive device or sprayed gunfire but by a single bullet to the head, the point-blank
execution of an innocent, rivaling in sheer barbarism the mass murders of
the Islamic State and its proud videotaped beheadings of hostages.
The
purity of such evil is clarifying. It banishes thoughts of negotiation or
compromise. Indeed, in response to the Peshawar atrocity, the Pakistani
Prime Minister suspended his country’s prohibition of the death penalty.
In
the face of similar savagery, Barack Obama committed the United States to
a military campaign against the Islamic State. Which, if successful, would not
just affect the region. Reversing the fortunes of the terror masters abroad is
the key to diminishing the lone-wolf threat at home.
These
groups inspire and influence because of their prestige, which, as for most
messianic movements, depends on their successes — measured in growing power,
territorial conquest and persuasive propaganda.
You
don’t find many local terrorists invoking al-Qaeda nowadays. They fly the flag
of the Islamic State. It is the strong horse, on the rise.
The
first line of defense against lone wolves is, of course, protective measures:
identification, tracking and pre-emption. But given the sheer number of the
disturbed, unstable and potentially impressionable among us, and given the
strictures that civil liberties have placed on prior restraint, that defensive
posture can take us only so far.
The
Islamic State has discovered that the projection of terror does not depend,
al-Qaeda-style, on sending expeditionary cells to kill infidels abroad. It can
do so long distance by inspiration, by wire, as it were. Which is why the
ultimate line of defense against lone wolves is to turn the fortunes of the
warrior tribes themselves, the script writers of jihad.
The
great new specter is the homegrown terrorist. But he is less homegrown than we
imagine. He is fed from abroad. Which is where, as ever since 9/11, the battle
must be fought.
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