Islamism & mental illness are simpler answers to New Orleans attack. They’re also misleading

Like other lone-wolf killers, the narrative around Shamsud-Din Jabbar is that he was seduced by online Islamist propaganda. While this is entirely true, it is also intellectually lazy.

Police officers stand at the scene where a truck drove into a large crowd on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. on 1 January 2025 in this screengrab taken from a video. | ABC Affiliate WGNO | Handout via Reuters

There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” Leaving his well-thumbed Bible on his bed, open to the revelation of the violence that would precede the crucifixion, Howard Unruh ate a breakfast of Post Toasties cereal and fried eggs. On that morning in September 1949, he dressed in freshly pressed slacks, a white shirt, and a bow tie. Then, he walked down the street, shooting dead 13 people—a cobbler, a barber, an elderly couple, and three children—who just happened to cross his path.

Last week, former United States Army officer Shamsud-Din Jabbar ploughed through crowds celebrating New Year’s Eve on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, the flag of the Islamic State streaming from his hired pick-up truck. There was the Quran left propped up on his bookshelf: “They fight in Allah’s cause,” a verse on the open page read, “and slay and are slain.”

The jihadist belief system that drove Jabbar to kill has led most observers to proclaim the case closed. Like other so-called lone-wolf attackers across the world, the narrative surrounding Jabbar deems him to have been seduced by fundamentalist religious beliefs and online Islamist propaganda. This story is entirely true. Yet, as Unruh’s long-forgotten case ought to teach us, it is also inadequate and intellectually lazy.

For decades until his death in Trenton Psychiatric Hospital in 2009—at the age of 88—psychiatrists sought to pick through Unruh’s mind, using then-fashionable techniques like hypnosis-inducing drugs. There were hints of sexual abuse as a child and the brutal humiliations gay men were subjected to. There was a diagnosis of schizophrenia, though Unruh did not display the symptoms associated with the illness today.

And, tucked away in his records, was another disturbing detail. Fighting with the 342nd Armoured Field Artillery through France and Germany, Unruh recorded the day, hour, and place of each Nazi soldier he had killed, describing each corpse in disturbing detail.

Lone-actor terrorist attacks stoke our deepest fears about violence lurking within our communities—but the answer isn’t paranoia or witch hunts. The most powerful weapon we have, instead, might be understanding.

America’s terrorism threats

For decades now, it has been evident that a diverse range of ideologies have driven Americans to kill. In 2020, thoroughgoing empirical analysis by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies revealed that a majority of terrorism incidents in the United States since 1994 have been carried out by right-wing actors like white supremacists. Even though the sheer scale of carnage on 9/11 permanently etched the jihadist threat on the American imagination, the majority of deaths in 14 of the 21 years studied resulted from right-wing attacks.

The 9/11 attack suggested that the most severe terrorism threats to the United States were from highly organised jihadist groups, which elided over a significant swathe of the landscape.

Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people when he bombed a federal government building in 1995—the most lethal terrorist attack by a homegrown terrorist in the United States. He acted alone, radicalised by an apocalyptic vision of the white supremacist movement. Large numbers of terrorists followed his example. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine parishioners at a largely-Black church in Charleston in 2015, also acted alone.

After 9/11, ideologues like al-Qaeda’s Mustafa Nasr had propagated much the same idea, recognising the enormous asymmetry of power between the jihadist movement and its adversaries. Nasr, terrorism experts Paul Cruickshank and Mohannad Ali have written, called for Muslims in the West to engage in “individual terrorism”, free from the jihadist movement’s hierarchical structures.

Al-Qaeda’s magazine Inspire brought these ideas to a wider audience in 2010, praising a killing spree by American military physician Nidal Hasan, who shot dead 13 fellow service personnel at the Fort Hood base. Hasan—whose extremist beliefs had worried his own secularised family but failed to alarm counter-terrorism investigators, analyst Katherine Poppe records—was lauded in the magazine for choosing to “fight jihad on U.S. soil”.

