Can we stop already with the head-in-the sand “lone wolf terrorist” bunkum being peddled by a cabal of running-scared governments, complicit media, and misguided academics? The catch-all explanation is dishonest and dangerous. It allows politicians and law enforcement to shrug their shoulders over another so-called “random nutter,” as they cover up their intelligence failings. Worst of all it prevents us from tackling the terrorist menace head-on.
Take the revelation the Bastille Day Nice attack was a pre-meditated mass killing. The magnificently unflinching and transparent (hello FBI!) French prosecutor Francois Molins has confirmed Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel planned his act of deadly terrorism for many months and possibly more than a year, with the aid of multiple accomplices. He watched beheading videos, did online searches on terror attacks, seemingly scoped out the beachside Promenade des Anglais last summer and was in constant contact with a radical who said after Charlie Hebdo: “I am not Charlie… I’m happy they sent the soldiers of Allah to finish the work.”
That’s as far as one can get from being a lone-wolf, mentally disturbed individual, self-radicalized at the last minute on the jihadi express (as the worn-out script goes).
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve tried to sell this dubious explanation in the days after the July 14 atrocity that left 84 dead and dozens wounded. Meanwhile the crazed loner theory has been bandied about in US media and academia over the past week, in a redux of Orlando and San Bernardino.
But the facts tell another story. Five of Bouhlel’s accomplices are in custody and have been charged with terrorism offenses, including supplying weapons. One accomplice — who gloried in the Charlie Hebdo attack — went back to film “the scene of the crime” after the attacks, said Molins. Bouhlel sent SMS messages referring to another attack planned in a month. Analysts suggest the terrorist may have been deliberately hiding his religious jihadist-terrorist tendencies and plans for a long time.
The parallels with the playbook after June’s Orlando attack are eerie. The FBI’s investigations showed Omar Mateen had known terror links via a radical mosque. His father was a pro-Taliban Afghan extremist, and his wife was there when he bought arms and drove him to the Pulse nightclub. Like Bouhlel, Mateen showed strong signs of being keyed into the virtual ISIS “sympathizers and fanboys” network and posted on Facebook during his massacre. Yet the identical “lone disturbed actor” narrative was flogged by President Obama and the FBI, as well as US researchers like Brookings Institution’s Will McCants and his peers at Georgetown University and beyond.
These same “experts” have resurfaced with their discredited “French connection” theories post-Nice to wave away the bloodbath on the Riviera as merely “ISIS-ish” because it was perpetrated by a “troubled youth with a criminal past” who was goaded into to it because of France’s “veil bans.”
The moral equivalence crowd blame “French political culture” with its so-called “aggressive secularism” — everything but the violent imported Salafist jihadist ideology, and its ISIS variant that Bouhlel embraced. Perniciously, they “forget” Bouhlel was not “made in France”: he was born and raised in Tunisia, by far the world’s largest exporter of ISIS foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq. He had a French resident’s card (thanks to his Franco-Tunisian wife he married in Tunisia) after arriving aged 21 and didn’t go through the radicalization crucible of French prison. They wilfuly ignore the influence his Tunisian upbringing could have had on what Islam specialists like Gilles Kepel show is a long Salafist-driven process toward a violent “rupture” with society. “Bouhlel is from an Islamist milieu, which is particularly pronounced in his Tunisian town of M’saken,” says Patrick Amoyel, a Nice psychologist who has worked on deradicalization. “He was in a sense raised on the Islamist feeding bottle. His father was an eminent local member of the Islamist party Ennahda. According to some sources he was a member of radical separatist networks…on Facebook.”
David Thomson, the French journalist and author of Les Francais jihadistes, pinpoints widespread “denial” post-Nice, even after Islamic State claimed responsibility. “Being mentally unbalanced has never stopped someone from becoming a jihadist,” he says.
The tired lone-wolf formula is being invoked in Germany after the train axe attack by a refugee who made a pre-horror-spree gore video, cheered on by ISIS. Still, he is said to have “no connection” with the group — and was possibly just depressed because his friend died!
The peddlers of what the French call the loup solitaire theory, afraid of being called Islamophobic, know the public is more at ease with a bonkers solitary character than a determined, religiously-inspired, politically-driven, networked terrorist, bathed in a climate of hatred of the West, Muslim “apostates,” and “infidels” common in Sunni Salafist communities as well as in the radical cyber “jihadisphere”.
Our leaders don’t want to admit they’ve missed a key element: ISIS is giving formal training to its recruits, even if the training is remote. Just because these attackers have no direct links with the hierarchy in Syria and are not getting orders does not take away from their affiliation, connections, and caliphate-soldier bona fides.
For French criminologist Alain Bauer, the lone wolf is “extremely rare” and the only recent examples are outside the Islamist terror model: Norway’s far right killer Anders Breivik and America’s anarchist Unabomber.
As Regis Le Sommier the author of a book on ISIS called Daech, L’Histoire explains, after San Bernardino, Orlando, and Nice: “the lone wolf doesn’t exist. We always find a connection and see there is a network.”
Emma-Kate Symons is a Washington, DC-based journalist and former Paris correspondent, published in The Wall Street Journal, Quartz, The Atlantic, The Australian, The Financial Review and Women in the World.
