RUTHFULLY YOURS

After the lone gunman, Mohammed Merah, was shot and killed by a French sharpshooter, the details of who and what he was have started to come out, and the commentaries to pour forth to explain why he did what he did. One word stands out that makes me stop to think: rampage.

A rampage is an uncontrollable act, a rage of fury starting out almost from nowhere and concluding in an explosion of violence. But everything I have seen and heard about more than three weeks of murders—first a single soldier, then a group of paratroopers, and then the killing of three children and a rabbi at a Jewish high school—indicates something quite other than an outburst of murderous rage. In each case, the young Frenchman of Algerian background rode his stolen motor scooter to the target area, dismounted, walked up to his victims, and shot them at close range, leaving burn marks on their skin. There were many days between each of these attacks. Mohammed also told police by phone as they encircled his flat in Toulouse that he had been planning at least one further shooting and he regretted not having more victims. This is not a rampage. If not, what is it?

Does it matter? No, not to the victims or their family and friends. For them, it is cold-blooded murder, another example of racist hate, and an unbearable tragedy. But it does matter to the security forces, police, and commentators who try to prevent similar events and to protect themselves when they hunt down and try to capture the perpetrators. If these killings were the result of a murderous rage, then it would be hard to predict who among the thousands, if not millions, of disaffected, angry young men, members of minority groups disadvantaged by this society or that, will finally have had enough and race out in a fury to maim or kill individuals designated by hate speech and cultural norms as worthy of being so attacked.

There is no way to reason with a person on a rampage. The French security chiefs knew that though they negotiated with Merah for more than thirty-two hours to try to capture him alive. However, they were not dealing with someone in a blind panic. The young man threw out a revolver and asked for a few hours respite; the time was given, and then he asked for more, and then again. A murderer in a mad fury does not toy with his pursuers. Merah announced he wanted to die gun in hand, to go down fighting as a martyr. He was playing a grotesque game, posturing, acting in a theatre of blood and false justice. Phyllis Chesler correctly says he was a political actor. He was… but not in a theatre of ideas.

We have been shown videos of an adolescent Merah driving a car wildly around a rubbish-strewn lot. He grins. It is great fun. The images are only a few years old but they show us a youth, often in trouble with the law on minor matters, enjoying the thrill of speed and screeching noise. Though someone, perhaps his older brother, took the pictures while he was playing, otherwise the boy is alone: there are no friends cheering him on and applauding him when he steps out of the car. Essentially he was a loner. The lone wolf, as one newspaper headline put it. Yet we also know that on the day when the police finally decided Mohammed was the killer they were after, they first arrested his brother Abdelkader and found his car loaded with weapons and explosives. It was also probably Abdelkader who went to the scooter shop to ask about removing the GPS system. One or both of them painted the vehicle white because the newspapers were identifying it as a black scooter used in the first two incidents. Mohammed didn’t want to be caught. At least not yet. Again these calculating moves are not the marks of someone on a rampage. He is someone playing a game.

He was playing a part, a role in some dramatic performance. He carried a camera to preserve the images of his crimes, but not pictures of himself, the star in this play. The video would be of his victims, their shock, horror, pain and death. This is part of a primitive festival of blood and the delusion of justice. History and geography collapse into one another: past and present are confused into theatrical time and play space, a world of dream and fantasy.

The drama concludes with the star player—not the author or perhaps even the director—being surrounded by massive numbers of police and their vehicles, the streets closed off, the building in which he lives and surrounding homes emptied, with electricity and gas being turned off, that is, the focus of the neighborhood, the city, the nation and the world on this one man, Mohammed Murah. The President of the French Republic Nicolas Sarkozy flies south to Toulouse, the presidential election is suspended for several days, the television networks devote an enormous proportion of their time showing the scene and discussing the efforts to talk him into custody. He is the centre of the world’s attention.

There is a military ceremony in Montauban for the Muslim soldiers he shot. There is a huge crowd at the funeral in Jerusalem for the rabbi and three children killed. Mohammed makes phone calls to the news media to explain his actions and give purported reasons. He negotiates with the hundreds of armed men in black balaclavas come to arrest him and he shouts out his demands. Then he emerges from the bathroom where he was hiding, guns blazing, leaps from the window, is shot in the head and falls dead, a martyr, enjoys a glorious heroic martyrdom. The curtain falls, and the play is over for this season. Now everyone can talk about him and his cause for many weeks to come, at least until the next terrorist incident and murder of innocent people.

What is a festival of blood and justice? The defining characteristics of such an event are the gathering of large groups of people at a particular time and place, the separation out of certain acts as symbolic and sacred, the eating of special foods, the wearing of traditional garments, the use of certain words and songs. Blood is the necessary medium of the ritual, the violent act. By justice is meant something quite other than the legal judicial proceedings we recognize in the Judeo-Christian West: it is a sense of retribution that eases inner pains and humiliations, that restores momentary equilibrium to the participants in the ritual. These are not the ideological causes of terrible political events or psychological stresses but they are often the triggers for outbursts of passion and rage. Ideological reasons are insufficient to explain outbursts of ritual murder. Individual psychosis is only part of the story.

These sensational events do not come from nowhere in the psyche of the killer—who is already a ghost, a zombie walking through the ritualized game of martyrdom; nor are they merely mechanical moves, as in video games and popular violent movies. The rules of the game are more ancient, as anti-Semitism is an archaic festival of hatred, he was role-playing, to be sure, but not in a sleepwalking trance: he had been well-schooled by Islamicist teachers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he had been consulting with and learning from local Al-Qaida branch-committees, and his older brother was probably complicit, as well. Nancy Kobrin suggests, his disturbed maternal bonding—ironically highlighted when his mother told the police she had no control over her son—helps set up conditions for the slide into terrorism.

What makes such a young man (his lawyer told the press his client had an “angelic” face) susceptible to these radical ideas and willing to find his identity through acts of insane bravado, self-sacrifice and mass murder? To be sure, some degree of social dysfunction, but not necessarily from poverty or lack of education. Rather, alienation from a normal family life, a high incidence of psychological and/or physical abuse, and frustration in a career goal which induce suggestibility to charismatic leaders and ideologies promising celebrity and fame, as well as culturally approved release from anxiety, anger and frustration. Kobrin and Lachkar suggest a cluster of causes: an upbringing deprived of loving fathers, dependence on undependable mothers, and disaffection from the immediate environment, often found in second or third generation families from Third World countries making incomplete and painful assimilation into advanced urban and technological societies, like France.

Someone like Mohammed Merah, who seemed to his neighbors friendly and helpful youth, albeit with a tendency to larceny and displaying no particular ambitions in education or apprenticeship training, needed something to trigger his swerve from juvenile delinquency into radical Islamism and some rationale he could use to project his own inadequacies and failures on to (his Muslim “sisters” banned from wearing the burka in France, the Palestinian children who like himself he fantasizes are murdered by successful Jews and powerful Israelis).

He was “proud”, as The Jerusalem Post claims, and his brother was “proud” of his deeds: but this is no ordinary pride. It is a state of exalted excitement in a festival of blood and mayhem. It is the state of sensual self-fulfillment felt by pogromniks in nineteenth-century Russia and in Hitler’s willing executioners as Goldhagen showed. How does the grotesque and horrible game begin and who is chosen to be “it”?

There has to be a receptive personality, then a point of crystallization of inner rage into purposeful activity, and finally a readily understandable script to articulate his (or her) needs. There also has to be a huge audience willing to watch, fascinated by the spectacle, participating in the transformative phantasmagoria. None of this, of course, has to be consciously planned out, either by the leading man or those around him, whether his immediate family—those also arrested: his brother, the brother’s girl friend, his mother—or a model facilitating group whom he met, trained with, and idealized.

We do not know what acted as the immediate trigger—maybe his failure to be enrolled in the French army because of his criminal past, his arrest the week before for driving without a license which deprived him of the big grin witnessed in the video of his speed-racing alone in a field, or the stimulating rhetoric of right-wing politicians during the presidential elections—but it would have been something that touched a raw nerve and had nothing to do with intellectual politics, ideology or social practice.

Mohammed would thus be removed from ordinary life and thrust fully into a carnival of death and destruction, the show played in full view of the world’s news media and accompanied by hundreds of policemen and soldiers. Unfortunately, too many innocent people died in this performance, and Jews for too long have been the screen upon which other nations’ psychotic angst and nightmares have been played out.