Said the Danish sociologist Aydin Soei,
quoted in the NYT, about Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, who, the authorities say, was the gunman who shot up that Copenhagen café and synagogue.
Though perhaps not part of an established jihadist network, the young man was clearly not alone in his anger. On Monday, about a dozen young men, their faces covered by scarves, visited the spot where Mr. Hussein died and, declaring themselves his brothers, shouted “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” as they removed flowers laid in memorial, a ritual they said was contrary to Islamic teaching.
In place of the flowers, they left a printed leaflet on the ground that fulminated against what they described as Denmark’s double standards, noting that Mr. Hussein’s body had been left in a pool of blood when the body of the Jewish security guard killed at the synagogue had been quickly covered. This, the leaflet said, exposed promises of equality as a fraud and showed that “religion and background make a difference.”
Soei studied Hussein's gang — called "Brothas" — and produced a book titled "Angry Young Men." (Was the book a source for the leaflet's rhetoric about the false promises of equality?) Soei
knew Hussein:
"He was one of the [gang] members who seemed to be the most interested and engaged... He was willing to enter into a dialogue about questions of the gang and their behavior. He wasn’t unintelligent. When he wanted to, he could do a good job in school. But he had an enormous temper he couldn’t control."...
Until his incarceration [for stabbing someone], religion for Mr. Hussein and fellow gang members was not so much a faith, Mr. Soei said, but “part of their identity, part of their narrative of: ‘We are outsiders because of who we are and how we look,’ but they were not praying all the time.”
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54 comments:
We can conclude that this was just a troubled young man.
Headline: Anger of Suspect in Danish Killings Is Seen as Only Loosely Tied to Islam"
“I’m just as shocked as the rest of the world,” his distraught father, a Palestinian from Jordan, told the newspaper Jyllands Posten on Monday...'
Local gang members, he added, “don’t care about religion. They just want to make money and chill out.”
So young men without direction can turn violent and self-destructive. Gee, I never thought that was possible. How could a teen turn violent?
Never happened before.
Very interesting.
I have to say I am having trouble getting past the stabbing someone multiple times on a train and out of prison after just a few months.
The Danish newspaper Berlingske reported Monday that, while in prison, Mr. Hussein spoke openly about his wish to travel to Syria to fight with the Islamic State.
an ISIL recruit without bus fare, but capable enough to obtain what was described as a 'submachine gun' in a land where:
Hunters may also use semi-autos rifles, but their magazines must be restricted to two shot capacity, and permanently attached to the weapon if they are to be used for hunting in Denmark. There is no restriction as to capacity for weapons used for hunting abroad, but it can be difficult to obtain permits for these (even though there is no legal reason for the police to refuse to grant a permit).
Headline: Anger of Suspect in Danish Killings Is Seen as Only Loosely Tied to Islam"
And yet in these cases when that anger boils over into violence, Islam seems to invariably inform their selection of targets.
Now I'm curious who this joker earlier stabbed and why?
Gun free zone.
they described as Denmark’s double standards, noting that Mr. Hussein’s body had been left in a pool of blood when the body of the Jewish security guard killed at the synagogue had been quickly covered.
Maybe Booth and Oswald should have had State funerals too.
Feeling angry?
Depressed?
Oppressed!
Shoot a Jew.
We won't hold it against you.
To ask the obvious, if his target was Danish society, why did he choose to fire at a symposium featuring a cartoonist who had drawn Muhammad and a bar mitzvah? The New York Times never disappoints.
Blogger Gusty Winds said...
they described as Denmark’s double standards, noting that Mr. Hussein’s body had been left in a pool of blood when the body of the Jewish security guard killed at the synagogue had been quickly covered.
One of these things is not like the other.
"Crime rates by country of origin: Denmark"
"Huge differences between countries."
they described as Denmark’s double standards, noting that Mr. Hussein’s body had been left in a pool of blood when the body of the Jewish security guard killed at the synagogue had been quickly covered.
perhaps the Temple parishioners requested the body of one of their members (the Jewish security guy) be covered, since his family was there, but nobody asked about the pile of Islamic dog $hit cooling in the street.
"Hussein"? Would that be the one in the White House?
And he randomly stumbled across a synagogue in a large Nordic city. What are the chances of that?
More randomsemitism, looks like to me.
...but Christians disrupted bar mitzvahs during the Crusades.
So he gets thrown out of his gang for being a nutcase and then winds up in prison for a very serious assault, and then finds himself a new "gang" in the form of ISIL.
This is hardly reassuring, nor does it support the article's title. An ideology that provides an emotional and intellectual "home" for such a person will appeal to many and will spark incidents such as this.
Another troubling thing about this is that despite the social theories involving our own class of disengaged angry youths, this young man was already getting everything involved in our recommended fix. He had free extended education at which he was equipped to succeed.
This guy didn't want to be an average citizen with an average, secure life (Danish social benefits are very strong). He wanted to be a winner, a top dog, a hero. He found the ideology that supported that desire.
This wasn’t an intellectual Islamist with a long beard... This was a loser man from the ghetto who is very, very angry at Danish society."
