Yarn 22 | Lone Actor Terrorism
[This conversation was automatically transcribed so it may contain errors.]
The Oklahoma City bombing of 1995…
The 2011 Norway attacks…
The 2016 Nice truck attack…
The three separate 2017 London attacks at London bridge, Westminister and Finsbury Park…
The 2019 Christcurch, New Zealand shootings…
What do all these terrorist attacks have in common?
They were all formulated, planned and executed by a single individual.
And some of them have become infamous household names like Anders Breivik, Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski.
The popular fear of lone actor attacks is that they are completely unpredictable and so almost impossible to prevent.
What motivates someone to carry out these heinous acts?
Can attacks like this be prevented?
These are some of the questions this guy is trying to answer…
Dr. Frank O’Connor.
For the past few years Dr. O’Connor and his colleagues have been funded by the EU Commission to research Lone actor attacks.
They have collected what they think is the largest dataset of Lone actor attacks and attackers in the world. It dates from 1990 until the present .
Dr. O’Connor is a native of Limerick, Ireland but he’s now settled in Colonge Germany, where he’s agreed to talk to me about his work over a zoom call.
I started off by asking Dr. O’Connor what was the focus of their research and how extensive is the data set they work from?
Dr. O’Connor:
Our job was to look at the early stage of loan actor radicalization. So what takes a so called normal person and leads them to take the steps that convinced them that violence is first necessary, and a positive thing, and then actually take the next step again, and carry out an attack on their own. And we worked on the basis of a database that was gathered by actually an Irish academic called Paul Gill at University College London, he’s like the key figure in the field of lone actor radicalization. Since then, which also coincided with a big peak in loan actor violence. We just continued gathering the data. So building on his original data set, now we’re up to around 310 cases. 309 cases, I think I added two or three yesterday, this data set covers the entire English speaking world, more so in Western Europe, especially Scandinavia, and Germany, because of my colleagues who are involved speaking the relevant languages. And of course, then there’s some cases which are more international. But for Western Europe, North America, it is, I would say, extremely representative.
Interviewer:
So how do you actually conduct the research on those cases? Do you interview people, Get primary sources or is it through media reports?
Dr. O’Connor:
So the first thing, when you’re talking about lone actor radicalization, its a low frequency phenomenon. I mean, we’ve looked at 1990 up to 2021. And we have 300 odd cases. So that’s an extremely low level.
So if you compare that, I don’t know, to any other types of violence, like non-political violence, like I don’t know, domestic violence, people murdering their wives or their husbands, criminal violence, I mean, you’re looking at 10s and 10s, and 10s of 1000s of cases. So it is a low data set. So the data isn’t there to try and see regressions, and quantitative analysis, it’s a very small data set we have, of course that limits us.
The other issue is that an a lot of loan actors, they die in the course of the attacks, they’re not available to interview, even if you want to interview them. And it also means that there usually isn’t a court case, which also removes some forms of data.
So court documents are really, for anyone that works in political violence are a really good source of data. I mean, of course, all court systems have inherent biases. So it’s not perfect, but it’s a very good source of data.
So for example, the Anders Breivik trial, you have an awful lot of information about it. So there was a lot of information that came out in the in the course of that trial.
Then of course, sometimes there’s trials, like the Christchurch attacker, the guy who attacked the mosque in New Zealand and killed 50 odd people, he just didn’t, didn’t really engage, we didn’t learn anything from it.
So usually in that case, we did get some primary source documents, but not for many cases. So we had some where we got restricted information from Police, from judicial documents and reports, which were not made publicly available. But through specific channels, as academics, we did apply. But for the most amount of the cases you have, we relied on publicly available court documents. And then for a large span of the cases, a lot of it is secondary data. So that’s newspaper reports, things like that.
And a lot of that is also some kind of analysis of their online behavior. If you’re lucky enough to get their Facebook page before it’s taken down.
So it’s kind of a mixture. And the other big issue is, of course, so our cases cover from 1990 to 2021, which is 30 odd years, but you have much less data from the case from 1995.
Firstly, because we’re retrospectively analyzing it. And secondly, because I mean, you don’t have the quantity of data. You didn’t have Facebook, you didn’t have their Twitter page profiles, and so on.
So when I hear about an attack, anywhere at all, I immediately go looking for as much information as I can and get as many articles.
And you can’t do that for some guy in Oklahoma in 1995, or something. We don’t have perfect data on these cases.
