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January 3, 2025 - 6:00pm
In the first hours after a terrorist attack, horror overtakes everything else. The scenes from New Orleans on Wednesday were hard to watch, starkly revealing unimaginable pain and suffering. After each incident of this kind, speculation about the motivation of the attacker quickly follows, asking whether they had accomplices and how they were radicalised.
In my book Home Grown, published in 2019, I pointed out that men who carry out these attacks are often so-called “lone wolves”, and that there are likely to have been a series of red flags before they created carnage. One of the most significant is a history of domestic abuse, leading to family breakdown and the perpetrator finding himself isolated and angry. Such men are hugely suggestible, looking for an ideology that “justifies” their rage and encourages them to act on it. Islamism, and specifically the violent brand promoted by Isis, is more than willing to provide it.
The FBI now believes that Shamsud-Din Jabbar acted on his own. The Bureau also believes he was motivated by Isis, revealing that he left behind videos in which he stated he had “joined” the group before the summer. Whether Isis had been in direct contact with Jabbar is unclear, but he appears to have been angry, broke and unstable in the run-up to the attack.
What has also emerged from his background are three failed marriages and accusations of abuse in two of them. His third wife obtained a restraining order in 2020, prohibiting him from engaging in threatening behaviour, sending obscene messages, physically harming her and their son, or denying her access to credit cards. The couple divorced a year later and Jabbar was ordered to pay child support. His first wife had sued him for support for their two daughters in 2012 while his second, with whom he did not have children, is said to have told the website TMZ that he was abusive towards her.
It’s clear from court filings that Jabbar blamed his divorces for his acute financial problems, which left him living in a run-down trailer park in Texas. Indeed, he was so angry that his original intention, revealed in a video made as he drove to Louisiana, was not to kill strangers at all. Instead, he declared that his first thought had been to invite his family to a “celebration” where he would kill them — a crime known as a family annihilation. He claimed to have changed his mind because he feared that headlines wouldn’t focus on what he called the “war between the believers and disbelievers”. Like other men who have carried out terrorist attacks, Jabbar wanted to be known as a warrior for Islam, not a failure with a grudge who murdered members of his own family.
This is a very familiar pattern. Most of the men responsible for terrorist murders in the UK in 2017 had a history of abusing women, including the Right-wing extremist who attacked worshippers leaving a mosque in Finsbury Park. Many turn to terrorism after losing access to their primary victims through separation or divorce. It’s happened so often that counter-terrorism experts argue family breakdown is a reason to reopen investigations into men previously suspected of supporting terrorist organisations.
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SubscribeBut before we all get swept away by finding ‘reasons’ for the attack, how often do abusive marriages breakdown without creating people with murderous intent? If only a tiny proportion of marriage breakdowns are part of creating a murderer then they are not diagnostic, only circumstantial.
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I’ve posted a comment which deals with this precise issue, but it’s failed to appear. The gist of it concerns the way that certain groups of males are brought up within their communities. I can’t see any reason why this comment shouldn’t appear.
Exactly.
Joan Smith makes a very valid point. OK, as is typical, Shamsud-Din Jabbar is a muslim and a self-confessed Da’esh jihadist. Such people turn to militant Islam partly because it justifies violence, but partly because it is an alternative sub-culture that can give the likes of Shamsud-Din Jabbar a narrative, blaming the kafirs for all the things that have gone wrong in his life.
Syria has adopted a fully Islamist school curriculum that, among other things, denies the country’s pre-Islamic history. As much of Syria as Israel did not yet want has been declared the homeland of every Wahhabi, Salafi and Deobandi in the world, and of nobody else. Expect Ahmed al-Sharaa to be proclaimed Caliph very soon. It was of this, the so-called Islamic State, that Shamsud-Din Jabbar waved the same flag that we are all expected to be delighted to see fluttering over Damascus.
Jabbar, Matthew Livelsberger and Ryan Routh all had close ties to what, when they were there, was Fort Bragg, the Army Special Forces headquarters that was named after a man who had committed treason against the United States. Routh visited it 147 times, staying overnight on 29 occasions, despite never officially having been in the military. Or, at least, not in the American one. He, Livelsberger, and Juraj Cintula, the attempted assassin of Robert Fico, were all close to Ukraine, which is a major supporter of the people who have just come to power in Syria, as they are of it. Livelsberger died an active duty Special Forces sergeant who could be identified only from his documents as such, papers that had apparently survived when his body had been burned beyond recognition. He and Jabbar had hired their attack vehicles via the same app. And so on. There is a lot here to unpack and unpick.
That’s all very interesting, but there’s also no denying the causality that JS writes about, i.e. males with a history of violence and unable to control their tempers in a domestic environment seeking to extend that towards the wider public when they find themselves out on a limb.
It’s all of a piece, and the unifying theme is the way in which males are brought up as little ‘gods’ within the environment of Islam, engendering a sense of unrestraint they can’t overcome in adulthood. We see this every day here in the UK, evidenced by the way they drive around towns in high-powered cars – with no visible employment history within their families that might support the purchase of such vehicles – causing accidents and generally ignoring the rules of the road.
Do we ever hear a peep from their so-called “community leaders” about such behaviour? Of course not – they’re in on the whole business, yet are given time and attention by our governments, seeking to placate them. This has got to stop. This is very much part of the reason why the riots occurred during the summer, the sense that the Pakistani/Bangladeshi communities in particular are living free from the normal democratic restraints which the ‘rule of law’ requires. Set that aside for one section of the community, and the rest will eventually take action. You can’t imprison everyone.
Actually that’s precisely what is wrong with the piece. See my other comment.
According to the writer of this piece, it’s toxic masculinity that she somehow relates to right wing extremism.
Apparently that’s the reason for most bad things, along with capitalism, free speech, and I suppose fossil fuels.
It is true that suicide rates are sky high among both older and divorced men, but this is also their fault, of course.
She seemingly doesn’t know why most men aren’t delighted to be hounded into poverty by courtrooms, and of course a religion from utterly alien and retrograde societies, that fueled countless conquests, wars, and theocratic dictatorships couldn’t have anything to do with “male violence,” which she likely believes is the only kind imaginable.
Yep, it’s the men again.
It’s a kind of monomania, or narcissism, in which everything is really about my pet issue and must be traced back to it.
Looks like unrelated scattershot. If there’s a point here, you haven’t made it very clearly. I hire my vehicles from Enterprise, and it’s statistically likely that there are criminals who have done the same on the same day. Does that make me their accomplice?
There Is a very odd and continuing silence in all quarters about Shamsud-Din Jabbar. Tonight his half brother says he returned to Islam. Earlier it was reported he had ‘converted’ to Islam as this article states.
Is his family Muslim and what is their ethnic origin?
How long since they migrated to the US and from where or are they black converts?
Why can this not be revealed? It would assist understanding at least.
If Shamsud-Din Jabbar is his original name and not a conversion name in the vein of Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar (as seems to be common in the African American Muslim converted community) then it sounds like his half-brother’s comment about him “returning” to Islam might be accurate. And as usual, why is the mainstream not talking about it?
If the government authorities don’t talk about it, the MSM doesn’t talk about it. The enterprising investigative journalists of the present are all chasing the likes of Taylor Swift around, looking for exclusives.
It is a degenerate age we live in.
Jeff, it is common for Muslims to use the word “revert to” rather than “convert to” when talking about a person’s decision to “embrace” Islam. The reason, so I gather, is that the belief that “all men are Muslims” from birth (although they may not yet know it), and so, what we would call a conversion, they would see as a return to the religion.
That’s correct. One does not convert, one reverts. But if his brother used the term, probably his brother is also Muslim. So likely it’s a return and not a conversion.
The mainstream media never investigates such topics because they are scared of what they might find. It doesn’t mean they have actually discovered anything. They just don’t want to go there.
If he ‘converted to Islam’ what was he before?
Uuuummm….thinking…in-fact, no, it was the ‘weather’ that did it – the winter heat did it…it was the thing that did it that didn’t do it…It Was right wingers!!!
If a significant proportion of divorced men (even of abusive divorced men) went on mass killing sprees, that would be news. That a mass killer turns out to have been abusive in relationships, or had anger issues, is not news at all. The author seems to think it is.
Excellent point. Some statistics would have shown the irrelevance of the author’s argument. But we don’t see many stats in these columns. It’s an “opinion piece”
This ‘analysis’ is shoddy. Research in Canada – including my own while with the Security Service – shows that misogyny and abuse rarely ‘explain’ the decision to join terrorist groups
Shockingly so. I’m sure many picked up on the illogicality of its argument, but it’s useful to know that it is evidentially false as well. Do you have a link to the Canadian research?
Oh dear, yet more evasion. Why can’t the chatterati face up to the simple truth? Islam was invented by an ignorant and illiterate camel driver, who lusted after wealth, power, and women, to give himself and his male gang the divine justification for satisfying those lusts by whatever means he could get away with, including murder, robbery, and rape. Islam – not ‘Islamism’, whatever that’s supposed to be,- both breeds violent abusers of women and girls, and attracts them.
Although the author doesn’t grapple with it she clearly outlines the financial doom-spiral that his divorces put him into. “Family breakdown” does not adequately account for the different experience of men and women who experience it. Chris Williamson had a divorce lawyer (American I think) on a while back who laid out how crippling it is for men while women are treated with kid gloves, especially when it comes to children, and generally benefit financially through child maintenance even if there is an “equitable split”. Having not been in that situation myself it was a bit of an eye-opener.
This should not lead us to have any sympathy for a killer, but the way the author brushes over this in the article is rather callous. There are plenty of men in similar situations, who do not go out and kill, pay their child support, and are struggling. It is wrong to dismiss them as failures or losers as the author does.
Nor is it right to portray a killer as in some way just your average divorced guy with a grudge.
He may have been unhappy, disturbed, under financial pressure, etc. but that doesn’t explain his actions. Whether he converted to Islam or was born a Muslim seems unclear but it is fair to consider whether Islam was a factor in what happened.