"The place of terrorists is not in psychiatry, but in prison"

Gilles-William Goldnadel is a lawyer and writer. He is president of the France-Israel association. Every week, he deciphers the news for FigaroVox.

A strong tendency of Western media and political personnel in recent years is to psychiatrize Islamic terrorism. A sort of immediate a priori obliges him to consider as mad any individual of Islamic origin who attacks Westerners violently. For example, on August 18, 2017 on RTL, Interior Minister Gérard Collomb wanted to "mobilize psychiatric hospitals to identify radicalized individuals, explaining that he was working in collaboration with the Minister of Health for the purpose of identify all of these profiles who can take action tomorrow”. For a bit, the minister would declare the claims to Social Security. I also remind you that the assassin who defended Sarah Halimi in April 2017 (whose family I am assisting) after having tortured her was immediately placed by authority in a psychiatric establishment without going through the prison box.

I argue that it is this obligation of a moral nature and of unconscious origin to evoke dementia that is socially, politically and psychologically insane.

Of course, this kind of violent and often suicidal individual is not a model of balance.

Of course again, this ball of anti-Western, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian hateful resentment, concocted moreover for fifty years largely by Christian and sometimes Jewish Westerners, is of a collectively neurotic nature, but very fortunately we do not rank the neurotics among the mad and they are not placed in psychiatric establishments, which, moreover, we do not know what to do with.

Most psychiatrists and specialists in Islamist terrorism do not believe at all in the effectiveness of the Interior Minister's proposal: "to seek to explain radicalization through psychiatry is to miss the mark, it it is ridiculous to still be there” criticizes the specialist in the terrorist question Romain Caillet (rtl.fr). Just like Jacques Raillane, also known under the pseudonym of Abou Djaffar who judges this idea "stupid or even absurd": "two years after the Bataclan, we thought we had passed this stage of nonsense" he still indicates.

As Raphaël Gaillard, professor of psychiatry at Sainte-Anne and expert at the Paris Court of Appeal, reminds us: “the vast majority of terrorists have no connection with psychiatry”.

But as Romain Caillet always indicates, seeing the question through the prism of psychiatry “avoids asking disturbing questions”.

I will therefore now indicate what secretly disturbs the minister, a large part of the Western media and political body

I affirm in fact that this media or political tendency towards psychiatrization is of an ideological nature and just as suicidal. It means that a Muslim terrorist cannot be bad and therefore can only be mad. We will compare this with the media attitude adopted in the case of the Norwegian terrorist Breivik – he is also in no way a model of mental equilibrium – and in which part of the press, including Le Monde, far from making an irrational psychiatric case of it, drew up lists of names of intellectuals responsible for his thoughtful political gesture...

I also affirm that this tendency always signifies the reluctance to inflict a repressive judicial sanction on a being from whom one would like to remove all individual responsibility.

No doubt because of the inability to be able to sanction it legitimately, by virtue of the guilt complex of the Western being, judging himself eternally responsible for his existential malaise.

Finally, I affirm that in the hollow of the media or political unconscious of this propensity for psychiatric excuses, there is also concealed the irresolution to defend oneself physically with lethal weapons and to prefer the use of deradicalization for fun or tranquilizers to sleep.

Who's mad? First, Western society has become neurotically masochistic.