That’s probably the most challenging part of our work. And even when you do, for example, access to their social media. I mean, you have to be very careful with how you use that because they’re specifically tailored that and they try to guide the media and academics down specific pathways.
And you see that a lot in these manifestos that have become very prominent. The Christchurch attacker left a manifesto, Brevik left a manifesto. And in the case of the Christchurch Manifesto, there’s this phenomenon of shitposting, where they just put in any nonsense, inside jokes that people in specific, not even the broader far right extremist milieu, but specific subgroups online, I would get these kind of jokes.
So I mean, you have to be very cautious with how that’s used. And sometimes you see people taking what’s said at face value, many things that these guys deliberately put out there to mislead you. It’s a tricky thing. I’d like to think of course, with experience that you get better at it and so on. But it’s not the data that is a fundamental issue, either. It’s the scarcity of the data or sometimes theres too much data, which is deliberately there just to fuck around a little bit like.
Interviewer:
Before we get into it properly, I just wanted to clear something with you about the term Lone Wolf, I think I used it at the top but you don’t like that term, am I right? Why is that?
Dr. O’Connor:
I mean, the first point is that the academic consensus, for the most part, not 100% is that we try to avoid the term Lone Wolf.
It’s a kind of a misleading impression, because it gives this notion of a Lone Wolf. Also, apart from zoologically, it doesn’t make sense. But this kind of guy on the margins, a bit of a glamorous kind of hero of the night, and then he attacks.
I mean, they’re not like that, most of them are kind of losers.
And it so that’s why we avoid using that term because it tends to glamorize these guys. So we use the term lone actor, which is fairly boring and dry.
The term Lone Wolf actually comes from the American far right. Up until forever 1960s 70s groups like the Klan were essentially everywhere.
And these are by any standards, far right extremists, far right terrorists.
Then they declined in power over time. And there’s loads of excellent research done on this. And what you had was very fragmented American far right. Active small groups, all fighting with each other over ideological terms.
And by the 1980s they weren’t really achieving very much. And they weren’t capable of serious violence. A man called Lewis Dean came up with this idea of leaderless resistance instead.
It was every American patriot or so-called patriot; it was their duty to carry out attacks on their own because the group were being infiltrated by the FBI. He says you don’t need to have a huge plot, just do it. And so in the American far right milieu, it’s extremely common.
Interviewer:
So for your research how do you defining a Lone actor attack? Does it have to meet certain criteria to get into your dataset?
Dr. O’Connor:
The first thing is, it has to be political.
So somebody that does something with is expressly linked to a political goal.
For example, a school shooter, which in essence, can go and kill people. But that’s not political. If you had a school shooting that someone went into school and said, I’m killing all the black students because I believe in white supremacy, that would be a lone actor attack.
But if you take the classic school shootings, none of those are lone actor attacks.
The political element, that’s hard sometimes to find out. You have a lot of poor media reporting and journalism. A few weeks ago in Colorado, I think, a guy carried out a shooting in in a supermarket, who was a Syrian refugee from 2001. He was 19 or 20 years old who was apparently angry about racism, he felt people were discriminating against him. He was a Syrian guy and a Muslim, but I mean, we have to find out more information. He will be tried in court. So he’s a very hard person to place. Just because you’re a Muslim doesn’t mean it’s a jihadist attack. The same goes, if you’re a white person, its not automatically a white supremacist attack.
The process of figuring it out is a very iterative one. You include someone but then you get more information and see actually, he’s not a lone attacker, then you take them out. So it’s over and back.
The second criteria is that you’re not a member of a group or acting on behalf of a group.
So I’m not a member of the IRA, or whichever group you want. Like Al Qaeda saying youre a suicide bomber, go there on your own, carry out an individual attack. So that’s an individual attack, but it’s not a lone actor attack because you’re acting on behalf of a group, the attack is planned by a group. You’re just essentially a foot soldier.
And the last criteria is that you’re not under the command of anybody else. The plan is initiated by yourself. But also our influences are collectively shaped. And it’s a relational process.
So those are three main criteria, then to get into the nitty gritty there also has to be a degree of intentionality and planning. So a big misconception is that most loan actors have year-long plans.
The planning of lone actor attacks tends to be much, much shorter than what’s popularly perceived. It’s just that the most high profile cases like the Unabomber and Anders Breivik, they’re much the exception.
I mean, you have most guys who carry out the attack after a day or two of planning or a week or a month.
