Recent terror attacks in France and Germany are forcing European counter-terrorist agencies to rethink their tactics. The evidence is now undeniable that mental illness and the trauma of migration are in many cases more important than ideology in driving terrorist attacks.
European countries have devoted large resources to counter radicalisation by keeping watch over mosques, combating jihadist messages on social media, and most of all following citizens who have gone to Syria for training with ISIL and who may return to carry out terrorist atrocities.
But as the territory controlled by ISIL shrinks, the number of attacks it claims in Europe has not fallen. It is exploiting the vulnerable to claim their attacks after the fact, even when its role in planning has been non-existent.
This is particularly clear in the case of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a lorry through Bastille Day crowds on the Nice promenade, killing 84.
Normally the first lesson of an ISIL jihadist is to encrypt communications. But Bouhlel, who has a long history of medical illness, left his phone in the cab, revealing his lifestyle of picking up male and female partners, drink and drugs. It was as if he wanted maximum personal celebrity. ISIL called him one of its “soldiers”.
The Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama says looking for ideological motives in the action of suicide bombers is not enough. “These are people whose terrible hatred for themselves and for others is ennobled by its conversion into sacrifice,” he wrote this week.
Undoubtedly there is also a copycat element by which vulnerable people are influenced by events in the media – notably mass killing in Orlando, Florida, where a Muslim man reportedly confused about his sexuality opened fire in a gay bar.
A second cause for concern arises from the 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker who attacked people with a knife and an axe on a train in southern Germany on Monday, wounding five. The attacker is one of the 96,000 unaccompanied migrants under the age of 18 who arrived in Europe last year.
The numbers have overwhelmed the social services in Germany, leading to long delays to process their asylum claims, which in the case of Afghans may be turned down. A sense of confusion and isolation is not surprising. The teenager is expected by his family to send home money to reimburse the cost of paying the smugglers who got him to Europe. This is impossible because asylum seekers are not allowed to work, even if they could find any.
Researchers who studied Norwegians who emigrated to the US have known since the 1930s that migration is associated with increased mental illness. A 2005 study suggests that migrants are three times as likely to suffer from mental illness as those who remain in their home countries.
Perhaps this is not surprising. Migrants suffer extreme dislocation and loss of status when moving to a more economically developed country, while their ability to access professional care is reduced.
In the case of people of Muslim heritage, readily available ISIL propaganda on the smartphone, combined with relentless media focus on suicide attacks and a hardening political climate of Islamophobia, offer a false heroic solution.
The rush to judgement was particularly noticeable in the Nice killings where the French prime minister quickly described Bouhlel as “a terrorist probably linked to radical Islam in one way or another”.
But what if a deranged Christian has been told by an angel with a flaming sword to wreak vengeance on the ungodly? Would that have been terrorism? Certainly not. No it would have been the act of a deranged person.
The definition of terrorism – always rather slippery – is now expanding. It used to be a violent act to achieve a defined political goal – the unification of Ireland, release of prisoners, the end of occupation. But now it has come to mean any mass crime carried out by a Muslim which can be adopted after the fact by ISIL.
Of course ISIL does have a goal in Europe – to provoke such harsh countermeasures in European states that life becomes intolerable for the Muslim communities, setting off a vicious circle that destroys multicultural states from the inside.
But there is a difference between ISIL having a goal – albeit a nihilistic one – and that ideology being automatically ascribed to the confused perpetrator who may be motivated more by the demons of confused identity.
With France and Germany gearing up for elections next year, the anti-Muslim rhetoric, and the confusion of Islam with the Salafi-jihadist ideology, are likely to escalate.
Clearly it is time for leaders to watch their words more carefully, and the media too. There has been a suggestion that media should hide the names of mass killers and pixelate their photos, to puncture their yearning for celebrity status. But that will never work in the digital age.
Jean-Pierre Filiu, a French expert on the Middle East and author of From Deep State to Islamic State, wrote in Le Monde this week that the term “radicalisation” should be abandoned. Instead of being seen as a radical version of Islam, ISIL should be viewed as a cult or sect which the naïve or feeble-minded could “join”, or be “converted” to.
This would avoid the cultural and religious baggage which comes with “radical Islam” and place ISIL in its proper context as a sect that is opposed to all other interpretations of Islam and indeed every other religion. It would also save the embarrassment of the security services who had to admit that Bouhlel had been “radicalised very quickly” – an odd statement about a process that might be assumed to take a long time. Joining a cult, however, can be a matter of days.
That does not make the task of the security services any easier in combating the insidious propaganda of ISIL.
But if multicultural societies in Europe are to survive, the words used to describe mass killings need to be chosen more carefully.
Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs
On Twitter @aphilps
