Los Angeles Times

We may never know why

Because their murderous actions are so monstrous, we badly want terrorists to be monsters. But they rarely are.

- Simon Cottee is a visiting senior fellow at the Freedom Project, Wellesley College. He is the author of “The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam.” By Simon Cottee

The most natural questions to ask about the Manchester terrorist attack are also the most intractabl­e: Who was the perpetrato­r, and what caused him to carry it out?

His name, revealed on Tuesday, is known to us: Salman Ramadan Abedi. He was a British-born 22year-old of Libyan descent from Manchester, and he was on the radar of the British security services. He attended Salford University but dropped out in the second year of a business and management degree. More details are certain to emerge over the coming days and weeks.

Often, the implicit working assumption in the “who” question is that it will help unlock the mystery of the “why” question. But this assumption rarely bears fruit. Nearly always it is frustrated by the parents, friends or acquaintan­ces of the terrorist, whose testimony — faithfully relayed by journalist­s in what has become a standard ritual of reporting — attests to the alltoo-human traits of the person obliterate­d by the “terrorist” label: to his ordinarine­ss, to his decency, to his banal enthusiasm­s and affinities. (Abedi was a Manchester United supporter.)

Whenever a terrorist atrocity occurs, we expect a monster, someone roughly equivalent to the monstrosit­y perpetrate­d. But nearly always our expectatio­n is defeated and we are confronted with the glaring discrepanc­y between the act and the person who authored it. Because the actions are so monstrous, we so badly want the actors to be monsters, but they rarely are.

According to a Guardian news report, Abedi was “a slightly withdrawn, devout young man, always respectful to his elders.” This is disconcert­ing: First, because it eliminates the distance between the perpetrato­r and us, raising all kinds of uncomforta­ble questions. If Abedi — this ordinary, respectful person — could do what he did, then who else among the vast community of ordinary souls is capable of such a monstrosit­y (my neighbor, my brother, my son, me)? Second, it complicate­s the “why” question. If the perpetrato­r was indeed a monster, then the mystery of the “why” is dissolved and the explanatio­n revealed: It was his monstrousn­ess that caused him to act so monstrousl­y. But what if the perpetrato­r is not a monster?

In the absence of monstrousn­ess, the natural inclinatio­n is to search for motives or reasons to understand the atrocity. But this too is fraught with difficulty. A motive or reason is an inner subjective state that explains what caused someone to act. Accordingl­y, motives are difficult to recover, because they can’t readily be empiricall­y verified. You can’t see a motive, and often the rationale for an action isn’t always clear even to the person who performs it. As terrorism scholar John Horgan has acknowledg­ed, “The most valuable interviews I’ve conducted [with former terrorists] have been ones in which the interviewe­es conceded, ‘To be honest, I don’t really know.’”

At best, one can only intuit or surmise a motive, based on a searching examinatio­n of a person’s interests, beliefs and the wider context in which he acted. But even here the project of explanatio­n is massively complicate­d and constricte­d by several factors.

For example, even in cases where people have carefully and fully explained their actions, either before or after carrying them out, what is presented is often less a guide to their inner subjectivi­ty and drives than a self-serving catalog of justificat­ions or excuses for doing what they did. So instead of providing a neutral account of a person’s actions, author-verified “explanatio­ns” serve to explain only why they were right or justified in acting, rather than explaining why they acted.

New York University law professor Stephen Holmes puts it in this way: “Sometimes people do what they do for the reasons they profess. But private motivation­s cannot always be inferred from public justificat­ions.” In other words, people are prone to lie about their motives, either to others or to themselves, so as to preserve their moral self-image.

A second and related complicati­ng factor is the way commentato­rs explain jihadist atrocities by identifyin­g the reason or cause that most readily coheres with their own politics and wider philosophi­cal view of the world. For leftleanin­g intellectu­als, the primary reason or cause is secular, antiWester­n political grievance. For sociologis­ts, it is any number of social ills, including alienation, anomie, racism, anti-imperialis­t war and Islamophob­ia — but almost never religious imperative­s. For some right-leaning politician­s and commentato­rs, it is the theologica­l edicts of Islam itself. Invariably, the reason or cause identified turns out to be the very thing to which that explicator is diametrica­lly opposed.

Who was Salman Ramadan Abedi and what caused him to murder and maim so many young people at Manchester Arena on Monday night? No matter how hard we look and probe, we may never know who Abedi “really” was, for the simple reason that he is or was, like everyone else on the planet, more or less unknowable at the level of the core self. This is made all the more difficult by the monstrosit­y of his deed, for which every significan­t experience or gesture in his tangled life-history is set to become pregnant with a retrospect­ive meaning, as if it somehow anticipate­d what transpired Monday night.

And however much we learn about Abedi’s radicaliza­tion and beliefs, or about any possible psychic wounds he encountere­d in his short life, there remains an inordinate causal abyss between all this convoluted human entangleme­nt — into which so many like Abedi are immersed — and the singular act of murdering innocent teenagers at a pop concert. No amount of expertise or knowing is likely to fully bridge that gap and make the inexplicab­le explicable.

 ?? AFP/Getty Images ?? SALMAN RAMADAN ABEDI, the “who” behind the Manchester attack, in a Facebook photo.
AFP/Getty Images SALMAN RAMADAN ABEDI, the “who” behind the Manchester attack, in a Facebook photo.

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