So for example, we don’t include in our research, a lot of these sovereign citizens in America who get stopped at a traffic stop by some regular cop because their Jeep is uninsured. However, then a fight breaks out, they shoot the cops, I mean, this isn’t an intentional ly planned attack.
So the main criteria is; a political element, not to be doing it on behalf of an armed group and for it to be a self-initiated, pre-planned attack.
Interviewer:
I guess the big question then is — Why do these people carry out attacks?
Is there a specific psychological profile or a set of circumstances or is there a certain background that leads someone to becoming a lone actor?
Dr. O’Connor:
So you have different approaches that emphasize different aspects of why lone actors carry out attacks.
The original one was this kind of focus on their mental wellbeing. So they were taken as people who were mentally unstable. And I mean, then you have a whole lot of psychological and psychiatric, almost medical research on these guys.
Forensic, let’s say not medical, where they look at their mental state. Why are they having delusions and so on?
So for example, mental illness is not a sufficient grounds to explain why someone carries out an attack, because if you consider that roughly 1/3 of the Western European population is considered to have different forms of mental illness, it’s not sufficient.
And then you have others, that look very much at their ideology, the ideology that they profess. Ideology is also not sufficient, because you have all these people who believe refugees aren’t welcome in Europe or are unbelievers and should be killed, whatever.
You have millions of people who believe these things, but they don’t carry out this behavior. So what we wanted to look at, and it was a developed from by myself and my two colleagues, Stephen Martin, or lassa, Linda, Gilda, and they, they came up with it and we worked on it together, was this notion of relational perspective.
We consider loneliness, to be alone, as a relational configuration in the sense that in the world that we live in, nobody’s born alone, nobody lives alone. We wanted to see how did they get to this point where they decided to carry out an act of political violence on their own.
So we looked at the relationships that they had that were then broken off to get to this point. We want to look a little bit more at the context around it. The social ties, the connections with other groups, or the breaking of connections with other groups, to connections within their immediate social environment. For example, if you look at a lot of these individuals, their attack is preceded by some type of personal misfortune- their wife leaves them, it’s generally men of course, which is another issue. The wife leaves them. Their father dies, they lost their job, they went bankrupt.
So you have this combination. We want to look at how these ties interacted. Rather than looking at an abstract sense of ‘I hate Jews’ and ‘I hate foreigners’. Like that doesn’t explain why in this specific case, this person carries out an attack.
We developed this relational phenomenon. And our main finding from it was that you have kind of two broad patterns of loan actor radicalization. The first one was of guys who share the same views as existing groups. But they never really managed to get into these groups, they were always left in the outskirts of these groups. And that we found different patterns.
One pattern was of guys who are just simply quite withdrawn, or people are not very self confident. People who don’t impose themselves. So they kind of go unnoticed by these groups.
Then we found people like Anders Breivik, is the best example who were for pathological and non-pathological reasons; extremely annoying. People who can’t get on with people. Brevik tried to join every group you can imagine. And he kept getting rejected. It’s kind of amazing that no one was really taking him seriously.
And another group that we found, which was especially common amongst some of the jihadist attackers, is this kind of volatile character in and out of a criminal lifestyle He goes into jail and out of jail, not really reliable. So even though they had contacts, like family contacts, no one really trusted them because they were too volatile.
So those are the guys who are kept on the outside for these different reasons, which are a combination of personality. So that was one pattern we observed.
And the second pattern we observed as people who are who had very successful, if you will, radical militant careers. But at some point, they are kicked out for different reasons. One of our case studies, it was a Somalian Danish man, who had a very successful career in Al Shabaab in Somalia. And then he was kind of essentially doing a commuting type of insurgency where he was going to Somalia fighting for X amount of time, then he’d come back to Denmark and go back and forth.
He unsuccessfully tried to kill one of the Danish cartoons. And he was arrested, kind of by chance in Kenya, by the authorities. And then he was sent back to Denmark. And the radical al Shabaab group there in Denmark, they were going;
“Why is this guy arrested in Kenya, and then, after a few weeks release, not put in prison sent back to Denmark?”
So they were very suspicious of him. And he was essentially marginalized from this community. You have to imagine you’re someone who believes, you have internalized this, you are someone who believes in this group’s ideology and their goals. So he decided to carry out an attack as a way to kind of redeem himself.
