Lone wolf wannabe home-grown terrorists

Society has had for many generations, people in their midst who are best described as being lone wolf wannabe home-grown terrorists who on their own initiatives, commit acts of terrorism involving murder and/or damage to property. The term ‘lone wolf’ was adopted by US law enforcement agencies and by media to refer to individuals following this strategy. A lone wolf terrorist is someone who commits violent acts in support of some group, movement, or ideology, but does so alone, outside of any command structure. They, for the most part claim to be representing terrorist organizations when in fact; they are not associated directly or indirectly with any terrorist organizations. They also claim that they are committing their acts of terrorism for classes of people such as the Palestinians or recognized eco-organizations when in fact those people and organizations have not called on these terrorists to represent their interests. Many of these lone wolf terrorists are losers in the country they have been brought up in. They have matriculated from being juvenile delinquents to adult criminals and many of them have poor work records. Combined with their criminal pasts and their poor work records and being rebellious to boot, the best description that be given to them is that they are losers and they consider themselves as nobodies. And as it has turned out, they are spoiling for adventure combined with risk and most importantly, they want to make a name for themselves and go down in the history books as someone who won’t be ever forgotten.

I am cognizant of twenty-five of these lone wolf terrorists but space and time doesn’t make it possible for me to write about all of them so I will pick two from the Middle East, two from Europe and two from the United States and give you information about each of them.

MIDDLE EAST

I will choose one from Israel and one from Jordan.

Baruch Kopel Goldstein was born on December 9, 1956. He was an American-born Jewish Israeli physician and mass murderer who perpetrated the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in the city of Hebron, Israel. On February 25, 1994, that year's Purim day, Goldstein entered a room in the Cave of the Patriarchs that was serving as a mosque, wearing his army uniform with the insignia of rank, thereby creating the image of a reserve officer on active duty. He then opened fire, killing 29 worshippers and wounding more than 125. Goldstein was seized by surviving worshippers of the massacre and beaten to death.

His motive was that he was shooting Arabs because he was of the opinion that Arabs want to kill Jews. When he lived in the United States, he belonged to the Jewish Defense League a militant Jewish organization founded by his boyhood acquaintance, Rabbi Meir Kahane. In 1980, Kahane was arrested for the 62nd time since his emigration to Israel and jailed for six months following a detention order based on allegations of planning armed attacks against Palestinians in response to the killings of Jewish settlers. He was later assassinated. There is no doubt in my mind that lone wolf terrorists often believe in the teachings of certain kinds of people who hate classes of other people.

Nabil Ahmad Jaoura, a 38-year-old Jordanian of Palestinian origin, opened fire on tourists at the Roman Amphitheatre in Amman, Jordan, on September 4, 2006. One British tourist died and six others, including five tourists, were injured. Police said he was not connected with any organized group but was angered by Western and Israeli actions in the Middle East.

A Jordanian court sentenced him to death by hanging for the gun attack that killed the British tourist who was visiting Amman and injured six other people. As the sentence was read out in Jordan's state security court, Jaoura shouted in Arabic: “God is great!” and "We are the masters, not the slaves. I am a holy warrior and I thank God for this verdict.” As you can see from his statements: his actions were that of a man with an unstable mind.

EUROPE

I will choose one from Norway and one from France

Anders Behring Breivik was born on the 13th of February 1979. He is a Norwegian terrorist and he is the confessed perpetrator of the 2011 attacks in Norway. On the 22nd of July 2011, the 33-year-old Breivik bombed government buildings in Oslo, which resulted in eight deaths. He then carried out a mass shooting at a camp of the Workers' Youth League of the Labour Party on the island of Utøya where he killed 69 people, who were mostly teenagers.

He wrote a 1500-page manifesto which was published hours before he committed his terrorist acts. Its title is 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. The title is rooted in his demographic claim—that Muslims will become a majority in Europe. According to court officials, he said that he was trying to save Norway and Western Europe from cultural Marxism and a Muslim takeover.

Court-appointed psychiatrists have assessed him as being criminally insane and concluded in their assessment of him that he developed paranoid schizophrenia over a long period. Prosecutors have accepted their judgment and will, in the absence of new evidence, seek an indefinite term of psychiatric care when he is put on trial on 16th April.

Mohammed Merah was born on the 10th of October 1988 in the French city of Toulouse. He was a Muslim French citizen, born to French parents of Algerian descent.

He shot to death three off-duty French soldiers over a period of several days. The shootings took place on March 11, 15 of this year. Later he then shot to death a rabbi, his two sons and another child just outside of their school on March 19th. The lone terrorist rode up on a motor scooter and opened fire with two pistols, first shooting at a group of waiting children outside the school and then followed some of them into a courtyard as they ran for safety toward the building. He grabbed the hair of the third child, a four-year-old and shot her in her head. Six other children were injured in the shootings.

