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Bisexual Prostitue, Not Violent Jihadi
Nice Attack Motive Questioned: Killer Was Bisexual Prostitue, Not Violent
Jihadi
July 19, 2016 By Richard Silverstein Leave a Comment
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel: Nice attacker’s motives may’ve not been related
to Islamism
Though it runs counter to the official French and Islamophobic narrative,
news sources probing the background of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Nice
attacker, are finding little evidence he was motivated by jihadism. Rather,
he was a violent, but petty criminal who made his living as a bisexual
prostitute on the French Riviera.
UPDATE: a long-time French reader of this blog has provided some important
new information. She believes the Daily Beast report that Bouhlel was a
prostitute may not be accurate. She has not read this in any French
publication. But she does say that the killer’s wife called him “an
atheist.” He drank alcohol and ate pork. Never celebrated Ramadan or
attended any mosque. His father confirmed that while he had been a
brilliant student as a youth, he began to see a psychiatrist at age 19. He
clearly, according to these French sources, had “mental problems.”
French sociologist, Farhad Khosrokhavar, a specialist in Islamic
radicalisation, told French media that this is NOT a case of religious
radicalisation or even terrorism: he, in fact, compared him to the Orlando
shooter, Omar Mateen, and particularly to the German pilot Andreas Lubitz,
who crashed his plane in a suicidal act. They were all mentally ill,
clinically depressed, and possibly seeking post-mortem fame.
While the French prime minister quickly claimed the killings were “somehow”
or other associated with Islamism, he offered no concrete evidence. Nor did
the interior minister, who said the suspect was completely unknown to
intelligence agencies. The killer never frequented mosques or had any
religious affiliation. The online Islamophobe mafia claims he shouted
Islamist slogans as he mowed people down in the street. But no credible
media or official source has confirmed this. ISIS has claimed him as one of
their own, but they too have offered no videotape of him acknowledging
allegiance.
It’s too early to know for sure his precise motives, or combination of
motives. But one thing is for sure, the French President and prime minister
misspoke when they almost immediately, and with little evidence, declared
the attack the work of ISIS.
This is a common human fault: when a tragedy occurs, rather than wait for
evidence and solid proof, we fall back on conventional wisdom. We turn to
old narratives which were true in the past. Jumping to conclusions often
sends investigators in the wrong direction and heaps blame on innocent
people, who themselves become victims. It does little to help us understand
new realities.
Let’s be clear about what I’m saying and not saying. I am not discounting
the phenomenon of jihadi terror. We have seen too many examples of it to
deny its existence. But I am saying that Muslims have become the punching
bag du jour in the West. As soon as an attack has a Muslim perpetrator,
people leap to conclusions. When in truth, Muslims have as many motives for
engaging in desperate violent acts as any human being.
Remember the Orlando shooting? Everyone assumed he was an Islamist. But he
wasn’t. He was a confused, closeted homosexual frustrated by his sexuality
and unable to come to terms with it.
We are entering new, uncharted territory when it comes to such inexplicable
acts of savagery. Instead of the typical narrative of the marginalized
immigrant transformed into the radicalized jihadi, we now have young,
impulsive, mentally imbalanced males with a varied list of grievances.
Their dissatisfaction may embrace violent fundamentalism, or it may involve
primarily personal demons. But all of them are united in their transfer of
personal demons into the public realm. They somehow believe society is
responsible for these traumas and take revenge on it for their pain and
suffering. These mass killers may have elements of conventional terrorist
motives, but there is a personal element that resonates for them just as
strongly.
U.S. Police Shootings
The recent Dallas and Baton Rouge police murders display a different
motivation, but one that will resonate here in America for some time to
come. Though it may not be popular to say so, American police have killed
thousands of unarmed Blacks and other minorities over the past decades. The
police, until this past year, almost never faced consequences for this
reckless behavior.
With the advent of smartphones and video, Americans have become far more
aware of these injustices. But the police have been largely unwilling or
unable to adapt to these changing circumstances. They continue to treat the
public, at least the minority public, as the enemy. American police need to
be held accountable and need to understand that any time they attack an
unarmed civilian they will be held accountable.
If local or state police and political leaders are slow to absorb this
message, then the federal government must step in. The Justice Department
should investigate every police attack on unarmed civilians (those not
engaged in a criminal act when stopped by police). This may be the only way
to restrain police and change behavior.
If we do anything less, even more policemen will be killed in these savage
attacks. Murdering police is despicable and wrong. It is the act of a
deranged anti-social criminal. But the motivations of these men resonate
among communities under attack. Stop killing young Blacks for no reason or
we will see more of this in the future.
Baton Rouge’s policing strategy is the exact opposite of what’s called for
in reducing hate and mistrust of the police:
Police departments have received waves of criticism…for using military-grade
equipment in relatively benign situations, and recent protests in Baton
Rouge have reignited the debate over the role of such hardware in American
policing.
Photographs and video shot over the weekend show Baton Rouge police,
sheriff’s deputies and other law enforcement officers clad in body armor and
gas masks and wielding semiautomatic rifles. In one sequence, riot police
and SWAT officers flank an armored vehicle as it eases through a relatively
peaceful crowd, a scene that looks similar to a military patrol through a
hostile city.
…According to Jason Fritz, a former Army officer and an international
policing operations analyst, the resurgence of military equipment and
heavy-handed tactics in Baton Rouge is the byproduct of a state-centric
approach to policing, one of the two policing philosophies most commonly
seen in the United States.
In Baton Rouge’s case, Fritz says, the police are there to disperse
protesters…
Officers in Baton Rouge “want to play soldier,” said Brandon Friedman, a
former Army infantry officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan…
“These cops clearly don’t have good relationships with their own community.
They feel like the answer to this is to come down with the boot,” Friedman
said. “It’s an entirely ineffective way to deal with it.”
Friedman compared the Baton Rouge police’s response to the protests to his
time conducting counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. The units that tried
to meet civil uprisings with force usually found themselves in a “downward
spiral” when it came to gaining the community’s trust.
“Units that strove to have good relationships with the community usually
incurred more risks but generally had a better outcome,” Friedman said.
“Baton Rouge is making a lot of mistakes, and they look ridiculous.”
After Baton Rouge’s police murdered Alton Sterling and followed that by
violently attacking and beating 200 unarmed non-violent protesters, a Black
man decided to exact revenge. That’s when three police officers were
murdered. The police chief there learned no lessons from what happened–or
learned the wrong lessons:
“We’ve been questioned for…our militarized tactics and our militarized law
enforcement,” he said. “This is why. Because we are up against a force that
is not playing by the rules. … They didn’t play by the rules in Dallas and
they didn’t play by the rules here.
“We don’t ever want to use it but we have to have the ability to use it when
we needed it, and we needed it here,” he said. “As several have said, this
guy was going to another location. He was not going to stop here. After he
was finished here I have no doubt he was heading to our headquarters and he
was going to take more lives.
“Our militarized tactics, as they’re being called, saved lives here.”
That analysis is precisely backwards. You must solve the problem by not
killing innocent, unarmed civilians. If you do that you will not provoke
their hate and you will face extremely rare threats. If you develop a case
of amnesia which causes you to forget that you provoked the populace by
killing them, then you can emphasize the outcome, and how you need to
protect yourself from killers among the populace with armored personnel
vehicles, tanks, body armor and gas. If your relationship with your
community is one in which you are adversaries, then the police and everyone
loses. In Baton Rouge, everyone loses with a police approach enunciated by
its chief. Policemen die, civilians die, and innocent protesters end up
beaten to a bloody pulp for exercising their constitutional rights.
Knife Intifada
This is not unlike the Knife Intifada under way in Israel-Palestine. Young
Palestinians see thousands of their country men and women gunned down by
Israeli soldiers and police. They see no one held accountable. They feel
impotent in the face of this savage Israeli onslaught. They have no hope of
change since their own Palestinian Authority has no power or leverage either
with Israel or the world community. The only outlet they have is–the knife.
Like some of the attacks mentioned above, these are random, spontaneous acts
of personal rage with a political overtones. The solution is not to blame
Facebook or PA incitement as the Israeli dar-right leadership has done, but
to search for the cause in the hopelessness of their condition. A
hopelessness that derives from Israeli mass violence and rejection of a
negotiated compromise solution offering Palestinians real, full national
rights. Fix this and you end the motivation for Palestinian terror. Leave
it to fester, and you risk turning random acts of violence into a mass
uprising in which thousands more may die.
