Farouk the victim: useless profiles and lesson for parents

These are the fundamental questions a profiler asks using the well regarded Korem System of profiling which promises to facilitate reading different types – including terrorists – the first time. It seems quite straight forward, but profiling is a tricky business even in the hands of a professional; it’s as nebulous as deciding whether a […]

These are the fundamental questions a profiler asks using the well regarded Korem System of profiling which promises to facilitate reading different types – including terrorists – the first time. It seems quite straight forward, but profiling is a tricky business even in the hands of a professional; it’s as nebulous as deciding whether a football player is onside or offside. This is because even the best systems are not reliable because character, type, and profile of a rapist, terrorist and so forth change all the time.

Therefore profiles have become like scientific theories. And if like Stephen Hawking said in A Briefer History of Time, “you can never prove it (the theory). No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time a result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of theory,” then it’s also true that we can never prove the profile of a terrorist. It’s even less reliable than a theory because while good theories could be quite consistent, even the best profiles are not.

In the past, psychologists and other experts held that a terrorist cum suicide bomber was a wretched crack head with nothing and nobody in the world and therefore nothing to lose. But events of the past few years have drilled holes in such notion. Consider the case of Humam Khalil who was responsible for the last December bombing of CIA agents – the worst attack on CIA since the 1983 Beirut blitz. Humam had everything. He was the best in the national examination and was subsequently sent to Turkey to study medicine under a bilateral scholarship scheme open to Jordanians. Again, he excelled in Turkey, finished his studies, married a Turkish lady, and went back to Jordan. Human came under the radar of the security agents during the last Israeli Gaza bombings. He berated Arab leaders for doing nothing while Israel pummelled his home country. Although he posted his writings on the Internet with an alias, the security agents found him out and arrested him. When their investigations revealed that he was still clean without clear link to Al Qaeda, they decided to use him as an agent so that the CIA could use him to get close to Taliban leaders, since his writings were widely celebrated among the radical Muslims. But Human chose to blow up his colleagues instead of working against the Taliban. He died living behind a good job, nine siblings – all of them university graduates – and a successful father who is also well educated. Remember Hassan, the American soldier who killed his colleagues, is also a doctor and therefore well educated

So is a new profile emerging? “Yes,” said a US official, “they’re extremely educated.” So if you’re a Muslim and you’re “extremely” educated, you fit the profile of a terrorist whether you like it or not. But, pray, what happens if tomorrow an uneducated terrorist is caught? Are we going to say they’re “extremely” ignorant?

It’s in this game of conjecture that Nigerian analysts and writers allowed themselves to be boxed and thus could not think outside the box.  And in doing so, some of them were insensitive and assaultive. Instead of plotting their own new profile – namely, rich kids studying abroad – they should have been perceptive enough to understand that Farouk didn’t fit the profile because there’s no profile to fit. Yet, the biographical sketches of his life taken from his close friends, Internet postings and family members give us a clear picture of his difficulties, his cries for help and how his own society victimized him.  From this picture other parents should understand the sensibilities of their young adults.

Whenever my foreign friends and acquaintances – especially professors who seek rationalization – ask me to explain Farouk’s action, I always refrain. Instead, without any fluff, I tell them the story of his life. And it’s not unusual to see them wiping tears from their eyes at the end of the story. In telling the story, I draw heavily from the anguished insider perspective that his sister, Hannatu Musawa, wrote in the Leadership newspaper and posted on gamji.com; his Internet postings as cited by Ishaq Modibbo Kawu of Daily Trust; same postings as analyzed by The Independent of London and the interviews his friends granted the media.

To be continued