And the other group that we found, and this is quite common amongst far-right groups, is that guys are involved in their local Nazi scene or local Patriots or are sovereign citizens or whatever group you want but they’re just talking about doing something. These guys think;
“I have to do it because if I don’t do it, nobody else will.”
So these guys are not isolated at all, you know, they potentially could have been part of an underground terrorist group or an underground armed group. These types tend to be strong, self-confident, self-assertive people who view themselves as essentially better than their comrades.
Interviewer:
In my introduction there I named a few of the best known attacks, or at least best known to me. And the periods in between them seemed to get shorter and shorter.
I named three from London that happened in the same year, 2017. I was living in London at the time and it seemed like every couple of months, there was a new lone actor attack. What was it about that period in time and space? Why was there a peak?
Dr. O’Connor:
So I mean, that’s exactly what we’re looking at in this book that we’re writing. If you imagine lone actor radicalization, which is not a new phenomenon, do you have the anarchist examples of the 19th century, but as a phenomenon it’s much more prominent now.
It’s a new field in the academic world. There’s no simple answer for it yet, but we do have some preliminary findings.
You have a clear cluster in Germany of far-right attacks by organized groups and by individuals around the refugee crisis, and I’ll get back to your London point now, in a minute.
So what you have there is, it’s a correlation causation, if you will, between the increased presence in the media of constant talk about refugees. And then of course, refugees were actually here. So let’s say you live in some disadvantaged part of East Germany where there’s a lot of people that are sympathetic to the far-right extremism, but you don’t have that many foreigners there. So I mean, if you’re someone who’s probably never even been to Berlin, next thing you know, there is a center set up with 30 guys from Afghanistan, then you have a target.
And this is where we have to look at the macro level. And you can’t just say, because there’s various politicians at the national level, then something happens, we have to investigate this relationship much more. But if the arguments you hear in your local village, from your local Nazi buddies, are also been echoed in the Bundestag or in mainstream news outlets and newspapers, then I mean, you have to feel empowered, and you can carry out an attack because there’s a target nearby, I mean, you can find someone to attack.
So they all clustered around. And then what we looked at was a thing called encouragement cues. So let’s say you have all the ingredients in the past, you know, you have in your head, whoever your adversaries are, you’re having a personally shit time, your girlfriend dumped you, your business is going bankrupt, we have all these things and you’re gonna go;
“Oh, god, my life is actually going terrible.”
What’s the next step to act? What we’ve discovered is indirect encouragement cues. You have direct encouragement cues, which would be when we’ll say, ISIS figures we’re saying run people over with your car for Islam. So that’s a direct encouragement. So identify with carry out an attack.
So I mean, it’s very hard when you see someone in Russia did something and I’m not Russian, I don’t speak Russian. It’s like, when your former fat friend takes up running, and then he’s like, really fit and you’re going;
“Shit, if he can do it, I can do it too.”
Whereas I mean, you’re not going to be able to relate to some Olympic level runner.
In the years you were living in London you had. And there’s also another dynamic which is this escalation between the two so your right wing guys attack Muslim community or whatever, you’ve Britain first and that Robinson prickwandering around.
So you have this kind of escalating dynamic. So it kind of envelops you. And next thing you see some guy who looks like you, who could be you, carries out an attack so you think;
“Why wouldn’t I do it, like? What’s my excuse? This guy’s doing it, he’s fighting back.”
So these kind of encouragement cues, which we called indirect encouragement cues is one reason. So that’s why you tend to seem to have clusters in time and space. And in London at the time you were there you also had right wing attacks, you had the case of the Welsh guy who drove down to London ran over a guy in Finsbury Park, outside the Finsbury Park center. So you have this back and forth. I mean, his attack was a response in his own self justification way at one of the attacks which had happened either London Bridge or the Westminster attack.
So you have this kind of reciprocal escalation between the two. You’re having indirect encouragement cues, and in the London case in specific areas, at that point it was quite difficult to go to Syria to fight.
So years before you had people just flying to Turkey and then wandering down to the Syrian border. So those things tend to come together.
And why is there clusters in specific places and specific, some of the clusters can also be that because in certain cities, you have much stronger, what are called radical milieus or different movements groups. So for example, if you look at England, you tend to have this, at least in our data set, you have a disproportionate amount of people from Yorkshire. So I mean, that’s probably a reflection that in Yorkshire you have a stronger far-right scene. And some of these guys eventually fall out of the movements and carry out attacks.
