Groundhog Day – Jihad Version

I think I’ve seen this movie before. The plot goes something like this: a man drives a car into a crowd of people, gets out of his vehicle, shouts an Arabic phrase, begins to stab bystanders, and is shot by police.

You probably know the rest of the story. Ordinary people immediately understand that it’s another jihad attack. But the police and the media are baffled. They spend hours and sometimes days looking into the possibility that it might be an act of terrorism. By the time they finally decide that it is terrorism, most people have moved on to the next news cycle.

Then there’s the question of identity. Who did it? At first the assailant is simply identified as a “man.” Then, after a suitable interval, he’s identified as a “London resident” or a “resident of Marseille,” or whatever the case may be. Next we learn that he’s an “Asian man” (if the incident occurs in England) or a “North African man” (if in France). Finally, we are told that it is a Muslim man, but by this point many have lost interest.

Next comes the matter of motive. Of course, the average citizen already knows the motive: the jihadist did it for the sake of Allah and the seventy-two virgins. But for some reason the Kabuki ritual must be played out to the end. Very often there is no end – that is, no motive is ever found. The authorities decide that the perpetrator acted irrationally. He was mentally ill or emotionally disturbed, or other kids bullied him in school.

Khalid Masood. Photo: Daily Mail.

As Governor Kasich said after a Muslim student at Ohio State University perpetrated a car and knife attack on fellow students, “we may never totally find out why this person. . . snapped.” One sometimes gets the impression that the authorities never want to know. That would explain why the motivation behind the crime is usually left hanging.

At any rate, the mystery-motive motif is a recurrent plot feature. After Khalid Masood’s car and knife rampage, which left several dead and forty wounded in London recently, a senior police official said, “We must accept that there is a possibility we will never understand why he did this.”

One thing you can be sure of in the official version: whatever the motive, it has nothing to do with Islam. The authorities are uncertain about everything else, but they are always quite certain of that. The denial comes in several variations: “this has nothing to do with Islam,” “this is a perversion of a great religion,” ”No religion condones terror,” and even, “this is a betrayal of Islam.”

Click here to read the rest of Mr. Kilpatrick’s column . . .