Is there a difference between the two?
Islam is the Religion of the Eternally Offended. As Muslims they feel a mandatory offense at Jews, Christians, women, freedom, love, mercy and free men.
Denmark, Belgium and France just offend them.
Aydin Soei, ah, a sociologist. I wouldn't take his analysis seriously. Sure, he sees the surface facts, but he would be an unusual scholar if his understanding of people and history ran deeper. And lefties are never unusual, their mechanical view of human beings hampers their analysis. It is like doing astrophysics with crystal spheres.
Well, if he wasn't an intellectual Islamist...not even a beard, you say?
Many Muslims are deeply hurt by the fact that they are not first class citizens in the West, when their religion Islam is supposed to be the final revelation from God and be the superior of the Abrahamic faiths.
There is a deep resentment at the West's intellectual and economic superiority. Such young men have classic cases of an inferiority complex.
Not all young Muslim men living in the West respond this way. There are plenty of them who are more accept reality and their places in the world.
Marx and Engels never shot anyone either. But their followers shot plenty.
Rob said...
To ask the obvious, if his target was Danish society, why did he choose to fire at a symposium featuring a cartoonist who had drawn Muhammad and a bar mitzvah? The New York Times never disappoints.
Little known fact.
Denmark has the highest per capita population of cartoonists in the world. Cartooning is a national pastime, Even Jews engage in it!
So he odds of hitting a cartoonist in your youthful rage rampage are pretty high.
Religion of peace.
Stalin wasn't an intellectual.
He was a thug, bank robber and murderer.
By joining the communist revolution, the one being run by Lenin and Trotsky who were inspired by Marx and Ingles, did Stalin taint the movement?
And if he did, how could someone not in step with everyone else's "good intentions", rise to the top of that movement and become it's supreme leader?
What happen to the communist intellectuals?
Why couldn't they maintain the "purity" of their lofty ideals?
Why couldn't the "good intentioned communist intellectuals" get rid of, or, control Stalin?
I'll admit to practicing sociology without a license here:
Islam - either the real version or some bastardized version - is clearly offering something to these young men that they like and that fills an emptiness in their souls. After all, hundreds of billions of human beings have found something in it worthy of worship for more than a thousand years.
From Dostoevsky (the BK):
"[Alyosha's] mind, too, was splintered and scattered, as it were, while he himself felt at the same time that he was afraid to bring the scattered together and draw a general idea from all the tormenting contradictions he had lived through that day."
The religious skeptic, despite his rejection of Christianity or in this case Islam, still needs an idea, something to live for. This hunger for an idea is inescapably human according to Dostoevsky; you can't argue it away. But without the divine imprint, any idea that the skeptic comes up with necessarily falls short in a grotesque way.
So, many of these young men turn to drugs and sex and gangs but find it too grotesque. Islam offers that divine source.
Something like that is happening.
Of course NYT et al. mean to excuse Islam as usual, but their description also cuts the other way: even a loose tie to Islam is apparently enough to inspire terrorist violence against cartoonists and Jews.
Just folks shooting other folks as Obama would say. It only has to do with the religion of the victim when the victim is Muslim.
And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that the Vikings committed terrible deeds in the name of Odin.
But without the divine imprint, any idea that the skeptic comes up with necessarily falls short in a grotesque way.
I not so concerned with the young men like Hussein in Denmark -- they will always be grotesque. I'm more concerned with the growing acquiescence to them in places like Denmark and to some extent here.
If the tipping point has been reached there, let's at acknowledge it for them. That will make the future less uncertain.
As a hypothetical:
imagine a man who shot an abortion-doctor, and claimed to be doing God's work. (Or Allah's work, if you feel inclined to make the hypothetical look like that.)
Then a sociologist starts saying things like "this man was not a regular communicant at any religious center, didn't pray regularly. He definitely wasn't a cleric, and didn't study his Holy Book very often."
Would that mean that he didn't really do it because of his religious belief?
Or that his deeds weren't representative of the True Belief?
If so, why?
If not, why not?
Nota Bene:My main question is not whether such a man is a True Believer. My question is (a) whether he thinks he's a True Believer, and (b) whether most other believers would celebrate his deeds or condemn his deeds.
Also (c) why are attempts to distinguish between nut-cases and True Believers almost-automatic towards Islam, but not towards most varieties of Christianity?
The problem with Islam is that it totally despises Jews and Christians who in turn confidently laugh at Islam and think it as a rediculous mind enslaving cult for thugs and robbers. So they feel a god approved righteous need to exterminate us as horribly as possible us and start over.
well, if he's a loser islamist, I guess it's ok and justified...
The job of the intellectuals is to motivate "losers" like Hussein. The motivation worked. Is it really hard to see that connection?
The statistics linked by Ferdinande are compelling. The crime rate for immigrants from the Muslim countries in Denmark is between 10-20 per hundred (not thousand) for the 20-29 year old group. It's not broken down by sex, but likely the perpetrators are mostly male. This means that 20-40 per hundred young adult males are criminals. One might argue that there is no demonstrated correlation with ideology in this numbers. My answer is that such massive disregard for the laws of the host society is an ideology.