The individual terrorism strategy, Daniel Byman records, often proved successful in evading the West’s counter-terrorism defences. In December 2015, husband and wife Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik shot dead 14 people in San Bernardino. The next year, Omar Mateen killed 49 at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Later that year, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel ploughed a truck into a Bastille Day celebration in Nice, killing 86.

Islamic State propagandists also proved adroit in claiming credit for attacks their organisation had little to do with, like the bombing of a Manchester concert in 2017. This had been Nasr’s advice. Even if local Muslims in the West did not wish to participate in violence, he counselled, they could still “call the press agency and tell them, ‘I’m from the global Islamic resistance’ and claim responsibility for whatever action is being done around the world.”

Each attack—just like those of white-nationalist terrorists—demonstrated that individuals could draw on an ecosystem of ideas which inspired them to violence. This observation, though, did very little to explain why some individuals acted as they did. Tens of thousands of online readers, after all, encountered online jihadist or white supremacist texts; few became terrorists.

Walled-off minds

Looking for plausible motives for terrorist mass-killers isn’t hard. The anthropologist Hugh Gusterson has noted that former military personnel—like both Unruh and Jabbar—are statistically overrepresented among perpetrators of terrorism in the United States. This could, however, simply be a statistical anomaly, given the small size of the data set, or just an artefact of a terrorist’s need for familiarity with weapons and explosives. Other scholars have noted linkages to mental health issues among perpetrators, and still others, toxic ideologies such as religion.

The complexities driving individuals to violence were starkly illustrated late last year, when Saudi Arabian-born psychiatrist Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen drove his car into a Christmas market in Germany’s Magdeburg. Even as social media commentary drew the obvious conclusions, it turned out Al-Abdulmohsen despised Islam, and was a supporter of Germany’s neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland party.

For his part, Jabbar railed against mainstream American culture for luring people “into the things that God has made forbidden to us: the intoxicants like marijuana, alcohol, sedatives, opioids, stimulants and others.”

In one of his recordings on SoundCloud, he said, “Then there’s the way that music entices us to illicit sex, vulgarity, violence, betrayal, arrogance, burglary, cheating, ingratitude to our spouses or others in general.” In another, he proclaimed: “Forbidding … evil is a mandate on all of mankind.”

There is no clarity, though, on why Jabbar moved from contemplating killing his family to planning the attack on Bourbon Street. Or, for that matter, on just what drew him to declare support for the Islamic State, an organisation he is not known to have had any direct contact with. Three failed marriages, financial pressures, and mental health issues may all have played a role.

As Gusterson notes, “Mass killings are a kind of Rorschach inkblot in which people see what they fear, or what they want to see. Where some saw homophobia at work in the Orlando killings, others saw radical Islamic extremism.”

The enigma of killers

“Lone wolves,” criminologists Mark Hamm and Ramon Spaaij have observed, “tend to create their own ideologies that combine personal vendettas with broader political or religious grievances.” This poses difficulties in assigning clear-cut motives. The enigma of the lone-actor terrorist is much like other criminals. Scholars Diana Sculley and Joseph Marolla, for example, have shown there is little in the behaviours of rapists that “reliably discriminates rapists from other groups of men”.

To reach for the simple answer is human, but it is also misleading. Like other mass killers, Unrich might have been driven by his Biblical obsessions or simply found a language for his resentments in messianic togue. There’s no way to tell why his rage at homophobic comments exploded into violence—if that is what happened—nor to comprehend his psychiatric condition.

Like President-elect Donald Trump, who wrongly blamed open borders and immigration for the Bourbon Street massacre, witch hunters gather after each violent attack: Islamism, Black activism, anarchism, homosexuality, or mental illness are all easy-reach targets. There is no stereotype—or algorithm, if one wishes—which can tell us who the next Unruh or Jabbar might be. The answer might just be building societies better able to address resentments and rage, and reach out to those in need of help.

Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)