Interviewer:
When a lone actor plans an attack, is it usually part of their plan to get caught or get killed, do any of them have a plan to get away?
And does their exit strategy differ depending on the ideology they prescribe to?
Dr. O’Connor:
This is exactly one of the questions I’ve added a new column to my data set, exactly stating the outcome; suicide killed by police, arrested or escaped. And I want to see or we want to see rather, does it vary between jihadists? Does it vary with far-right, and so on?
I can’t tell you the precise data yet. We have the data, we just have to work through it. Someone like Anders Breivik very consciously handed himself in because he wanted to use his trial as a platform, he was really angry when he was first condemned as having mental illness and not being fit to stand trial because he wanted to share his views with the world.
Others like Brendan Tarrant, the Christchurch attacker, didn’t actually use his court case. Some of these guys playing a very long game. In their own heads, they have long term plans, you know, they’re gonna go be the guy that goes to prison and radicalizes people in prison, or they’re going to be a martyr by being in prison.
So I don’t have we don’t have the data to say how many people and whose ideology, or which countries at the moment. From my own personal experience, I mean, theyre not necessarily planning to die, but also theyre not too upset if they die in the process.
But then you have the case of the guy who did the shooting of the American soldiers at Frankfurt Airport in 2010. And he handed himself over directly to the police because he didn’t want to shoot any German policemen. And he didn’t really use his court case as a platform. So it depends a lot on the different individuals and so on. So I can’t give you any conclusive answer regarding patterns across ideologies but it is something we are actively looking at.
But most don’t get away with it, which is one point. You have a few guys like Eric Rudolph, the guy who put the bomb at the Atlanta Olympic Games. He was on the run for years. And of course, Ted Kaczynski wasnt even on the run, he was just hanging out in the woods for 20 odd years. But those guys are definitely the exception. Very few to get away with it.
Interviewer:
How big a part does online radicalization play? Theres a certain narrative out there sometimes that, to parents, that your kid could be radicalized right under your nose, in their own bedroom, and they can become a terrorist. From your data, have these lone actors been radicalized online?
Dr. O’Connor:
What tends to happen is someone carries out an attack and is shot by the police. First thing you do is you look at his Facebook. And then you see on his Facebook, this guy is friends with x and y jihadi organizations, and he follows all the Twitter accounts of ISIS in Syria. It’s online radicalization.
Whereas in fact, in many of these cases, there’s a dimension of confirmative bias. There’s no need to go dig any more. For example, the Hala killer. His mother is an open anti-Semite. I mean, he was radicalized online, but he also had an antisemitic mother, people in his family had these views. So it’s a combination, usually a combination of the two.
In my experience, it’s usually a mixture of online radicalization, where you take your views and then you validate them with your buddies.
So it’s between the two. And if you compare, like how technology developed, so we don’t really have fully offline spaces anymore, you know, you’re on WhatsApp you don’t have the boundary between the two. It isn’t like 1998, where you had to go home, turn on your PC, slow internet, you could only afford to use it for X amount of time. So I mean, the online, the offline, there are complementary realms of radicalization rather than separate.
Some of the very smart lads also shape the data that they leave online, the more computer savvy ones, and I think there’s a danger of focusing on it too. But that this is a part of the back and forth between online and offline.
Interviewer:
But like he said, you look for people around you who agree with you. Now, because the world is so interconnected, someone living in the middle of nowhere can find like minded people, easily even if they’re 1000s of miles away. They weren’t able to do that before the internet, right?
Dr. O’Connor:
I mean, that’s true. But the other point is that all the research that we know, on collective radicalization, the biggest predictor of being in an armed group, is having a friend or family member involved in violence.
We still don’t have the evidence that purely online relationships are strong enough to motivate people to carry out violence. So I mean, I don’t know any cases, that I’m convinced by. And the media plays a bigger role in this as well. I think there’s has a tendency to over focus on it because a lot of the attacks in recent times haven’t been like been carried out by people using discord forums or people using telegram. The guy who stabbed the candidate at the time, the current mayor of Cologne in the neck in 2015, I think was just an old-fashioned Nazi. He was someone who belonged in this milieu. And then he just stabbed her. He wasn’t online, in any sense.
If we just focus on these cases of people who stylize their own radicalization online, I think that that isn’t as productive a usage of our time and efforts as would be to consider these as complimentary realms.
Interviewer:
Has your research.. Are their any aspects of the research in general that has a practical application in preventing attacks or can it inform security approaches?
