At the start of March, a 51-year-old man was stabbed in Belfast, in what investigators are considering might be Northern Ireland’s first Islamist terror attack. What is new for Northern Ireland is only the latest in a string of near-weekly stabbings and other ‘low tech’ attacks inflicted on Western European targets, most notably in Germany, Austria and France.
Sometimes these attacks are indiscriminate, other times they are highly discriminate with individual targets selected well in advance. To the extent that they are commented on at all, they have usually been interpreted through the lens of the mental health of the perpetrator or described as lone actor jihadist attacks in a ‘post-organisational landscape’, to use the counter-terrorism jargon.
While the official counter-terror lexicon of most states labels such outbursts as ‘Islamist terrorism’, what authorities usually mean by that is the jihadist violence of the likes of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS). Among the steady trickle of stabbings or vehicle-ramming attacks, there are indeed those either claimed by IS – such as the 2024 Solingen mass stabbings – or those attributed to IS by the perpetrator, such as the vehicle ramming in New Orleans which ushered in the New Year. There are also those where the mental health of the attacker does indeed seem the most pertinent factor.
Beneath this though, a clear subcategory of Islamist terrorism in the truest sense of the word emerges, and which does not at all appear influenced by jihadists such as IS. The terrorists who struck Paris in 2015 or Brussels the following year hoped that their acts of mass murder would spark a conflict on the continent which would push Muslims into the arms of jihadists and lead to the establishment and expansion of an Islamic state. As much as it may have been labelled ‘senseless’ by politicians and newspapers, in fact it closely followed a logic outlined extensively in text by veteran jihadist strategists such as Abu Musab al-Suri, a man who calculated what it would take to wreak chaos in Europe from an apartment in Spain, and also London. For many of the attackers in Islamic State’s post-Caliphate era, while they share a hostility to the West with the jihadists, there is no such strategy or logic apparent.
Not only do they not have operational links to either IS or Al-Qaeda, they do not appear to have directly consumed their ideology or propaganda. Instead, their acts appear motivated by anger and moral disgust, by the perception of an irreconcilable clash between themselves and the societies around them, or finally by the crossing of certain moral red lines shared by various Islamist movements – such as perceived acts of blasphemy or injustices in Gaza.
Some of the perpetrators will give an Islamist politico-religious framework to their own personal anger and resentment, where an asylum application denied by a state and culture they deem rotten perhaps proves the final trigger for their deadly act. Others will inject their selfish and criminal deeds with the same politico-religious significance, such as the gang who kidnapped and tortured a Jewish music producer in Wales. The target was chosen for his perceived wealth, but also for his religion and as retribution for the conflict in Gaza, which provided a further layer of justification for the gang.
There may even be those who simply want to kill themselves but wish for their death to have some sort of divine coherence. Was this the case for the failed asylum seeker who tried to bomb Liverpool Women’s Hospital in November 2021? Years of investigation have found little in the way of motive for the attack and he had no ideological or operational links to a terrorist group, but we do know the terrorist had attempted a very public suicide in the past.
Then there are those who commit acts of violence and murder in response to certain moral transgressions. As well as the aforementioned kidnapping, events in Gaza have been invoked during several attacks which cannot truly be described as jihadist, including the murder of a pensioner and the stabbing of another in Hartlepool by a man claiming revenge for Palestine. Most pertinently, there was the Blackburn man who took hostages in a Texas synagogue demanding the release of Islamist cause celebre, Aafia Siddiqui.
There have also been dozens of threats, plots and attacks in response to perceived acts of blasphemy. We still do not know if Salwan Momika’s killers in Sweden were jihadists or not, but the middle-aged knife wielding man who attacked a Quran-burner in London recently is almost definitely not. Instead, he saw potentially lethal violence as a fitting and appropriate response to a specific religious provocation. A reaction which fits a logic normalised by all sorts of Islamist actors since the original ‘Satanic Verses’ affair.
Then there are those where the lines are blurred between recognisably jihadist motivations, and a broader Islamist worldview which justifies reprisals against perceived ‘Islamophobes’. In the case of the fatal stabbing of a police officer in Mannheim, Germany, in 2024, the attacker’s original target was a controversial critic of Islam, Michael Stürzenberger. The perpetrator, an Afghan man who may have flirted with IS ideas online but had no actual links to the group. He had voiced support for the Taliban, but then that makes him no more radical than countless preachers in Britain and Western Europe who have done the same.
The challenge for authorities with this new type of terrorism is that there are no cells to infiltrate, no long-prepared plots to intercept and no outward signs of traditional ‘radicalisation’ prior to an attack which might warrant surveillance.
The intellectual challenge will be even harder to stomach. It means accepting that extreme anti-Western, antisemitic, conspiratorial and even outright apocalyptic rhetoric is not the preserve of IS propaganda on the far-flung corners of the dark web. Instead, it is broadcast to much wider audiences, both online and in supposedly mainstream and respectable settings by men who on another day of the week might be sitting down with their local MP or police chief.
It is also true that while these repeated stabbings seem not to leave much of an impression on the mainstream cultural psyche, their cumulative weight, as well as the perception of a bewildered and potentially gaslighting official response, has been noted and given a voice by Europe’s populists.
While these non-jihadist Islamist terror attacks have a smaller body count than the atrocities at the Bataclan or Manchester Arena, their fallout may prove even more consequential to Western states. What’s more, should they continue, both the security and societal challenge will likely prove more complex than the threat jihadists alone ever posed.
Click here to subscribe to our daily briefing – the best pieces from CapX and across the web.
CapX depends on the generosity of its readers. If you value what we do, please consider making a donation.