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Was Bisexual Prostitue, Not Violent Jihadi
Nice Attack Motive Questioned: Killer Was Bisexual Prostitue, Not Violent
Jihadi
July 19, 2016 By Richard Silverstein Leave a Comment
http://i0.wp.com/cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2016/07/1
8/nice-attack-has-a-bisexual-muslim-hustler-put-france-on-the-path-to-civil-
war/jcr:content/image.img.1280.1024.jpg/48963071.cached.jpghttp://i0.wp.com/
cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2016/07/18/nice-attack-has
-a-bisexual-muslim-hustler-put-france-on-the-path-to-civil-war/jcr:content/i
mage.img.1280.1024.jpg/48963071.cached.jpg
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel: Nice attacker’s motives may’ve not been related
to Islamism
Though it runs counter to the official French and Islamophobic narrative,
news sources probing the background of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Nice
attacker, are finding little evidence he was motivated by jihadism. Rather,
he was a violent, but petty criminal who made his living as a bisexual
prostitute on the French Riviera.
UPDATE: a long-time French reader of this blog has provided some important
new information. She believes the Daily Beast report that Bouhlel was a
prostitute may not be accurate. She has not read this in any French
publication. But she does say that the killer’s wife called him “an
atheist.” He drank alcohol and ate pork. Never celebrated Ramadan or
attended any mosque. His father confirmed that while he had been a brilliant
student as a youth, he began to see a psychiatrist at age 19. He clearly,
according to these French sources, had “mental problems.”
French sociologist, Farhad Khosrokhavar, a specialist in Islamic
radicalisation, told French media that this is NOT a case of religious
radicalisation or even terrorism: he, in fact, compared him to the Orlando
shooter, Omar Mateen, and particularly to the German pilot Andreas Lubitz,
who crashed his plane in a suicidal act. They were all mentally ill,
clinically depressed, and possibly seeking post-mortem fame.
While the French prime minister quickly claimed the killings were “somehow”
or other associated with Islamism, he offered no concrete evidence. Nor did
the interior minister, who said the suspect was completely unknown to
intelligence agencies. The killer never frequented mosques or had any
religious affiliation. The online Islamophobe mafia claims he shouted
Islamist slogans as he mowed people down in the street. But no credible
media or official source has confirmed this. ISIS has claimed him as one of
their own, but they too have offered no videotape of him acknowledging
allegiance.
It’s too early to know for sure his precise motives, or combination of
motives. But one thing is for sure, the French President and prime minister
misspoke when they almost immediately, and with little evidence, declared
the attack the work of ISIS.
This is a common human fault: when a tragedy occurs, rather than wait for
evidence and solid proof, we fall back on conventional wisdom. We turn to
old narratives which were true in the past. Jumping to conclusions often
sends investigators in the wrong direction and heaps blame on innocent
people, who themselves become victims. It does little to help us understand
new realities.
Let’s be clear about what I’m saying and not saying. I am not discounting
the phenomenon of jihadi terror. We have seen too many examples of it to
deny its existence. But I am saying that Muslims have become the punching
bag du jour in the West. As soon as an attack has a Muslim perpetrator,
people leap to conclusions. When in truth, Muslims have as many motives for
engaging in desperate violent acts as any human being.
Remember the Orlando shooting? Everyone assumed he was an Islamist. But he
wasn’t. He was a confused, closeted homosexual frustrated by his sexuality
and unable to come to terms with it.
We are entering new, uncharted territory when it comes to such inexplicable
acts of savagery. Instead of the typical narrative of the marginalized
immigrant transformed into the radicalized jihadi, we now have young,
impulsive, mentally imbalanced males with a varied list of grievances. Their
dissatisfaction may embrace violent fundamentalism, or it may involve
primarily personal demons. But all of them are united in their transfer of
personal demons into the public realm. They somehow believe society is
responsible for these traumas and take revenge on it for their pain and
suffering. These mass killers may have elements of conventional terrorist
motives, but there is a personal element that resonates for them just as
strongly.
U.S. Police Shootings
The recent Dallas and Baton Rouge police murders display a different
motivation, but one that will resonate here in America for some time to
come. Though it may not be popular to say so, American police have killed
thousands of unarmed Blacks and other minorities over the past decades. The
police, until this past year, almost never faced consequences for this
reckless behavior.
With the advent of smartphones and video, Americans have become far more
aware of these injustices. But the police have been largely unwilling or
unable to adapt to these changing circumstances. They continue to treat the
public, at least the minority public, as the enemy. American police need to
be held accountable and need to understand that any time they attack an
unarmed civilian they will be held accountable.
