Terrorist or disturbed loner? Munich attack reveals shifting labels

— Munich’s police chief, Hubertus Andra, the morning after a shooter killed nine people and then himself, offered two pieces of information that seemed at odds.

The massacre, he said, appeared likely to be “a shooting rampage” rather than an act of terrorism. But when asked about Anders Behring Breivik, the right-wing Norwegian terrorist who killed 77 people exactly five years earlier, Andra answered that “this connection is obvious.”

“We must assume that he was aware of this attack,” he said, referring to the Munich shooter, 18-year-old Ali Sonboly.

Information about Sonboly is still emerging. But regardless of what details surface, Andra’s classification of the attack — as potentially inspired by a famous terrorist attack, yet not terrorism itself — reflects more than the increasingly blurry line between mass assailant and terrorist.

It also highlights that this line is often drawn differently depending on the attacker’s apparent ideology.

When mass killers show even minor hints of affinity for jihadi groups, as they did in recent attacks in Orlando, Fla., and Nice, France, their actions are swiftly judged to be terrorism. But when their source of inspiration appears to be rightwing extremism, as Andra speculated could be the case in Munich, they are often treated as disturbed loners.

This has fed concerns by civil rights groups and Muslim organizations, in Europe and the United States, that there is a lower bar for labelling something as terrorism when it can be linked to Islam. This tendency, they warn, feeds into anti-Muslim sentiment at a time when far-right populist movements are calling for special restrictions on Muslims.

The Islamic State group has contributed to the blurring of this line.

Because it encourages individuals to act alone, it can be nearly impossible to differentiate an attacker acting on behalf of the group from one who is merely grasping for justification to commit violence.

The group benefits from this uncertainty, playing up claims of responsibility to better terrorize faraway communities that it might otherwise strain to reach.

But non-jihadi ideologies, though they might receive less scrutiny, are also capable of inspiring violence.