Dr. O’Connor:
Unfortunately, as academics, we don’t set the policies. But what we discover is we have a lot of cases of people who are released from prison, recently released from prison.
So for example, if you’re in prison, you can have a social network and there you have your structured life, you come out, maybe your family doesn’t want to have anything to do with you, maybe your partner has left with your children, you can’t find a job because your criminal record, and you’re left with nothing there, you’re really adrift. So I mean, if people who are known to have radical views or have been convicted for active political extremism, are closely supervised, and also supported once they leave prison.
There’s many cases in our data set, which could have been potentially prevented. So that’s a kind of an academic finding, which could, if it was carefully considered, by the relevant bodies could remove people getting killed in terrorist attacks.
A securitized approach wouldn’t prevent a lot of these facts alone. So I mean, if you lived in a society where the social services have better support, if you had better paid, better trained social workers who are in disadvantaged neighborhoods, these should be open channels for someone to notice;
“This guy is acting a bit weird. Maybe someone should go and have a chat with him.”
And I don’t mean to police. So Aarhus in Denmark had a very big problem with foreign fighters leaving to fight in Somalia and then later in Syria, and they developed this really impressive comprehensive network where the police are only involved as a last resort. You have the likes of neighborhood mentors, football coaches, boxing coaches, clerics, lads involved in motorbikes, clear channels where cases which would cause worry are brought to the attention of other people who can help them and point them in the right direction.
Many times it’s just, and I mean I don’t want to go all Oprah Winfrey, but it’s kind of a cry for help. But the problem with this is it’s time intensive, you need a lot of resources. It’s multifaceted. But then theres no attacks so how can you prove this system worked. But it’s not just a question of policing them.
Interviewer:
Okay so this is my last question… and its kind of a broad one…
Why do we care about terrorism so much? Either lone actors or groups.
Isn’t that what makes terrorisim so effective?
Should we just ignore it,It’s disproportially reported and talked about.
I mean in the western world, I think the biggest killer of people is heart disease. Why worry so many people and give so much attention to terrorism, to something that only effects a tiny number of people each year?
Dr. O’Connor:
No, I mean, that’s a good question, it’s an interesting question. So first of all, in many senses, terrorism is a useful thing depending who’s carrying out the terrorism.
For governments. I mean, you have the classic Donald Trump using any type of attacks to scapegoat Muslims. Or unpopular right wing governments, Sarkozy and now, Macron. You know, like in France, like this madness that they have at the moment, because of this terrible attack for when that poor teacher was killed. I mean, this is something that Macron is using for his election campaign.
The question, should we just ignore it. No. I mean, I don’t think you should, in the same way, you could say, criminal domestic violence, more women are killed by their partners each year. And we don’t focus on it, maybe we should, maybe the same attention should be put on violence in the home and this specific patterns of anti women violence.
In my opinion it would be important to look at why men tend to kill their close female relatives and partners.
So there’s a moral obligation, because it’s also not a little amount you know what I mean, like that time a few years ago, for the French Bastille Day. A guy I drove a truck into 85 people. That’s, that’s a lot. None of those people had to die.
Wuth heart disease. I mean, it’s so multifactorial. Heart disease, in many ways, is just a product of getting old. You know, it’s kind of inevitable. No matter how healthy you live, you could get heart disease.
So I think it’s important. For example, I think your point is correct. And so I mean, a lot of media coverage is very unhelpful as well. So how terrorist or political violence is talked about in the media or by by authorities is a relevant thing that we can improve upon, which might, in fact, also preclude or lessen the likelihood of further terror attacks.
I mean, don’t glamorize it. So I think we should improve how we talk about terrorism is something that can be improved upon at a government level, a media level, an academic level, and people who should know better to be honest and stop inviting fucking Nazis and Nazi apologists on TV. Remember a few years ago Pat Kenny had that Calid Kelly guy who later went on to blow himself up in Syria or Iraq. Don’t have those guys on to talk. Don’t give these guys a platform.
-
Thank you to Dr. Francis O’Connor for talking to me.
He has a book coming out soon…
On a totally separate subject..
Its called — Understanding Insurgency: Popular Support for the PKK in Turkey
Published by the Cambridge University Pres.
this has been an interview for yarnpodcast.com
Produced by me, John Roche
And a special thanks to Bryan O’Regan for putting me in contact with Dr. O’Connor.