If local or state police and political leaders are slow to absorb this
message, then the federal government must step in. The Justice Department
should investigate every police attack on unarmed civilians (those not
engaged in a criminal act when stopped by police). This may be the only way
to restrain police and change behavior.
If we do anything less, even more policemen will be killed in these savage
attacks. Murdering police is despicable and wrong. It is the act of a
deranged anti-social criminal. But the motivations of these men resonate
among communities under attack. Stop killing young Blacks for no reason or
we will see more of this in the future.
Baton Rouge’s policing strategy is the exact opposite of what’s called for
in reducing hate and mistrust of the police:
Police departments have received waves of criticism…for using military-grade
equipment in relatively benign situations, and recent protests in Baton
Rouge have reignited the debate over the role of such hardware in American
policing.
Photographs and video shot over the weekend show Baton Rouge police,
sheriff’s deputies and other law enforcement officers clad in body armor and
gas masks and wielding semiautomatic rifles. In one sequence, riot police
and SWAT officers flank an armored vehicle as it eases through a relatively
peaceful crowd, a scene that looks similar to a military patrol through a
hostile city.
…According to Jason Fritz, a former Army officer and an international
policing operations analyst, the resurgence of military equipment and
heavy-handed tactics in Baton Rouge is the byproduct of a state-centric
approach to policing, one of the two policing philosophies most commonly
seen in the United States.
In Baton Rouge’s case, Fritz says, the police are there to disperse
protesters…
Officers in Baton Rouge “want to play soldier,” said Brandon Friedman, a
former Army infantry officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan…
“These cops clearly don’t have good relationships with their own community.
They feel like the answer to this is to come down with the boot,” Friedman
said. “It’s an entirely ineffective way to deal with it.”
Friedman compared the Baton Rouge police’s response to the protests to his
time conducting counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. The units that tried
to meet civil uprisings with force usually found themselves in a “downward
spiral” when it came to gaining the community’s trust.
“Units that strove to have good relationships with the community usually
incurred more risks but generally had a better outcome,” Friedman said.
“Baton Rouge is making a lot of mistakes, and they look ridiculous.”
After Baton Rouge’s police murdered Alton Sterling and followed that by
violently attacking and beating 200 unarmed non-violent protesters, a Black
man decided to exact revenge. That’s when three police officers were
murdered. The police chief there learned no lessons from what happened–or
learned the wrong lessons:
“We’ve been questioned for…our militarized tactics and our militarized law
enforcement,” he said. “This is why. Because we are up against a force that
is not playing by the rules. … They didn’t play by the rules in Dallas and
they didn’t play by the rules here.
“We don’t ever want to use it but we have to have the ability to use it when
we needed it, and we needed it here,” he said. “As several have said, this
guy was going to another location. He was not going to stop here. After he
was finished here I have no doubt he was heading to our headquarters and he
was going to take more lives.
“Our militarized tactics, as they’re being called, saved lives here.”
That analysis is precisely backwards. You must solve the problem by not
killing innocent, unarmed civilians. If you do that you will not provoke
their hate and you will face extremely rare threats. If you develop a case
of amnesia which causes you to forget that you provoked the populace by
killing them, then you can emphasize the outcome, and how you need to
protect yourself from killers among the populace with armored personnel
vehicles, tanks, body armor and gas. If your relationship with your
community is one in which you are adversaries, then the police and everyone
loses. In Baton Rouge, everyone loses with a police approach enunciated by
its chief. Policemen die, civilians die, and innocent protesters end up
beaten to a bloody pulp for exercising their constitutional rights.
Knife Intifada
This is not unlike the Knife Intifada under way in Israel-Palestine. Young
Palestinians see thousands of their country men and women gunned down by
Israeli soldiers and police. They see no one held accountable. They feel
impotent in the face of this savage Israeli onslaught. They have no hope of
change since their own Palestinian Authority has no power or leverage either
with Israel or the world community. The only outlet they have is–the knife.
Like some of the attacks mentioned above, these are random, spontaneous acts
of personal rage with a political overtones. The solution is not to blame
Facebook or PA incitement as the Israeli dar-right leadership has done, but
to search for the cause in the hopelessness of their condition. A
hopelessness that derives from Israeli mass violence and rejection of a
negotiated compromise solution offering Palestinians real, full national
rights. Fix this and you end the motivation for Palestinian terror. Leave it
to fester, and you risk turning random acts of violence into a mass uprising
in which thousands more may die.
