Terrorism, “Lone Wolves,” and “Virtual Wolf Packs”

Members of the group "Anonymous" wearing the mask in Los Angeles, 2008

Members of the group “Anonymous” wearing the mask in Los Angeles, 2008

Violence to change or impact the existing order may be as old as humankind. In terms of collective violence—let’s use the term “mob” for a phenomenon that may start small but can even morph into a revolution—it has had varied political, economic, and religious-ethnic motives over the course of the last thousand years in western societies. In his book “Communities of Violence,” David Nirenberg showed how, before about 1350, riots were regular, small-scale affairs, meant to reinforce the religious pecking order, with Jews and Muslims scapegoated in Spain to send a message for these minorities to stay in their place. Everybody got the message, and there wasn’t much violence because the authorities made sure that there wasn’t. After 1350, these “traditional riots” grew into full-scale pogroms that were very different beasts and eventually even shook the socio-political order.

The line between different kinds of motives for collective violence has often been blurred. When thousands of French Protestants were murdered during 1572’s St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, religious strife combined conflicts between aristocratic elites as reasons. In 1605, when Guy Fawkes (whose caricatured image today’s anarchist rioters still wear on their masks) and his co-conspirators tried unsuccessfully to blow up the British Parliament, once again religious conflict in the form of minority Catholic grievances in England, fused with political disputes surrounding the succession of Elizabeth l by James l. The twinning of religious and political violence during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation resonates with our own time, especially in the Middle East.

In Europe (and also colonial America), food riots in cities where violent protestors showed their unhappiness with rising prices were almost expected by those in charge who often treated them as an unavoidable “safety valve” as well as a warning for the authorities to act. Yet in France in the 1780s, traditional food riots escalated and merged with a complex of other causes to precipitate the Revolution that is still the signature event in modern political history.

Everything discussed so far falls under the rubric “group behavior,” but violent behavior aimed against regimes can also be individually motivated. Americans used to have a vested interest in the comforting idea that, while assassinations elsewhere might be the product of conspiracies, ours were the handiwork of “lone assassins.” This was only partly true. Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was plugged into Confederate “dirty tricks” networks stretching from Richmond to Toronto, and he was of course the master architect as well as leading participant in the ultimate plot to decapitate the federal government. In 1881, when mentally unstable office seeker Charles G. Guiteau assassinated President James A. Garfield, he seems to have fit the “loan assassin” profile. A more difficult case was Leon Czolgosz, a child of Polish Catholic immigrants (though anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists still identify him as Jewish), who was a social misfit who tried to become a comrade of Emma Goldman and other anarchists. Partly inspired by the 1900 assassination of King Umberto I by Gaetano Bresci, Czolgosz claimed he killed McKinley because the president was “an enemy of working people.” Czolgosz was an isolated actor, but his ideology was thoroughly-grounded in the anarchist thinking of his time.

Of course, debates will never end about whether Lee Harvey Oswald, identified by the Warren Commission as JFK’s “lone assassin,” was instead the product (or pawn) of a wider conspiracy, variously identified as right-wing and CIA-related or a payback operation by the Mafia or Fidel Castro.

The tension still exists between seeing terrorist actors as primarily motivated by individual, often psychological grievances and seeing them as parts of broader conspiracies.

There has been a spate of recent transnational terrorist incidents (some of which the U.S. government unaccountably insists on classifying as “workplace-related violence”), accelerating in frequency at least since 2009 when Major Nidal Hasan—an Internet pen pal of terror master Anwar al-Awlaki—murdered 13 soldiers at a base in Waco, Texas. Now—since the Islamic State in Iraq-Syria galvanized cyberspace to issue new incitement orders—the pace of attacks has accelerated:

• The beheading in London of British soldier Lee Rigby, an Afghanistan veteran, by Michael Adebolajo, an Islamist murderer with ties to Kenya, shouting “Allahu Akbar.”
• The Oklahoma City beheading of a grandmother by her fellow worker Alton Nolen after she and others spurned his demands that they convert to Islam.
• The cross-country murder spree, from New Jersey to Seattle by Islamist Muhammad Brown
• The vehicular murder in Quebec of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent by self-styled “Ahmad the Converted” Martin Rouleau, and lethal attack in Ottawa on the Canadian War Memorial and Parliament by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, also a recent Islamic convert.
• The hatchet attack, killing one New York City policeman by petty criminal and drug abuser Zale Thompson—another recent Islamic convert.

The Tsarnaev brothers, responsible for the terrorist bombings at the 2013 Boston Marathon, are sometimes treated as “lone wolves” despite their ties to Chechen terror networks. And today, the “lone wolf” designation is being widely applied in Israel to terrorists like the East Jerusalem cousins, Abed Abu Jamal and Ghassan Muhammad Abu Jamal, who, whipped up by Hamas and Palestinian Authority propaganda about real and imagined grievances, murdered four worshippers and a Druze policeman at a Har Nof neighborhood synagogue.

What’s the common denominator here? Unfortunately, the designation “lone wolf terrorist”—has become a source of confusion.

Few people know where the label was first applied. So far as I know, it originated by William L. Pierce, anti-government founding father and author of the Neo-Nazi “Turner Diaries.”  The term “lone wolf terrorist” was first widely applied in 1999 when Bufford O. Furrow, Jr. a white supremacist follower of Richard Butler “Aryan Nations” Church in Idaho, received generalized marching orders to go forth and commit mayhem on Jewish and other targets of his own choosing. After casing the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum in Los Angeles, Furrow instead attacked a Jewish community center, where he wounded five people, including a five year-old boy, and then shot and killed a nearby Filipino American mail carrier. White supremacist Tom Metzger had helped popularize the term in the 1990s.

Contrary to the current usage of “lone wolf”—which some apologists for radical Islam are now using to distance the current crop of terrorist killers from their shared fanatical religious motivation—Furrow was not an isolated actor. He was inspired and trained, hands-on fashion, by an organized resistance movement, the “Aryan Nations,” that preaches violence. What made him a “lone wolf” is that he did not receive specific orders—but was sent out into the sheepfold of peaceful civil society to commit crimes for which his extremist handlers could disclaim direct responsibility.

The big difference today is that so-called “lone wolf” terrorists no longer are trained “hands-on.” Rather, they just hook up to the Internet and join the cyberspace “Church of Islamist Extremism.” Unlike in the horror story, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” today’s violent misfits seem to be irresistibly drawn to joining the “Invasion of the Soul Snatchers.” Desperately searching for purpose and meaning, they convert to a dogmatic creed that offers absolute certainty of salvation in return for a loyalty oath to murder. Earlier generations of true believers joined anarchist, fascist, and communist movements for similar psychological reasons, but none of these movements—in recruiting “fifth columnists” to undermine free society—had the invaluable tool of the Internet. Today’s “lone wolves” are often “known wolves” with membership in “virtual” terror churches—in an analogous fashion to those of us who peacefully hook up with Facebook or YouTube. They behave like a violent copy cat contagion or members of a murderous “flash mob.”

Today, there are both “lone wolves” and “virtual wolf packs” of terrorism. It’s important but tough to draw distinctions.