Yet they continue to allow them to come. The fools.
On Monday, about a dozen young men, their faces covered by scarves, visited the spot where Mr. Hussein died and, declaring themselves his brothers, shouted “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” as they removed flowers laid in memorial, a ritual they said was contrary to Islamic teaching.
Am I misunderstanding this sentence, or did people leave flowers in a memorial FOR the killer?
I'm of the opinion that as soon as you put on a mask/hide your face you should be automatically assumed to be an enemy (applies also to riot & patrol cops with unnecessary balaclavas).
Anyone else remember when Excitable Andy Sullivan assured us that the real danger in the world is from Christianists? Good times, good times.
“This wasn’t an intellectual Islamist with a long beard,” Mr. Soei said. “This was a loser man from the ghetto who is very, very angry at Danish society.”
Quick, name me an intellectual Islamist with a long beard who actually committed a terrorist act. Not planned, not incited, not facilitated but committed it in person.
Omar Abdel Hamid el-Hussein and his ilk are the foot soldiers of Jihad. The front-line troops; the expendable ones. And every time they kill Western intelligentsia as surprised and shocked, because the killer wasn't an Islamic scholar. But there are few scholars and lots of people in Western society who have been taught that it is corrupt. That their lot in life is the fault of Western culture. It helps if they have been to school because that's where Western culture is most denigrated. The Crusades! Slavery! Capitalism! Oppression of the masses! Come on, join in the oppressed of Madison ...
In the U.S., we know from the LaPierre Doctrine that an occasional unpleasantness is the price we pay for freedom.
There's nothing to see here. Move along.
As opposed to the Crusaders, bearded Christian theologians each and every one.
Whew! For a minute there, I thought this might have something to do with Islam.
It was the evil Danish Crusaders (aka the Normans (Vikings) who reconquered Sicily from the Muslims and were the competent part of the first and second Crusades...
It's always the Crusades, unless it's the Joowhs, or the Great Satan
Only a Lad!
It's disturbing that a dozen young men can't make a moral distinction between a dead man and his murderer. They even find his uncovered body as a cause of further grievance against society. Something extremely fucked up about those dynamics........The left is absurdly worshipful of the Scaninavian welfare states. It's hard to keep a straight face when talking about the triumphs of the Cuban revolution, but a more plausible argument can be made in favor of the Scandinavian countries. I think a skeptical observer might find much that's rotten in the state of Denmark.......Still this young man was not motivated by Denmark's high rate of taxation, nor was his zeal diminished by having stare provided health insurance. The irritant was his religion.
Bbkingfish: "...LaPierre Doctrine.."
Wayne LaPierre wrote the Second Amendment to the Constitution?
I guess when radical islamists murder Jews in foreign nations the bat signal goes out to our resident lefties to talk about something else. Preferably white western Christians.
About 70 years ago George Kennan wrote his famous "Mr. X" article on the source of Soviet conduct.
This piece, by the Atlantic's Graeme Wood, might be considered its equivalent: What ISIS Really Wants".
Key grafs:
"Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest."
And on the Western bias that fails to acknowledge the religious component: "If religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons."
The privilege given to Muslim men is a large part of its appeal to young men. The legal system is rigged so that the testimony of infidels or Muslim women against them is per se illegal.
Not covering a dead Mulim man's body while showing respect to a dead Jewish victim violates that privilege mind set. It is an OFFENSE!
"This wasn’t an intellectual Islamist with a long beard... This was a loser man from the ghetto who is very, very angry at Danish society."
When you're identifying terrorists, this seems like a distinction without a difference.
I'm still waiting to hear who provided the weapon and ammo to el-Hussein. He didn't pull them out of thin air.
William: It's disturbing that a dozen young men can't make a moral distinction between a dead man and his murderer.
They can make a moral distinction between the man who killed and the man killed all right. It's just that the distinction you notice and deem important - "murderer and murdered" - isn't the distinction they're noticing and deeming important.
Of course Hussein was a member of a jihadist group--the Islamic religion. every tenet of that death cult directs its members to kill or subjugate every non-Muslim within reach.
Of course Hussein was a member of a jihadist group--the Islamic religion. every tenet of that death cult directs its members to kill or subjugate every non-Muslim within reach.
Actually, fuckers, he WAS bearded.
The provided quote only demonstrates the words of another Muslim who obeys Mohammed's command to lie to"unbelievers" as a tactic of Jihad.
As a model for effective response, Carthage comes to mind.
There just must be a skit in here if it could be laughed at, where the end scene is some dude a la Yosemite Sam, only with scimitar, and face covered, jumping up and down shouting, "No, it was in the name of religion! See x from my sacred text on which I acted! They don't pass out membership cards, but I am wearing the colors of my gang!" Meanwhile some investigators are shrugging shoulders with their backs to him, "It is not clear what motivated this person. This is just some sort of random act against some random people." Repeat for additional chuckles. Did the Wayans already do this? I may have seen it but don't now recall where. Repeat.
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