Former Radical Islamist: Sydney Attacker Isn’t ‘Lone Wolf’

Maajid Nawaz, a Daily Beast contributor, and former Islamic radical, argued that the terrorist attack in Sydney was not a “lone wolf” attack on Monday’s “AC360” on CNN.

“It is a mistake. I would use the term ‘self-starter’…it doesn’t describe the phenomenon correctly to use the term ‘lone wolf'” he declared.

He continued, “if we expect, as Mulims, if we except non-Muslims to speak out against anti-Muslim bigotry…how many times do we Muslims starting such hashtags [like the anti-bigotry #illridewithyou hashtag] to say, ‘actually, we condemn Islamist and jihadist terrorism.'”

Nawaz also argued that it was “very dangerous” to believe the attack in Sydney was a one-off attacking, saying “we have the school shootings in America as a phenomenon, and again, they aren’t one-off. But there is a difference here, and the difference is that in the case of Islamist-inspired self-starters, there’s a whole bunch of iconography and symbolism and ideology underneath it that inspires multiple one-offs. And at what stage do these multiple one-offs stop becoming one-offs and we start recognizing that we’re dealing with a phenomenon of the atomization of self-starter terrorists terrorists across the world.”

(h/t Mediaite)

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett