EPISTO!

So, last week we talked about the Midi-Pyrénées/Toulouse shootings.

The facts of the mat­ter are ably described by this Wiki­pe­dia art­icle, so I won’t go into much detail about the case itself but, rather, I’ll assume you know about the shoot­ings and so I will focus, instead, on the twin mat­ters of whether Merah was an Al Qaeda oper­at­ive and whether he had an accomplice.

As I said on the show, claim­ing you are linked to or part of an organ­isa­tion does not, in itself, tell oth­ers that you are a mem­ber of that organ­isa­tion. I can claim to be a mem­ber of the Real IRA, but unless the Real IRA comes for­ward and says “Yep, one of us,” then what I say about my mem­ber­ship of an organ­isa­tion can, in some cases, mean very little.

So, whilst Merah is repor­ted to have claimed he worked for Al Qaeda, this does not mean he actu­ally did.

Oh, it’s true he has the right back­ground and spent time in areas where we know Al Qaeda oper­at­ives have been trained¹, so it’s not out of the ques­tion that Merah was tied to Al Qaeda in some way. How­ever, as people often false claim or exag­ger­ate their affil­i­ations, it might well be the case that Merah tried to join Al Qaeda and even acted in a way he thought Al Qaeda would approve of, but this, in itself, is not proof that he was an Al Qaeda operative.

Now, I’m quite away that there are a lot (an awful lot) of hypo­thet­ic­als and con­di­tion­als in the last few para­graphs (I’m hedging my bets because, as I said, he might well have been a mem­ber of that organ­isa­tion), but it’s import­ant to be just a little scep­tical about these mat­ters. It’s well attested to in the lit­er­at­ure that people and organ­isa­tions take the credit for things they didn’t do, includ­ing tak­ing credit for the ter­ror­ist activ­it­ies of other organ­isa­tions. It’s also well attested that as soon as you say “X was (prob­ably) part of group Y” people will often assume that it is the case that X was part of group Y (not the drop­ping of the “prob­ably” clause). It’s also well-attested that people will assume that if someone alleges that X is part of a group, they will assume said group actu­ally exists; one of the biggest issues I had with the media report­age on the Urew­era 4 was the assump­tion that because the police said they were part of a crim­inal group, that this meant that the 4 (pre­vi­ously 17) were actu­ally a group with an hier­archy, et al, rather than 4 people who happened to know one another, happened to have been at some of the same places together but may not have been in any way form­ally affil­i­ated with one another.

Now, all this being said, this doesn’t say that we should ignore Merah’s repor­ted claim; we just need to be care­ful in assess­ing such claims about Merah’s actions being in some way endorsed by Al Qaeda.

More inter­est­ing, to my mind, is the claim that Merah might have had an accom­plice. On the day he holed him­self up in his apart­ment, he also sent a video to Al Jaz­eera, detail­ing his killings. It is, appar­ently, very slick and well-edited, to the extent that some com­ment­at­ors (and it’s not clear that these com­ment­at­ors have even seen the video) think that Merah could not have fin­ished the video, pos­ted it and then sent it on to Al Jaz­eera without help (the kind of help, it is claimed, that must have been privy to the con­tents of the video).

Hav­ing not seen the video (and I do not want to see it, either), I can’t say for cer­tain that it is the case that Merah had an accom­plice, but it’s not out of the ques­tion. How­ever, just because it’s pos­sible that he had an accom­plice, that doesn’t mean we should imme­di­ately jump to the con­clu­sion, as some have done, that because the French police took Merah’s brother into cus­tody that he must be the accom­plice in question.

A lot of people (but surely not you, dear reader(n+1)) will take claims like “He said he worked for Al Qaeda” and “Police think he had an accom­plice; look, his brother has been arres­ted!” at face value and say “So mote it be!” (or, if they aren’t Aleister Crow­ley, will say “Look, proof!”). Now, it might very well be the case that he was an Al Qaeda oper­at­ive and had an accom­plice, but claims that he was and had must be backed up with proof, not just mere assertions.

Obvi­ous, really, but appar­ently not so obvi­ous that every­one knows it.

Notes

1. We also know he spent time as a Legion­naire — well, most of a day, really — but no one seems to link­ing that strange mer­cen­ary group to Merah’s recent actions.