The alarming rise of the middle-aged terrorist
Police in Paris last week arrested a man suspected of planning an attack against a church. That in itself was not unusual. According to Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, since 2017 the police and intelligence services have thwarted 45 Islamist attacks.
What was different about the man detained in Paris was his age: he was 62. This is an alarming development in Europe’s ceaseless fight against Islamic extremism. In the bloody years of 2015 to 2017, when hundreds of people were slaughtered in attacks across Europe, the perpetrators were young men.
The exception was Khalid Masood. On March 22, 2017, the Briton killed five people in an Islamist attack in Westminster before he was shot dead by police. Masood, born Adrian Elms, was 52 and it wasn’t only his age that distinguished him from most other Islamist terrorists. Masood was well-educated and had for a number of years lived a typical English middle-class life.
Terrorists are usually young men because this demographic is by nature more impulsive and idealistic; many are looking for an identity, a cause, some way of finding their place in a world their immature minds find confusing.
