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Kari

From today's NY Times

WASHINGTON — In December 2014, a middle-aged man driving a car in Dijon, France, mowed down more than a dozen pedestrians within 30 minutes, occasionally shouting Islamic slogans from his window.

The chief prosecutor in Dijon described the attacks, which left 13 injured but no one dead, as the work of a mentally unbalanced man whose motivations were vague and “hardly coherent.”

A year and a half later, after Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel slaughtered dozens of people when he drove a 19-ton refrigerated truck through a Bastille Day celebration on Thursday in Nice, France, the authorities did not hesitate to call it an act of Islamic terrorism. The attacker had a record of petty crime but no obvious ties to a terrorist group, yet the French prime minister swiftly said Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel was “a terrorist probably linked to radical Islam one way or another.”

The age of the Islamic State, in which the tools of terrorism appear increasingly crude and haphazard, has led to a reimagining of the common notion of who is and who is not a terrorist.

Instances of wanton violence by deranged attackers — whether in Nice or in Orlando, Fla. — are swiftly judged to be the work of terrorists. These judgments occur even when there is little immediate evidence that the attackers had direct ties to terrorist groups and when they do not fit a classic definition of terrorists as those who use violence to advance a political agenda.

“A lot of this stuff is at the fringes of what we would historically think of as terrorism,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism and a professor at Dartmouth College. But, he said, “the Islamic State and jihadism has become a kind of refuge for some unstable people who are at the end of their rope and decide they can redeem their screwed-up lives” by dying in the name of a cause.

Mr. Benjamin said this also led the news media and government officials to treat violence like the Nice attack differently from other mass attacks, like shootings at schools and churches that have been carried out by non-Muslims.

“If there is a mass killing and there is a Muslim involved, all of a sudden it is by definition terrorism,” he said.

The spectrum of terrorism is widening and now includes attacks loosely inspired by the Islamic State, those carried out by its affiliate groups and attacks directed by the group’s leadership. All have drawn public condemnation and concern, but the plots organized and executed by the Islamic State usually prompt greater concern from the authorities.

On Saturday, a bulletin on the Islamic State’s Amaq News Agency channel described Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel as a “soldier of the Islamic State” who answered a call to attack nations involved in the military campaign against the group. But the bulletin gave no specifics about the extent of the attacker’s ties to the terrorist network.

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The full article is here - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07...y-deranged.html?_r=0

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KariSenior Member

Was the Nice Attacker Really a Jihadist?

From Time Magazine online

Those who knew the attacker said he had a history of violence and ignored basic Muslim rules

Two days after the devastating attack in Nice, which killed 84 people and injured hundreds, a muddied picture has emerged of the man who mounted the assault — with still no firm idea yet of whether he was a terrorist at all.

On Saturday, Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Bastille Day attack, trumpeting the truck driver Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel as an ISIS “soldier” who barreled his heavy-duty vehicle through a crowd packing the seafront Promenade des Anglais during the traditional fireworks display on Thursday night. ISIS claimed in a tweet he had struck in retaliation for air war against the extremist group in Syria and Iraq, in which France is heavily involved.

But Bouhlel’s acquaintances reject that version, and describe the man they knew as troubled and violent, with no attachment at all to his Islamic faith.

In interviews on Friday and Saturday, old neighbors and longtime acquaintances of Bouhlel — who was killed by police on Thursday night — paint a picture of a volatile loose cannon with a history of violence, who ignored basic Muslim rules and never attended a mosque.

“He was not a Muslim,” said Walid Hamou, who also said he was a close friend of Bouhlel’s wife since her childhood, and had seen a lot of Bouhlel since his marriage a decade ago. “He drank, he ate pork, he danced, he dated lots of women,” Hamou said, sitting in the stairwell of his apartment building in the northern part of Nice on Saturday morning. “He didn’t do Ramadan. He did not pray.”

Hamou also said domestic abuse was a regular feature in Bouhlel’s household — something he believes helps to prove the driver’s lack of religious faith. “He hit his children. He hit his wife,” he said. Bouhlel, a Tunisian immigrant to France, married his French-born wife in Nice, but was in the process of divorcing her when he mounted his murderous assault on Bastille Day.

A similar picture emerged in interviews with TIME on Friday, from neighbors of Bouhlel’s in-laws in a public-housing complex in northern Nice. “He drank, and he smoked on Ramadan,” said one neighbor, who did not want to be named. By contrast, he described Bouhlel’s in-laws as “very good,” sober and personable, he said, with a thumbs-up sign.

Bouhlel’s father Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel told the French news agency Agence France-Presse on Friday that between 2002 and 2004, his son had suffered a nervous breakdown, in which “he became angry, he shouted, he broke everything he found in front of him.” He said the two fell out of touch after Bouhlel moved to France in 2005.

The question of whether Bouhlel was a violent troublemaker or an Islamic jihadist is key to French officials. Investigators are trying to determine what motivated Bouhlel, how he carried out the attack, and how police and intelligence services missed the planning for it. It is the third mass-casualty attack in 18 months in France, after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015 and the Paris attacks last November, which prompted President François Hollande to impose a state of emergency. While the two Paris attacks were clearly linked to terrorist groups, until the ISIS claim on Twitter on Saturday, there was nothing tying Bouhlel to any broader network or beliefs.

the article continues here - http://time.com/4409306/france...xid=newsletter-brief

7/18/1612:35 PM