Beyond Reason: Politicising Killers and Mental Instability - Thomas Mair and Omar Mateen

Jo Cox death: Thomas Mair, accused of murdering MP, gives name to court as 'death to traitors, freedom for Britain'

Orlando gunman Omar Mateen raged against 'filthy ways of the West'

When someone carries out an atrocity, why do we take their stated reasons as gospel? If someone who shoots up a gay club is solely a homophobe, or an Islamist, or if someone who shoots an MP is just a right wing xenophobe, then you are selectively choosing to politicise those actions. If those minds are as reeling as any mind who can carry out those kind of acts should be, the fact that their brain can land on a political motivation one minute means as much or as little as the unintelligible gibberish they might say a minute later. Even a lost mind can pick up the odd quote and mimic the context now and then.

These killers are not freedom fighters, they are not world changers; they are people who can’t cope, and who can brutally trample on other people through cruelty and intellectual laziness and mental infirmity.

“My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.” Thomas Mair, who shot Jo Cox. They are not even his words. It’s just something that’s bubbled up to the top in a confused, angry mind. He’s heard similar phrases bandied about generically and tried to attach a specific, personal meaning to them.

What does ‘freedom for Britain’ even mean? Freedom from other countries and cultures? Freedom from complications? From nuance, from being wrong, from learning, from other people’s opinions, from having to understand, freedom from reality (freedom from Britain).

It’s freedom to rubber stamp and act quickly, easily, selfishly and self-absorbed, and not feel guilty about it. Freedom, or a mandate, to think that you represent people’s opinions, over and above others, to a bloody conclusion.

Embed from Getty Images

Jo Cox was killed outside Birstall library as she was about to hold a constituency surgery – come one, come all, and tell me your problems, whether macro or micro. It’s as direct as our democracy gets. And here’s all that civics and philanthropy and cooperation being broken. Almost broken: beautifully, MPs still don’t think we should have knife arches and US-esque security filtering the contact time.

Shot three times and repeatedly stabbed. The hatred, the punch bag repetitive outlet of that. I don’t have the time, brain, personality or concentration to work out my problems thoughtfully, so I kick ass to pump some new chemical feelings into my experience instead.

As the law has it, it’s not about the personal for Thomas Mair. He’s being charged within the legal framework surrounding Terrorism, which the law has as its goals: “made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.” It’s where his ideas meet a wider conceptual framework, that’s what he’s up for. Not for his personal motives.

Protect me from what I want.

Mair had a haphazard interest in white supremacy. “Despite everything I still have faith that the White Race will prevail, both in Britain and South Africa.” Prevail against the liberal media, prevail against the white traitors letting the movement down. Mair took an interest in white-abulous movements in both SA and the US in the 1980s and 1990s. From 1999 - 2003 he spent £400 on literature from the largest neo Nazi group in the US. Explosive and gun making manuals, it seems. But these activities are short-lived wherever the facts are grounded with dates.

Then there’s the other Thomas Mair. The sufferer of mental health problems also had a quiet way of living with and dealing with things. He was a reserved neighbour offering gardening tips (neighbours can’t equate the man they knew with these acts). Back to the library again – he loved books, his house was full of them, “he practically lived in the library.” Mair’s brother had not noticed any particular political leanings, let alone extremism.

The man volunteered at a country park to help his mind, there are quotes:

“I can honestly say it has done me more good than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world. […] Many people who suffer from mental illness are socially isolated and disconnected from society, feelings of worthlessness are also common, mainly caused by long-term unemployment.”

No troubles with articulation and composition of thoughts there.

It’s all a soup, all interlinked, you can’t have one without the other – except in law and the media, I suppose. The negative card-carrying highlights make more sense of a person’s awful actions than the conflicting context. If he was unhinged with an interest in the far right – that’s easier to digest. Mental illness can be an insult when the bastard’s evil. Otherwise there would be some nasty logical extensions.

Omar Mateen

Embed from Getty Images

So you might be gay and you might not be. You don’t understand, you’re afraid, you’re angry, you’re lying to your family and your dad and your dad is standing up for you (and killing you) in the only heartbreaking way he knows how. Then you decide to shoot the people you are but don’t want to be, assuming other people can be you in the first place. BANG a beautiful teenage brain full of heart and hope goes all over the wall before he gets to tell mom he loves her BANG another BANG BANG BANG BANG mother fucker. Visceral pleasure, totally blind, totally false, totally cruel.

You can’t have what you want, you won’t let yourself have what you want, and so you disprove what you want. You make it something that’s wrong, you make it ugly, but you prove you still want it by killing it, blasting it out of life, rather than walking away indifferently.

It’s only dilemmas that make people rant.

All those dicks you like, those beautiful bodies that mean more to you than all the hate inside and what do you do? You shoot them because they are wrong, because you think they are impervious to the homophobia you’ve experienced and internalized, because they rejected you (yes, all of them), because you think they think they are better than you, because the US invaded Afghanistan, because whatever.

Nothing really adds up, other than a problem with other people. Either a problem connecting with them, or a problem with being nice to people. Mateen would linger around women, unsettling them, he would stare impassively at aggrieved husbands, beat his wife, go to gay clubs to either flirt with men or hurl abuse about homosexuality, and a few minutes before pulling triggers, he said it was all in the name of IS.

Islamic State even played along, calling Mateen, ‘one of the soldiers of the caliphate.’ But then “Mateen also appears to have been a deeply conflicted and possibly self-loathing homophobe who drank heavily, took drugs, dated men, frequented the same club he later attacked, Pulse, and used a gay dating app.” Quite a blemished Islamist.

Mateen’s ex wife, describing the beating and the violence, and the bipolar shifts, was backed up by her fiancé: ‘I hear the media trying to make this about Isis or Islam…but it is about imbalance, it’s about society, it’s about parenting, accepting each other.’

How do you call it with mental illness? How does either the good or the bad win out, and define the person or their motive/actions when you want to sum up. What’s so wrong with a killing being done for complex, conflicting personal circumstances? Is that less of a crime, or less of a death for the victims? Why do we like a mental illness to be coupled with unpleasant political affiliations, so it is more definitely the killer’s fault? Do we need to be angry at them, rather than at a situation, where there would be nothing to grab hold of?

Because it’s not as if there isn’t a situation. It’s not as if the sick (mentally ill) thought processes that have gone on here aren’t terrifying exaggerations of sick (fuckwit) thought processes that go on in the minds of non-criminal people every day:

The [BNP] was accused of posting leaflets near the West Yorkshire town where Labour MP Jo Cox was killed, accusing her of taking "misguided action" by "helping Muslims".

Shooting, killing, obliterating someone for having a different opinion to you. Blaming them for all the manifestations in reality of the things you dislike theoretically. Wow. So mad you need to stamp on something. So mad and incapable of understanding. That’s why you get mad enough to kill someone. Your whole life is frustration because you don’t understand anything you profess to hate with knowledge/experience. You grab at random bits of it for a quick fix. If only we could leave Europe… You hate the gays, you hate the people letting in the immigrants, you hate the Western powers, you hate the Muslims. Everything in your life would be alright if they could only just fix this one problem you see.

You align your anger, which is personal, which is your problem, with a cause – which has nothing to do with your inability to cope with the world without stamping on people and things. If you’re not careful (and if your mind’s like this you’re not going to be careful) you’ll get recruited to a cause that is led by people who are more rational than you and who want to feed on/exploit your anger and set you off, while they take the leadership credit. They might run a political party or movement; they might lead a terrorist cell. They might not all condone your killing, but they’ll happily make use of your anger and deny any responsibility for it – or its consequences.

Syria: One Man's Freedom Fighter is Another Man's Son is Another Man's Terrorist

“What draws these young men — and, to a lesser extent, women — to fight are what they regard as the indiscriminate killings of Muslim children, women and men in Syria. The use by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime of industrial-scale torture, barrel bombs and chemical attacks evokes a strong desire to defend fellow Muslims.”

Chams Eddine Zaougui and Pieter Van Ostaeyen,
‘Overblown Fears of Foreign Fighters,’ New York Times, 29^th July 2014

ISIS is the acronym you get if you don’t translate it as ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ and instead put Syria or al-Sham on the end. The name only emerged out of al-Qaeda and other groups last year.

The UK Government outlawed Isis on 16^th June, making it illegal to associate with the group or give it financial backing. The US had already designated it a terrorist organization.

On 29^th June Isis became ‘The Islamic State’ in name after declaring its captured territories in Syria and Iraq to be a new… Islamic state.

Isis/The Islamic State is all contradictions – a smaller version of the mess of conflicting ideas, pros, cons and dilemmas facing anyone who tries to pick a particular group of combatants to ‘like’ in Syria. It’s never as simple as knowing their stance on Assad. Isis is fighting the brutal Assad regime. But Isis itself is being brutal to its opponents. Isis administers aid, food and healthcare to Syrians. But Isis is threatening Christians who don’t leave Iraq. Isis blows up rival’s mosques and shrines.

And as professor Sam Hardy said: “If we didn’t intervene when they were killing people, it would be kind of grotesque to intervene over a building.”

Isis crops up in the news in two ways: its activities in Iraq and Syria …and the profiles of young Muslims from the UK and the West who come to join the fight.

Call of Duty

In November 2013 23-year-old Ifthekar Jaman from Southsea appeared on Newsnight: “I am ISIS. This is the group I am with. We are trying to establish the law of God, the law of Allah.” Footage of him from a year earlier showed a member of the Portsmouth Dawah Team – a community organization spreading the word about Islam (all leaflets and friendly chats over a little table in the high street). His smartly turned out younger brother displayed a quiet pride in his brother’s subsequent journey to Syria.