Merah claimed to be a member of al-Qaeda and said that his motives for the attacks were for the honor of Islam, to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children (by attacking the Jewish school) and to attack the French Army for its involvement in the war in Afghanistan. The Palestinian Authority has stated that he had no authority to speak on their behalf. Merah said that his only regret was not having been able to bring about more killings. He was antagonized by the French ban on face covering. Merah filmed all of the killings using a GoPro camera strapped to his body and according to the French prosecutor, he could be heard saying, “You killed my brothers, I kill you.” and “Allah Akbar.” (God is Great) during the shootings.

He had plenty of stamps in his passport, according to French intelligence officials. He traveled through at least seven Middle Eastern and central Asian countries on his way to Afghanistan in 2010. Merah's path to radicalism remains murky but appears to have been influenced by family connections. His mother is married to Sabri Essid, a member of a Toulouse network that tried to recruit fighters to join al Qaeda in Iraq. Essid was convicted in a French court in 2009 after being detained in Syria in 2006 where he was running an al Qaeda safe house.

He was sociopathic and ignorant, adopting a terrorist agenda as moral cover for his pre-existing and increasing rage, an escalating lust for violence evidenced in his lengthy rap sheet, from teenage rock thrower to assaulting elderly women with handbags. In other words, he was a garden-variety thug and not the enemy within for a country that 1 million Muslims call their home. Thousands of Muslims serve in the French military and fight under the French flag. Their boots have been on the ground in Afghanistan and their allegiance to France is a thousand times more profound than Merah’s maverick murderous alienation.

He finally came to his end after a three-day siege of his home. He was shot in his head as he tried to flee out of a window. No doubt his parents are proud of him. His brother Abdelkader certainly is. He as much as said so publicly. The brother has been arrested and subsequently charged with terrorist activity for his alleged role in supporting his brother.

UNITED STATES

I will choose two from the U.S.

Timothy James McVeigh was born on April 23, 1968. He was a United States Army veteran and security guard who detonated a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. The attack killed 168 people and injured over 800 people and was the deadliest act of terrorism within the United States prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. McVeigh, a militia movement sympathizer, sought revenge against the federal government for its handling of the Waco Siege, which had ended in the deaths of 76 people exactly two years prior to the bombing, as well as for the Ruby Ridge incident in 1992. McVeigh hoped to inspire a revolt against what he considered to be a tyrannical federal government. He was convicted of 11 federal offenses and sentenced to death. His execution took place on June 11, 2001 at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.

McVeigh claimed to have been a target of bullying at school and that he took refuge in a fantasy world where he imagined retaliating against those bullies. At the end of his life he would state his belief that the United States government is the ultimate bully.

McVeigh aspired to join the United States Army Special Forces (SF). After returning from the Gulf War, he entered the selection program to become an SF soldier, but he quit the army after his psychological profile categorized him as very unsuitable for SF. After he left the army, he grew angry and frustrated at his difficulties in finding a girlfriend and took up obsessive gambling. The destruction of the Waco compound enraged McVeigh and convinced him that it was time to take action. The government's use of CS gas on women and children angered McVeigh. For this reason, he decided to take revenge on the U.S. government. In April 1993, McVeigh headed for a farm where co-conspirator Terry Nichols lived. In between watching coverage of the Waco siege on TV, Nichols and his brother began teaching McVeigh how to make explosives out of readily available materials; specifically, they combined household chemicals in plastic jugs. The rest is history. Nichols was sentenced to natural life in prison.

Eric Robert Rudolph was born on September 19, 1966. He is also known as the Olympic Park Bomber. He is a far-right terrorist responsible for a series of bombings across the southern United States between 1996 and 1998, which killed two people and injured at least 150 others in the name of an anti-abortion and anti-gay agenda. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers him a terrorist. Rudolph is most well known as the perpetrator of Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta which occurred on July 27, 1996, during the 1996 Summer Olympics. The blast killed spectator Alice Hawthorne and wounded 111 others. Rudolph pleaded guilty to numerous federal and state homicide charges and accepted four consecutive life sentences in exchange for avoiding a trial and a potential death sentence.

FINAL COMMENT

As I see it, these lone wolf wannabe home grown terrorists are also guilty of treason if they were citizens of the countries they wanted to commit their crimes of terrorism in. The penalty for treason is death. I think these terrorists should have been executed, just as I suggested in my speech before a United Nations crime conference held in Milan in 1985. It appears that only Jordan passed such a sentence. In any case, if they were not executed, they should have been imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives.