Spare me the phoney tears of terrorists’ mothers
Just hours before her son was shot dead by Italian police yesterday, the mother of Berlin terrorist Anis Amri was talking in her family home in tunisia, lovingly clutching his picture.
the photograph showed him wearing a fur-trimmed parka and sporting a fashionably spiky short haircut. He could have been any young man starting out in life.
Passionately protesting his innocence, Nour explained her son was just like so many other young North Africans who left their tunisian homes in search of a better life in Europe.
she claimed she saw no sign that Amri had been radicalised. In recent phone conversations, Nour said, he played tunisian music and ‘asked about ordinary family news, and showed us meals he was preparing’.
Amri’s brother Abdelkader, meanwhile, also believed he was innocent, saying: ‘I’m sure he can’t have done this.’ And his sister, Najoua, said he was a poetry-loving boy who enjoyed amateur dramatics and cooking, and ‘brought laughter’ into the home.
No mention that by the age of 18 he had already been convicted of drug abuse and violent armed robbery in tunisia. Or that he had only fled to Italy to escape a lengthy prison sentence.
Posing as a minor, he claimed asylum but was later imprisoned for four years in sicily for setting fire to the migrant centre that took him in. Prison guards in the six sicilian jails he attended recall Amri as a thug who bullied other inmates. It is clear he was a dangerously violent and angry young man — and, I’m sorry, but I can’t believe his family weren’t aware of this.
Like so many parents and siblings of terrorists, Amri’s mother seemed blithely unaware that her child was a turning into a monster.
It’s always someone else’s fault when these kids become murderers, never the fault of families and communities which turn a blind eye when their young spiral frighteningly out of control.
It was the same story after the horrific murder of an elderly priest in his Normandy church this summer — forced to his knees by two men who slit his throat in front of worshippers and nuns and watched him bleed to death as they chanted Arabic slogans.
THE mother of one of those men, 19-year-old Abdel Malik Petitjean, swore her boy was a ‘gentle’ and ‘soft’ soul, and that she ‘did not give birth to the devil’. But unless parents, local communities and religious leaders accept responsibility for their children’s behaviour, there will be countless more terrorists like Anis Amri causing misery and carnage in the West.
Amri’s mother said that if he was guilty she would renounce him before God. she can renounce away, but it will give no comfort to the families of those who died at her son’s hands.