There were lots of tremors from MI5 at the time. The number of Britons in Syria was in the low hundreds. They were being greeted by al-Qaeda out there: “they meet British citizens who are willing to engage in terrorism and they task them to do so back at home, where they have higher impact, in this country. We've seen that played out in previous plots here, including 7/7.” In December Jaman’s family reported that he had been killed. He’d already said not to worry about his threat to the UK – he wasn’t coming back.

‘Canadian jihadist’ Andre Poulin made the news in January – he’d been killed in August 2013, during an attack on the government-controlled Mennegh airport in northern Syria. Reports described his life prior to leaving Timmins, Ontario: soon after converting to Islam he’d moved in with a Muslim man, attacked said man for living an un-Islamic lifestyle, had an affair with said man’s spouse, and threatened said man’s life and pulled a knife on him (sucks to be said man; he even wanted to give Poulin – as a young, fragile convert – another chance).

The Islamic State has since released a devastatingly slick video in tribute to Poulin. We don’t seem to like dusty Middle East militants having HD cameras and an eye for editing – it seems to unsettle us more than their killing proficiency (Isis produce bombing infographics, too).

“British brothers fighting for Isis in Syria were groomed by extremists using Call of Duty, claims their father.”

The Daily Mail’s recycling of a New Yorker article there. The NY even got hold of a games and media entertainment expert, who noted that our passive office work and lack of having to fight bears in the food gathering process left us with a hole to fill in our lives – the only thing that hits the spot being rapid decision-making pumped full of adrenaline by a combat situation. They’re not connecting this observation to fighting in terrorist designated organizations for real, no - just putting it right alongside there.

And there have been French and German and American and Finnish and Danish and Australian and… all leaving their homelands to join team Isis. A 19-year-old woman fell in love with an Isis fighter online and decided to quit America (Denver, if that doesn’t downplay the decision) to be with him, providing medical aid to his camp and a little combat. Poor love got arrested at Denver International.

Not all the Western fighters go to Isis, though. In April 18-year-old Abdullah Deghayes from Brighton made the news when he was killed in Syria. Vice filmed with his brother, 20-year-old Amer, also in Syria: “I came to Syria to answer the call of duty, and that is to give victory to the religion of Allah. And the way to do that is to help the oppressed Syrians here.”

His 16-year-old brother Jaffar is there, too. Their father Abubakr wanted, and still wants, them to collect aid (medicine, food, clothing) – helping Syria from the UK. He didn’t know his sons were planning to go to Syria (well, he thought he’d convinced Amer to stick to doing aid work in the country).

“In the situation that we’re in today, parents go to a level of selfishness where they would see the situation in Syria as to do with Syrian people. They’re not willing to allow their sons to go there and do what they have to do. So really parents are the last people you would tell.”

(Amer)

At the time of Abdullah’s death William Hague was all: “I want anybody who is contemplating going to Syria for any reason to hear that advice very clearly from the British Government: do not travel to Syria.” Elaborating, his advice nicely offset “the dangers [in Syria] are extreme” with the observation that people returning from the conflict were an “increasing threat to our own national security.” It was almost presidential in its good and bad cop PR schizophrenia.

The government’s haphazardly-policed stance is that Britons returning to the UK from Syria will be treated as terrorists. There have been deprivation of citizenship orders – 20 new ex-Britons in 2013. There were 16 arrests and warnings of more in January. The Met took a gendered approach in April – asking Muslim mums to have a word with their boys or (in confidence) the police: “This is not about criminalising people. It is about preventing tragedies.”

Meanwhile President Obama wants $500 million to train ‘vetted’ Syrian rebels - helping Syrians defend themselves against the regime’s attacks, as well as stopping the unrest from spreading to Iraq and upsetting the region.

The semantic battle between freedom fighter and terrorist has run on and on regarding Western combatants in Syria. On 30^th July Radio 4’s The Long View examined them alongside Britons who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s (the Guardian actually beat them to it regarding that comparison).

Some view the whole Britons in Syria thing as a frightening radicalization that warrants passport revocation; others see a perfectly impassioned desire to help an oppressed people – no more radical than being human. As ever, it’s a bit of both, and not very representatively depicted in the news reports taking either angle.

Of course there are posturing kids (“One day the flag of tawheed will fly over 10 Downing Street and the White House”). Of course there are lovely, do-gooder types just trying to make a difference, and of course there will be some of Norman Tebbit’s ‘poor little creatures,’ who are all too easily manipulated into doing or attempting other peoples’ bloody deeds in Britain and elsewhere.

And then there are those who fall into the manipulator’s ‘opposition’ category, who don’t receive the PR, and who get brutally forced into their emotions:

“Muhammad Ahmad [23] is motivated by more than nationalistic feeling. His father has been detained by Isis and his uncle was killed by its fighters – beheaded for answering back to an Isis soldier who reprimanded his female companions for not being properly dressed.”

It’s terrifying. Call of Duty? No matter how powerful, in charge or strong you make a person, it’s always just a petty, insecure demand for respect sitting on top of the might.