The devastating power of the individual

Friday’s rampage and massacre outside the Munich shopping centre reminded us all of the dangerous times we are living in.

ngrima@independent.com.mt

That area in Munich is very near to the Olympic village where Israeli athletes, taken hostage by the PLO, had been massacred during the 1972 Olympic Games. The Olympic village has now been turned into student housing but there is still a plaque marking the spot – I know, I went to see it many years ago.

That was terrorism of a kind waged by terrorist groups such as the PLO, the Baader-Meinhof, the Rote Armee Fraktion, the Brigate Rosse and so on.

The victims were either chosen for being who they were – Israeli Olympic athletes – or else ordinary human beings whose only fault was being where they were – such as the people downed in planes attacked by terrorists, such as the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie.

Other innocent victims were those killed in the Twin Towers on 9 September 2001. As were the victims at the Bataclan in Paris last year, whereas the victims at the Charlie Hebdo some months before were designated victims, as they worked for a paper that attacked Islam.

Successive terrorist attacks have led to stricter security on planes and at airports (although they did not impede terrorist attacks just outside airports as in Brussels and in Istanbul). Football games, as we saw in the Euro 2016 games recently, have been rendered safe through massive expenditure and strict security enforcement.

But this has now changed. This overall security at designated events has opened up a glaring lack of security at what are being termed as ‘soft targets’ and shopping malls are a prime example of these.

At one point on Friday, when we still did not know the outcome, television commentators were comparing the Munich attack to the attack on the Kenyan shopping mall which took days and countless dead before the guerrillas were smoked out of the complex.

In this case, however, there was a variant. This, as we now know, was the work of an individual. This has become the age of the devastating power of the individual.

We can start with the terrible tragedy of the GermanWings plane, whose pilot with an addled brain crashed the plane into the Alps.

Just a few days ago, we had a single Frenchman of Tunisian descent who drove his huge truck on Promenade des Anglais, mowing down men, women and children who were watching the Bastille Day fireworks. At first it seemed that the driver had acted of his own accord but links have now been discovered with radical Islam.

Earlier last week there was the case of an Afghan immigrant who ran amok on a train in Germany until he was killed, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. Maybe he too had been radicalized.

And now this. The Daily Mail has named the perpetrator who killed nine people before killing himself as Ali Sonboly, an 18year old Iranian, described by his neighbours as a quiet boy. According to a police briefing just now, he may have been on psychiatric medication (just as the GermanWings pilot).

It may have been him who lured crowds to the McDonald’s there by promising free meals on a fake Facebook page.

There was a point when he went up on the roof of the complex and got involved in a shouting argument with people in the balconies of a nearby building – replete with expletives: you can read all about it in the Mail online. He denied being a foreigner (even if he was) and said he was a German who had been bullied as a child. Whether this is true or not is still being investigated.

The point I am trying to make is that we all know people who at one point or another might flip with catastrophic results. I myself know a couple – or maybe more without realizing it. (But then I worked for years alongside a paedophile without realizing it, only for him to be unmasked this past week on Glenn Bedingfield’s blog) When something like this happens, I say it is only by the grace of God that so and so has not flipped – so far.

There is precious little that society can do to protect itself against such attacks. As long as everybody begins to carry weapons – and I do not know what can be worse. Or unless we create so much security that we start to resemble an armed camp.

The beauty of our Western civilization – the one which makes millions risk so many dangers to try and get in – is the air of freedom we breathe. It is not without its attendant dangers.