Lone Wolf Terrorism (7 page)

Breivik wrote that the attacks, which were several years in the making, were aimed at drawing global attention to his manifesto. He certainly accomplished that, for soon after the attacks, the manifesto, titled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” was studied, assessed, and debated by scholars, journalists, policymakers, pundits, and many others throughout the world. It led to accusations that Breivik had been influenced by some of the anti-Islamic blogs and other Internet materials that were prevalent in the United States and Europe. In his manifesto, Breivik quoted Robert Spencer numerous times. Spencer runs a “jihad watch” website. Breivik also cited other Western writers who argued that Muslim immigration posed a threat to Western culture.
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Furthermore, Breivik included, without citing them, several passages from the manifesto of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Breivik substituted the words “multiculturalists” or “cultural Marxists” for Kaczynski's diatribe against “leftists” and others.
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In addition to igniting a debate over the effects that anti-Islamic writings on the Internet may have had on Breivik, there was also criticism lodged against some right-wing politicians in Europe who had advocated anti-Islamic and anti-immigration policies in inflammatory speeches.
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One view held that “a trend toward xenophobia and nationalism in the region had fostered the attacks in Norway.”
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The right-wing, antigovernment nature of Breivik's attacks drew comparisons to Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. In both cases, the prevailing terrorism threat before the attacks was seen as emanating from Islamic extremists and not
from right-wing, homegrown terrorists. A Norwegian Police Security Service report released in early 2011 stated that “the far-right and far-left extremist communities will not represent a serious threat to Norwegian society.”
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That it wasn't a far-right or far-left “community” that wreaked havoc on Norway, but rather an individual extremist, illustrates the dangers of lone wolf terrorism. Although Breivik tried to portray himself as being part of a larger movement, warning that there were other cells planning future attacks throughout Europe, authorities were not able to uncover any evidence to support those claims.

A panel of five judges at Oslo's district court declared Breivik sane and therefore legally responsible for the murder of seventy-seven people in August 2012.
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The verdict most likely pleased Breivik “who had hoped to avoid what he called the humilaiton of being dismissed as a madman.”
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He was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison, the maximum term allowed under Norwegian law. He will probably, however, spend the rest of his life in prison, since the sentence could be extended, potentially indefinitely, if he is still considered dangerous to society.
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Anders Breivik is clearly an angry young man who, according to his manifesto, began thinking as early as 2002 about taking action to defend the “free indigenous peoples of Europe.”
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As one observer noted: “For at least nine years he carried anger towards the changes occurring in Norwegian society. He did not accept the multicultural country that was emerging. It threatened his identity and he felt alienated from it.”
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Rather than channel that anger and alienation into nonviolent actions, Breivik chose to lash back in one of the worst lone wolf attacks in history. Nobody saw it coming, which is what many lone wolf terrorists count on.

RELIGIOUS LONE WOLVES: NIDAL MALIK HASAN AND JAMES
VON
BRUNN

Anger and alienation can also be found among some of the religious lone wolves. Two cases illustrate the lengths to which an individual
will go when he or she is convinced that the policies and actions of governments and societies are contrary to his or her religious beliefs. In both cases, the lone wolf intended to kill as many people as possible in a mass shooting. That one of the cases involved an Islamic extremist while the other involved a white supremacist illustrates the diversity that is to be found in the belief systems of religious lone wolf terrorists.

Nidal Malik Hasan

The threat of religious extremist violence has been at the forefront since the 9/11 attacks. While the concern has primarily been with al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups, religious lone wolf terrorists have also made their presence known. There was enough concern about potential religious lone wolf attacks in the aftermath of the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued threat advisories to law-enforcement agencies throughout the United States to be on the alert for retaliatory lone wolf attacks.
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There was good reason for that concern. Less than two years earlier (as noted in
chapter 1
), a US Army major, who was partly influenced via the Internet by an Islamic extremist cleric living overseas, opened fire at Fort Hood in Texas, killing thirteen people and injuring thirty-two others in the worst terrorist attack ever to take place at a US domestic military installation. The case of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is revealing for how life experiences, technology, and government policies can converge to create a religious lone wolf terrorist.

Early in the afternoon on November 5, 2009, Hasan entered the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, where soldiers obtain medical checkups before being deployed or after returning from overseas. After shouting “God is great” in Arabic, Hasan began shooting at random before he was wounded by return fire and taken into custody. Hasan did not expect to survive the attack, as he had given away all of his possessions to a neighbor before he embarked
upon his mission. Hasan, who was scheduled to be court-martialed in 2012, faced the death penalty if convicted.

Hasan's path to becoming a terrorist was an unusual one. The son of Palestinian immigrants from a small town near Jerusalem, Hasan was born and grew up in Virginia. His parents became American citizens and ran businesses in Virginia, including restaurants and a store. Hasan was patriotic and joined the army after graduating college. His parents objected, but he told them, “I was born and raised here. I'm going to do my duty to the country.”
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In that sense, he didn't fit the profile of some of the Islamic extremists in Britain and other European countries, who were the children of immigrants but found discrimination and unhappy lives as they grew up in their parents' new country. For Hasan, the discrimination would come later, after 9/11, when he claimed that he faced hostility within the military because he was a Muslim.
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While in the army, Hasan attended medical school at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. Upon graduation in 2003, he did his internship and residency in psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. Hasan raised eyebrows at Walter Reed when, instead of delivering a presentation on a medical topic as part of the final requirement of his residency, he spoke on the topic, “The Koranic World View as It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.” Among his comments were: “It's getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.”
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He continued making controversial statements after he arrived at Fort Hood, where he told his supervisor that, as an infidel, she would be “ripped to shreds” and “burn in hell.”
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Both at Fort Hood and at Walter Reed, Hasan treated soldiers who were returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological problems. Hasan was reportedly anxious himself about possibly being deployed to a war zone. He expressed his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to colleagues and others and made no secret of his
support for Islamic extremists. A US Senate investigation report on the Fort Hood shooting stated the following:

Evidence of Hasan's radicalization to violent Islamist extremism was on full display to his superiors and colleagues during his military medical training. An instructor and a colleague each referred to Hasan as a “ticking time bomb.” Not only was no action taken to discipline or discharge him, but also his Officer Evaluation Reports sanitized his obsession with violent Islamist extremism into praiseworthy research on counterterrorism.
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Hasan's journey toward radicalization was aided by numerous e-mails he exchanged with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American-born Islamic cleric who was living in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was a leading figure of a Yemen-based branch of al Qaeda (al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) and had been linked to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who attempted to blow up a plane over Detroit, Michigan, in December 2009. He had also been connected to Faisal Shahzad, who attempted to set off a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010. (Al-Awlaki was killed in a US drone attack in Yemen in 2011). In one of the e-mails Hasan exchanged with al-Awlaki, Hasan asked al-Awlaki when jihad is appropriate and whether it is permissible if there are innocents killed in a suicide attack. Al-Awlaki had also been Hasan's spiritual leader at a mosque in the United States before al-Awlaki fled to Yemen. After the Fort Hood massacre, al-Awlaki stated that he may have influenced Hasan's radicalization and praised Hasan, referring to him as a “hero” who “did the right thing” in killing the soldiers.
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While some lone wolves cannot be stopped before they act because they fly under the radar and their intentions are not known to others, this was clearly not the case with Hasan. There were enough prior indications that he was committed to Islamic extremist ideology. As the US Senate investigation report noted, one of the lessons of the Fort Hood shootings was the need for the military “to identify radicalization [among soldiers] to violent Islamist extremism and to distinguish this ideology from the peaceful practice of Islam.”
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James von Brunn

Another religious lone wolf for whom there were plenty of signs of potential violent behavior was James von Brunn. He holds the dubious record for being one of the oldest terrorists in history. At the age of eighty-eight, he walked into the lobby of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, on June 10, 2009, with a rifle by his side, intending to kill as many people as possible. However, after fatally shooting the security guard who opened the door for him, Von Brunn was wounded in return fire from other guards. Von Brunn had planned to die in his assault, having finalized his funeral plans and put his finances in order for relatives. He survived, though, and was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of first-degree murder, committing a hate crime, and gun violations. Before he could stand trial, however, he died in January 2010 at a hospital near the federal prison in North Carolina where he was being held.
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Von Brunn can be considered a religious lone wolf because his terrorism was directed at a target associated with the Jewish religion and he had long espoused neo-Nazi and white-supremacist views. He symbolized the ideology of the Christian Identity movement, which is “a racist and anti-Semitic religious sect whose adherents believe that white people of European descent are the descendants of the ‘Lost Tribes' of ancient Israel…. Despite its small size, Christian Identity influences virtually all white supremacist and extreme anti-government movements.”
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Von Brunn self-published a book titled
Kill the Best Gentiles!
Its main thesis is that Jews are on a mission of “destruction of all Gentile nations through miscegenation and wars.” He viewed his book as “the racialist guide for the preservation and nature of the white gene pool.”
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Two themes that Von Brunn continually discussed in his book, as well as in other essays and writings posted on his website, were that Jewish bankers controlled the Federal Reserve Board and that the Holocaust never occurred.
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In addition to his terrorist attack on the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Von Brunn also attacked the
Federal Reserve Board headquarters years earlier in Washington, DC. In December 1981, Von Brunn walked into the building with a bag slung over his shoulders, telling the security guards he was a photographer who wanted to take pictures of the boardroom. When he was told to wait, he ran up the stairs to where the board was meeting. He was captured and found to be carrying a pistol, a shotgun, a knife, and a mock bomb. He told police that he wanted to take board members hostage to garner media attention regarding the board's responsibility for high interest rates and the country's economic problems. He was convicted in 1983 and served six and a half years in prison on attempted kidnapping, second-degree burglary, assault, and weapons charges.
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Despite the fact that he had a criminal record and was posting anti-Semitic and racist writings for years on the Internet, Von Brunn was still able to double-park his car outside the Holocaust Memorial Museum on the day of the shooting and walk up undetected to the entrance while carrying a rifle. Perhaps it was because he was an aging white supremacist that the authorities did not regard him as a high risk to commit a violent act. There were plenty of signs, though, that Von Brunn would one day strike again. In 2004, he wrote to an Australian Holocaust denial website that it was “time to FLUSH all ‘Holocaust' Memorials.”
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He also foreshadowed his attack on the museum in e-mails he sent to John de Nugent, another white supremacist. After the shootings, de Nugent stated that, in the weeks before the attack, Von Brunn “had been sending a lot of e-mails with violent content.”
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According to de Nugent, Von Brunn was depressed over having his monthly Social Security check cut in half and blamed it on somebody in the federal government reading his website and punishing him for his views.
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