Read on, and you will find out that a man genuinely did believe that Mr Blair was his guardian angel. Might it change your mind on the problem of mental illness and terrorism? I doubt it. But I thought it worth a try.
I shall fall silent on the subject of drugs and violence for a while after this, not because it isn’t important but because I am sick of fending off the boneheadedly stupid responses which my work on this subject attracts from people who (for various reasons) are frantic not to believe what is in front of their noses, and who in many cases believe (madly, given that I am a Christian and a Zionist) that I am trying to excuse Islamism.
I suspect a lot of them are Trumpoids, fanatics for whose reasoning power there seems to be no hope, and the rest are drug-lobbyists, who at least have a rational motive for the garbage they emit. But I have this terrible urgent feeling that I need to rebut each of their idiotic comments, and it wears me out that, having done so, I then have to endure a second and a third wave who say exactly the same thick things, as if I have never offered my rebuttal.
But I was very struck by the coverage on Tuesday, of the sentencing of the once-famous ‘terrorist’ threat, Muhiddin or sometimes Muhaydin Mire. It was a lot less prominent than the original huge media response to his original crime, a knife-attack on an innocent passer-by at Leytonstone Tube Station. Quite a lot of it still treated the action as if it was political. How on earth could they do this? It was revealed during the trial that Mire had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act as long ago as 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/27/leytonstone-tube-attacker-muhiddin-mire-psychotic-court-told
He was prescribed drugs and propelled back into the community. Of course, he stopped taking the drugs. Many, perhaps most, do.
And Mire seriously believed Tony Blair to be his Guardian Angel.
I must ask, how can someone in the grip of such a delusion possibly be considered rational?
As ‘The Guardian’ reported, Mire ‘was put in touch with a community mental health team upon his release [from mental hospital], but soon lost contact with them and stopped taking the medication. In the years before the attack, Mire became increasingly unwell and was likely exhibiting symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, a serious mental illness for which he is now receiving treatment.
Among “strange” ideas Mire had was a belief that former prime minister Tony Blair was his guardian angel and that he had been possessed by evil spirits, the court heard.
His paranoid delusions later manifested themselves in a belief that he was under surveillance by the security services and was being followed.’
So the real story is perhaps, 'Severely mentally ill man released on to street, where he later savagely attacked an innocent passer-by.'
Yet most of the media have decided to view it through the crimson-tinted lens of ‘terrorism’ and ‘Islamic State’.
Some of you may recall me writing about this odd episode two months ago
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/he-wasnt-no-terrorist-bruv-reflections-on-the-leytonstone-knife-outrage.html
It was clear then that Mire was seriously unhinged, so much so that his own family had very responsibly tried to get something done about it, very difficult since the ‘care in the community’ frenzy launched by Enoch Powell in 1961 in this insufficiently famous speech http://studymore.org.uk/xpowell.htm
closed most of the old mental hospitals.
But (I forget their actual wording) the BBC (increasingly in the grip of a security service agenda on these matters) and ‘The (neoconservative) Times’ , among others, have continued to report the matter as if it were a political event. The full Times report is behind a paywall, so here are some extracts:
It opens with ‘A fanatic inspired by Islamic State who tried to behead a musician at a London Underground station has been sentenced to life imprisonment and will be detained at Broadmoor after being found guilty of attempted murder.’
The phrase ‘inspired by Islamic state’ , like its close relative ‘who had sworn allegiance to Islamic state’ handily gives the impression of a connection to organised terror without actually having to demonstrate that Islamic State was aware of the person’s existence, or cared what he did. Downloading some video (which any idiot could do) or burbling some formula of words, or allegedly shouting ‘Allahu Akhbar!’ (there’s always someone who says they did shout this) is enough. The matter is settled.
The account recorded that he yelled "This is for Syria, I'm going to spill your blood" as he stabbed the man at Leytonstone station in east London last December.’
Only after they had got this material off their chests did they mention that Mire ‘ has a history of mental illness and his desperate family had taken him to imams to exorcise jinns, or evil spirits. He will be detained indefinitely at Broadmoor and if ever deemed well enough to be sent to prison must serve a minimum of eight-and-a-half years.’
This priority is perhaps because of the weird remarks of the Judge, Nicholas Hilliard, QC, the Recorder of London. He opined at the Old Bailey that Mire ‘had not "lost touch with reality" (PH asks:Really? he thought Tony Blair was his guardian angel, and he had not lost touch with reality?) and had smoked strong cannabis before the attack, which may have affected him. He said that mental illness may have had a "disinhibiting effect" but that Mire was motivated by an "independent interest in extremism". "It was not carried out secretly but very brazenly, indeed to further an ideological cause, namely Islamic extremism. Comments made afterwards aligned him with that murderous cause," the judge added. "The defendant was aware at the time he was killing a blameless person."’
I doubt myself if Mire knows now or knew then where Syria is or what is happening there. His family had reported that he was seeing demons. It was reported (I repeat) at his trial that he believed (really) that Tony Blair was his guardian angel.
They were not trying to excuse him. They had gone to the police *before* he struck, to try and get him taken into some sort of care or custody. As the report states, they had twice taken him to hospital casualty departments and twice reported him to the police. Can you imagine the level of desperation and concern which would get you to try four times to get your own close relative confined in a mental hospital? And yet even now a senior judge and a major newspaper treat the case as if it is primarily political and the person involved (whose attack on a person wholly unconnected with any political issue, is utterly absurd and unhelpful to any conceivable cause as well as frighteningly crazy) is a rational actor.
The Guardian gave the most interesting account. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/01/leytonstone-knife-attacker-isis-muhiddin-mire-sentenced-to-xxxx
which revealed a dispute between two doctors about the nature of Mire’s state of mind. One, the Broadmoor forensic psychiatrist Shaun Bhattarcharjee, said something very interesting indeed, for those with open minds: ‘Bhattacharjee told the court the prevailing culture – in this case a heightened state of tension over Islamic terrorism – could often inform schizophrenics’ delusions. As an example, Bhattacharjee said in the 1970s some paranoid schizophrenics experienced delusions related to the IRA and Irish terrorism.’
In short, crazy people identify with whatever wild causes are available at the time. Their ‘allegiances’ to these bodies are not fundamentally political.
I really cannot see how it is possible to say with such firmness as the Judge used, what motivated Mire. What is clear is that he had been sane before he took up cannabis, and that his own family believed he had become irrational after he took up using the drug. And what is also clear is that nine years before his crime, he was so mentally ill that even the NHS put him into a mental hospital, something it is very reluctant to do.
One of the others to report the sentencing, the Daily Telegraph, took a different angle. Though crammed with psychospeak, it came much closer to acknowledging that Mire was irrational, saying : ‘A PARANOID schizophrenic attempted to murder a Tube station commuter because his addiction to skunk cannabis had altered his brain to make him believe he was being followed by MI5, a court has heard….’ Adding ‘…Dr Philip Joseph, a forensic psychiatrist, told the court Mire's cannabis use made a "significant" contribution to his paranoia.’
Yes, I rather suppose it did.