2023-10-17 23:41:44
‘Youm al ghadab’ is what the day of rage is called in Arabic. Last week, Hamas leader in Qatar, Khaled Masha, issued a global call for all Muslims in the diaspora to participate. But it was a call that was not limited to Friday – the equivalent of Christian Sunday – but called for maintaining a continuous fight, on all fronts, and by all means – Masha urged to be “creative” – against Israel and his allies. Since then, the ‘lone wolves’ have performed twice. Starting on the day of rage, a 20-year-old young man, the son and brother of radicals, stabbed a teacher to death at a school in the French city of Arras and injured two other people. In Belgium, last night, another radical – with a record of crimes against state security – murdered two Swedish citizens who were attending a football match.
The attacks committed by two people in isolation, without any support structure and with the Internet as a focus of radicalization, highlight one of the great security problems of the West: lone wolves. This unstructured jihad is capable of acting outside the radar of security forces and in cyberspace it finds everything it needs to unleash violence, from justifications to training. The Palestinian cause is one of the great catalysts of a community that the expulsion of the Palestinians from Israel has brought together for decades and now reinforces in its message.
The web of Al Qaida
In this sense, one of the problems that arises with Hamas’ call is that it affects a digital community accustomed to channeling that violent message and spreading it through its channels. This ‘virtual jihad’ was quite successful before 9/11, when it was discovered that even Al Qaeda had a website. But the pressure from the security forces was cornering their ability to reproduce their message until they confined it to WhatsApp and Telegram channels, whose reach is much smaller than the large platforms. The problem posed by a global crisis like the one unleashed by Hamas’s incursion into southern Israel and the subsequent bombing of Gaza is that it puts the radical message back on the major broadcast channels.
A French soldier, participant in the Vigipirate attack prevention plan.
Because anti-Semitism is one of the basic foundations of the radical message. In Spain, for example, a Quran teacher who worked in Valencia was expelled from the country last year for sending violent messages against Israel, Shiites and the LGTBI community. Khaled Masha’s appeal, in this sense, was addressed “to all scholars who teach jihad”, that is, to people who, like the expelled Quran expert, have influence in their community.
Mental illness
Furthermore, one of the problems that have been detected in recent years is that this form of self-radicalization is having a special effect on people with psychological imbalances. The last two attacks carried out in Spain have had this component of mental illness mixed with jihadism: in Torre Pacheco, in 2021, a person with psychiatric problems drove his car into a cafeteria and killed a person, an event that the National Court he accepted to process it as terrorism by the jihadist components that surrounded him; and in September of this year the central courts also considered the case of another person with psychological problems who murdered a sacristan in a Church in Algeciras as jihadism.
According to the latest annual report from the Memorial Center for Victims of Terrorism, this type of terrorism practiced by people suffering from mental illness has skyrocketed in the world. The analysis also highlights that it has a global character: in the last year alone, a total of seven attacks have occurred in the United States, France, Norway, Germany and Belgium in which the perpetrator was a person with psychological crises. In many of the crimes, the perpetrators were people who became rapidly radicalized and took action.
The suspicion is that, precisely, it is their imbalance that leads them to accept terrorist postulates without any reluctance and commit attacks as a form of personal reaffirmation in the digital communities that have given them meaning in life.
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