'Mental illness' blamed in recent attacks 'for Allah'

Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris

While police continue to investigate the Manchester and London Bridge jihadist attacks, several incidents this week conducted in the name of Allah by Muslims in Europe have gained considerably less attention, dismissed as irrational acts of the mentally ill.

In London, a man roamed a heavily Jewish area Thursday morning shouting "Allah Allah" and "I’m going to kill you all," and, in another part of the city Thursday, a nursery worker suffered broken ribs and was slashed with a knife by three women chanting "Allah will get you."

Farid Ikken

Meanwhile, in Paris, the nephew of Farid Ikken, who attacked a police officer with a hammer Tuesday outside the Notre Dame Cathedral, expressed disbelief that his uncle -- "a progressive, not an extremist" -- would declare allegiance to ISIS and perpetrate a violent act, noting the whole family is "in shock."

Ikken's former boss, Algerian journalist Kamel Medjoub, suggested, the London Express reported: “Maybe he lost it that day and attacked a police officer in a moment of madness. But I refuse to believe he would pledge allegiance to ISIS.”

However, a video of Ikken pledging allegiance to ISIS was found in his apartment in a counter-terrorism raid.

And the 22-year-old police officer who was the target of the attack said Ikken was “not crazy” and “knew exactly what he was doing."

The officer told Europe 1 radio: “I’m ready to go back to work now. Things could have been much worse.”

Ikken, 40, had worked in Sweden as a journalist, receiving the EU Commission’s National Journalist Prize Against Discrimination award in 2009 for a report on alleged racism towards migrants.

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The incident Thursday morning in the heavily Jewish area of north London, the Daily Mail of London said, was reported by a member of a Jewish neighborhood watch group called Shomrin.

Michael Scher said the man was "shouting threats, with members of the public rushing away from him, fearing for their immediate safety. Thankfully police were able to detain him, and prevent further incident."

A police spokesman told the Daily Mail the suspect was detained by officers under the Mental Health Act, and the case is "not being treated as terror-related."

In northeast London, a nursery worker suffered broken ribs after she was kicked to the ground and slashed with a knife by three women chanting "Allah will get you."

The London Evening Standard reported the incident is not being treated as a terrorist attack. A Metropolitan Police spokesman said the "Met’s Counter Terrorism Command has been made aware of the incident but is not investigating at this time."

Islam expert Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, which noted both incidents in London, commented: "This denial and willful ignorance on the part of British authorities will ultimately result in nothing less than the death of Britain."

Last August, after a 19-year-old Somali Muslim stabbed to death an American woman injured five others in a tourist-filled London square, Spencer observed to WND that authorities regularly have ascribed attacks by Muslims to mental illness only to later change their assessment to terrorism, including in the Orlando, San Bernardino and Chattanooga attacks in the United States.

In the case of the Chattanooga attack, it was five months before the FBI determined Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was a jihadist and not simply a mentally disturbed young man who suddenly snapped before shooting to death five unarmed U.S. servicemen.

“What could account for this global outbreak of mental illness that always manifests itself in similar ways?” Spencer told WND at the time. “Authorities should start asking themselves why so many mentally ill people embrace Islamic jihad violence."

'Something to do with Allah and the Quran'

In the case of the attacked nursery worker, the BBC has been accused of censorship after Twitter users said references to Allah and the Quran were edited out of a TV interview with the worker's boss, Karrien Stevens. The Twitter users note a BBC Online article has Stevens saying the women shouted out "something to do with Allah and the Quran," but that statement was cut in the TV version.

Stevens said the women pulled the nursery worker to the ground, punched her and kicked her in an attack that lasted 10 minutes.

"One of them pulled out a knife and cut her arm from her wrist to her elbow," she said, as they chanted "Allah" in the quiet, leafy street.

Last summer, WND compiled a list of more than 20 reported knife attacks by Muslims in just a two-month period, many of which were attributed to mental illness.

The Religion of Peace website, monitoring news reports, has counted 73 Islamic jihadist attacks during the first 13 days of the current Islamic Ramadan holiday, resulting in 809 deaths.

The site counts 30,973 attacks attributed to Islamic jihad since 9/11.

David Kupelian, author of “The Marketing of Evil," “How Evil Works” and his latest, “The Snapping of the American Mind,” said in a WND story last August that in response to all of the cases of jihad-type assaults that have been labeled "mental illness," the question should be asked: "Where does ‘radical Islam’ end and ‘mental illness’ begin? And what if they are the same thing?”

For more than 150 years, the legal standard for claiming innocence by reason of insanity has been the M’Naghten rule, noted Kupelian, WND vice president and managing editor, stipulating the perpetrator was unaware his criminal actions were wrong at the time he committed them, Kupelian noted.

“But by that definition, every Islamic terrorist in the world is innocent, since his religious delusions persuade him that not only is it right and moral to massacre innocent men, women and children, but it is mandatory, required by their god as a prerequisite for salvation,” he said.

In his book ‘How Evil Works,’ Kupelian provides evidence the Western world is in the grip of a massive case of "Stockholm syndrome," in which governments and journalists "have essentially befriended the enemy sworn to destroy them."

“One manifestation of this syndrome," Kupelian said, "is these reflexive, almost comical, efforts by Western authorities to eliminate jihad as a motive, no matter how obvious the truth is to everyone else.”

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