From schoolyard freak to cold killer

There has been a lot in the news recently about the radicalization of young Muslims by murky groups hell bent on seizing young minds. There has also been a lot unfortunately about the inherent evil nature of Islam and how this is Islam's fault. Yet if we take a step back and look at three separate instances of mass-murder committed on three separate continents we may in fact see that some other trait is omnipresent in the lives of the perpetrators.  

Below are three quotes from descriptions of three people who killed in cold-blood. I will reveal their names later but for the moment please just take time to read them and see what your initial impression is.

Number One

He was so painfully shy that he barely spoke to anyone. Whenever he did, he had this habit of pulling his hand up to his mouth. He’d done it ever since a different girl had told him in front of loads of other kids that he had bad breath. Everyone laughed. He tried to laugh it off, but it was obvious that it had hurt him. His eyes teared-up and he wandered off on his own to a corner of the playground.Girls thought he was weird and tried to stay away from him. (...) He shuffled around with his head down and his shoulders hunched. He had no ­confidence and held himself in a really nervous way. But at the same time, he wore trendy baseball caps and trainers. It made him look even more odd. Instead of coming across as cool, he became a figure of fun who everyone took the mickey out of.

Number Two

The homes of the two boys were sealed off by police, and journalists were not able to talk to their parents. Both, however, lived in respectable neighbourhoods and did not arouse the suspicions of their neighbours, who described them as predominantly taciturn and difficult to get to know.Their solidly middle-class background reflected the community as a whole, which found the tragedy particularly shocking because it imagined its school to be free of the usual urban blights of crime and dysfunction. Volunteers flooded into the area to provide counselling, food, spiritual solace and blood donations.

Number Three

He grew up an alienated and socially awkward child who unsuccessfully tried to find an identity on the (...) streets as a teenage tagger, a graffiti artist who went by the name of “Morg”. Rejected for being uncool, he reinvented himself as a salesman, making a tidy living flogging fake diplomas, until the authorities closed him down.He also joined the (...) party, intent on becoming a politician. But as with everything he tried, his personality got in the way, and once again he was rejected. Even the (...) mail order bride he ordered didn’t work out. He thought she was a “gold-digger” and she was sent back home.

Perhaps it is an oversimplification or the view of a person not in tune with the real intelligence on the matter but what seems to link these three descriptions is their banalness. These people were, to put it bluntly, loosers. They would in fact have more in common with each other than the actual ideology they supported. Who are these people? Well they are Anders Breivik, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, and Mohammed Emwazi, who were the Oslo mass-murder, Colombine shooters and Jihadi John respectively. 

I have mixed up the order of the quotes to try and illustrated a point. If you want to know which is which then please go to the bottom of the post. My point is that if you read the description without knowing the names then they are pretty much interchangeable. Whether its goth, neo-nazi or Islamic fundamentalist, the young lives are pretty much the same. All the killers were lost souls who wanted to prove something to the world. 

Any and every religion can be taken as an excuse to kill. You can either quote exact texts that support violence or misread them to support your view. If we (i.e. the West) blame religion then we are in fact missing the point. This is just an excuse. These people latch on to this fundamentalist world view as its simplifies their life. Gone are the complexities of interacting with people. Gone is the need to understand societal intricacies. Further than this they can project their identity on to this simplified utopia. They feel strangers in their own community and transpose themselves onto another identity, another culture.  

Number One: Mohammed Emwazi (http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/02/who-is-mohammed-emwazi-from-lovely-boy-to-islamic-state-executioner)
Number Two: Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/dylan-klebold-17-eric-harris-18-the-misfits-who-killed-for-kicks-1088734.html)
Number Three: Anders Breivik (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/08/one-of-us-review-compelling-anders-breivik)