Being orphaned, feeling marginalized, and "craving belonging" are not explanations for the French terrorist massacre. Islamic jihad is the only reason these two Islamic terrorists murdered the innocents. All the rest is psycho-babble.
Occam's razor, folks. Just go with it.
At the Los Angeles Times, "French terrorists were primed for trouble from the start, analysts say":
The gunmen behind France's worst terrorist attack in decades appear to have been easy prey for recruiters to violent jihad.More.
The children of immigrants, with seemingly chaotic family lives, they were frustrated by injustices they perceived around them and had been trying to make their way with few means, according to court records and experts who study terrorism networks.
"These were people who were marginalized, who broke with society. They went to prison, and they became radicalized because they needed to be heroes," said Christophe Crepin, spokesman for a French police union. "In the end, they're just barbarous assassins."
Their path to radicalization began in the seething immigrant neighborhoods on the edges of Paris.
Said Kouachi, 34, and his brother Cherif, 32, were born to a family of Algerian descent in Paris' 10th arrondissement. Their father appears to have been largely absent, and their mother struggled to raise the family's five children, Crepin said.
The brothers were placed at a young age in a center for orphaned and troubled children outside the capital. Their mother died soon after.
The pair returned to Paris around 2000 and moved into an apartment in the 19th arrondissement, an area heavily populated by migrants from France's former colonies in North Africa. They survived on odd jobs. Cherif Kouachi delivered pizzas for a time and later worked at a supermarket fish counter, according to French news reports.
Long before the brothers stormed the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7, killing 12 people, they fell under the influence of a self-proclaimed Islamist preacher they met at a local mosque.
Still in his 20s and working as a janitor, Farid Benyettou became the mentor and spiritual leader of a group of young Muslims who were angered by images of American abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison and wanted to go fight U.S. soldiers in Iraq. French authorities called them the Buttes-Chaumont network, after the picturesque park with its picnickers and hilltop views where they would go jogging.
Benyettou was just a year older than the younger Kouachi, but the brothers looked up to him because he claimed to have studied Islam and had a brother-in-law who was part of an Algerian militant group, said Jean-Charles Brisard, chairman of the Paris-based Center for the Analysis of Terrorism. They attended lessons at Benyettou's apartment, where they discussed the religious arguments for waging holy war.
Even then, Cherif Kouachi would talk about wanting to stage an attack in France, a friend told investigators. But their mentor told them the fight was elsewhere.
Some members of the Buttes-Chaumont group would later be killed in Iraq or return badly maimed, but the Kouachi brothers never made it to the war. Cherif Kouachi was arrested in a 2005 crackdown on the network that was funneling fighters. He had a plane ticket for Syria, then the gateway for fighters hoping to do battle against the U.S. in Iraq. His brother's role in the network, if any, is unclear.
At the time, the younger Kouachi told investigators he was relieved to be caught. He described himself as a "ghetto Muslim," according to the French newspaper Le Monde, a clean-shaven hipster who liked to rap and smoke marijuana with friends. He didn't want to die in Iraq, he said, but was afraid he would be called a coward if he didn't go.
Prosecutors thought he had been manipulated by a cult-like ideology and didn't consider him a serious threat. When the case wrapped up in 2008, he was sentenced to time served.
But the radicalization that had begun on the streets of Paris intensified in prison, experts say. Remanded after his arrest to Fleury-Merogis Prison south of Paris, the nation's largest, he found himself in the company of hardened extremists.
There he met the Algerian-born Djamel Beghal, regarded as one of Al Qaeda's top recruiters in Europe, and convicted in a 2001 plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris. With them was the Kouachi brothers' future accomplice, Amedy Coulibaly, serving time for one of a string of robberies.
Coulibaly, the same age as Cherif Kouachi, was born in France to parents of West African descent. The only boy in a family of 10 children, he grew up on a housing estate in Grigny, south of Paris, that is notorious for gangs, drugs and violence.
"These guys are looking for something to join, they're looking for something to identify with," said Andrew Liepman, a senior policy analyst at Rand Corp. and former principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center. "It could be a bridge club, the Boy Scouts or Al Qaeda — and there aren't a lot of bridge clubs in prison."...
Note: "Craving belonging" is how the hard-copy edition of the story described the Kouachis.
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