October 27, 2002

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

As I wrote in this space last week, "I bet my assistant a hundred bucks that the sniper would turn out to be a Middle Eastern terrorist." I had a similar bet with my wife. I've no desire to profit from the murder of innocents, so I'll be donating my winnings to a worthy cause, like the Pentagon R&D budget. But so far my assistant's taking it better than my spouse. "Technically, our bet was that he'd be an Islamic terrorist," she said. "He's Islamic, and he's terrorizing people. That's good enough for me." My wife, on the other hand, insists it doesn't count unless he's got an official membership card in al-Qaida.

That's not the way these fellows work, which, to give them the barest fig leaf of an excuse, may be why all those legions of TV experts clung to the approved "angry white male loner" cliches right up to the moment of arrest. But there's a difference between a reluctance to leap to conclusions and a bizarre determination to leap away from the facts. There's been something very weird about the networks' insistence on busing in armies of "psychological profilers" whose areas of alleged expertise might as well have been on Planet Zongo for all they had to do with what was going on in Maryland and Virginia. Regardless of whodunit, it was very obvious what he'd dun: The killer didn't kill blondes, he didn't kill fetching young men he picked up in bars, he didn't kill lonely spinsters from the personal ads. He killed Americans--male and female, young and old, black and white.

Now whose profile does that fit?

But the penny drops exceedingly slow. It turned out police were looking for a Muslim convert. A Muslim convert who last year had discarded the name "Williams" and adopted a new identity as "Muhammad." A Muslim convert called Muhammad who in the wake of Sept. 11 had expressed anti-American sentiments. Could even the most expert psychological profiler make sense of such confusing, contradictory clues? Apparently not. Even though the crime and the accused are a pretty good match, the network criminologists profess themselves perplexed by the apparent lack of motive, as if we'll shortly discover that Mr. Muhammad had been denied a promotion at Home Depot or he'd been abused as a child.

Radical Islamism is a highly decentralized operation. There's a fair degree of organized cooperation: for example, National Review's Michael Ledeen reports that the Indonesian group that killed hundreds in Bali used bombs delivered by Hezbollah operatives, who'd been trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. But there's also a lot of rinky-dink freelance terrorism by people who hold no rank or serial number--fellows like the Egyptian immigrant who chose to celebrate the Fourth of July by going to LAX and opening fire. After four months of insisting they've no idea why a radical Muslim male would observe America's national holiday by going Jew-killing, the FBI has cautiously decided to characterize the incident as "possible terrorism."/b

When two Muslim males embark on a clinical, unprovoked campaign of infidel-killing, "possible terrorism" also seems a reasonable conclusion. It doesn't matter whether they were acting on orders or simply improvising. The al-Qaida honchos in the Middle East are happy with either. If anything, the freelance approach suits them better: you don't need complicated and traceable communications and wire transfers; the punks on the ground will act independently just to impress you.

In a way, we're in that opening scene of "Godzilla" where the baffled authorities are trying to figure out where the mysterious crater came from: It's only when the camera pulls back and you see the aerial wide shot that you realize they're standing in the little toe of the world's biggest footprint. This monster has a lot of toes: the big ones blew up the World Trade Center and Indian trains and the Bali nightclubs; the medium ones took the Moscow theater audience hostage en masse and bombed the French oil tanker in Yemen; and then come all the little ones--Jose Padilla, the shoebomber Richard Reid, the LAX shooter.

Not all Muslims are snipers, hostage-takers, nightclub bombers, suicide bombers, shoe bombers and folks who like their Fourth of July to go with more of a bang than you get from firecrackers. But a huge percentage of snipers, nightclub bombers, etc., turn out to be Muslim--and, if they're all acting independently, that's even more worrying. I made that bet with my poor underpaid assistant because, as a sophisticated intelligent woman, she thought I was too hung up on 9/11: "Oh, come on," she scoffed. "The Muslims can't be behind everything. When something sounds too good to be true, that's because it is." But when, late on Wednesday, Chief Moose announced he was looking for a guy called Muhammad, how many of us honestly went, "Muhammad? There's a surprise!" Apart from all the TV psychologists, that is.

Speaking as an "angry white male" myself, I almost wish the sniper had turned out to be the stereotypical "troubled loner" with NRA stickers and a lousy sex life. But even Timothy McVeigh, Bill Clinton's poster boy for home-grown right-wing gun nuts, was pretty atypical: It was the Gulf War that transformed him; he'd seen what he called "Iraqi suffering" and concluded the country for which he soldiered was a global bully. Far from the archetypal white supremacist, McVeigh seems to have been the biggest Arabist in the American militia movement. And, with each passing month, the vague blurry links between Oklahoma City and the Iraqis swim into sharper focus.

This week, following the Bali bombing, Indonesia's two largest Muslim organizations urged their government to crack down hard on Islamic extremists and issued a condemnation of terrorism far stronger than anything the slippery-tongued Council on American-Islamic Relations and Co. managed here after Sept. 11. Traditionally, South Asian Muslims have been perhaps the most moderate in the world, and they have no difficulty reconciling their faith and their national allegiance. Loyal law-abiding western Muslims would benefit from a similar forthrightness by their own lobby groups. But it's far harder to say what North American, Australian and European Muslim leaders really feel about Sept. 11, Bali, LAX and the shoe bomber.

As for "the snipers," regardless of the chain of command, their apparently motiveless murder spree is fully consistent with Islamist goals. As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, put it: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." Or as James bin Carville might say: It's the jihad, stupid.

-- Anonymous, October 27, 2002