Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who seems to have been the person responsible for shooting dead Corporal Nathan Cirillo and opening fire in the Canadian parliament seems to be more of a (would be) mass shooter than a serious terrorist. Amidst all the high-level discussions, ramping up of security and rhetoric about Canada refusing to be intimidated, it is important to remember that.
When Major Nidal Malik Hassan opened fire in Fort Hood Army base in Texas and killed thirteen people, the action was presented as a manifestation of a frightening Al Qaeda strategy of leaderless jihad, and leading Al Qaeda figures were happy to claim it as such. But Hassan’s also bears striking similarities to incidents such as the Kanadahar massacre in 2012, when a US soldier killed sixteen Afghans in a gun rampage, or indeed a more recent spree shooting in Fort Hood itself.
But terrorism exists not so much in the violence of the act itself, as in how different political actors are able to frame it for their own ends. Today, another tragic example of this is provided by an incident in Jerusalem in which a Palestinian driver ploughed his car into a group of people at a tram stop, killing a baby. Benjamin Netanyahu has already sought to link the act to a recent speech by Mahmoud Abbas calling for legal action at the international level to defend the Al-Aqsa Compound in which he spoke of the need to use ‘any means’ to keep settlers from the Temple Mount.
However, insurgent organisations can also play the game of encouraging and claiming credit for attacks by ‘self-starter’ groups and individuals. And while the actual individuals who end up taking action may not fit the usual stereotype of the rational and high-functioning terrorist militant, there may indeed be method as well as madness. In my recent work with Dr Sarah Marsden, we found that – contrary to widespread assumptions about the inherent propensity of jihadists for mass casualty attacks – violence by ‘grass roots’ or ‘self-starter’ jihadi sympathisers displays a marked tendency to be focused and discriminate in character – usually going after individuals who are believed to be specifically culpable for the oppression of Muslims rather than killing civilians merely to produce terror or punish societies as a whole.
What our analysis seems to demonstrate, moreover, is that this is not merely the result of contingent factors, such as the ease of carrying out one kind of operation rather than another. Rather, it seems to be part of a wider ideological trend. While jihadist ideologues continue to try to legitimate a wide range of potential targets for aspiring fighters, as reiterated in a recent video address by IS, the last few years have seen the generally ‘strategic’ conception of jihadist terrorism, favoured by the likes of Osama bin Laden give way to a more thoroughly ideological understanding whereby the purpose of coercing or intimidating entire countries exists side by side with the idea of specifically seeking out and punishing individual wrongdoers specifically for their perceived transgressions.
If this continues, then it may be that the whole way we look at terrorism – dominated since the 1990s by presumptions about a ‘new terrorism’ that would inherently seek ever bigger and more lethal spectaculars needs to be revised. We may be witnessing the emergence of an ‘even newer’ terrorism of which – in common with the micro-marketed spirit of our age – the hallmarks will be precision and (from the point of view of the perpetrators and their potential supporters) high levels of legitimacy. The risks posed by such a strategy, which are more political and cultural than infrastructural, deserve serious contemplation.