Blogs, Radio Talkers Use Mall Killer's Muslim Affiliation for Shock Value: Ignore Youth's Traumatic Escape from Bosnian Genocide

Are conservative blogs and news sites exploiting the fact that the Trolley Square Mall shooter, Sulejman Talovic, was Muslim simply to attract site traffic? Elaine Jarvik, Deborah Bulkeley, and Ben Winslow of the Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City) provided two very important follow-up articles in today’s edition about the slayings at the Trolley Square Mall earlier this week. Jarvik and Bulkeley took conservative sites to task for declaring, without any evidence, that because Talovic was Muslim he must have engaged in “Sudden Jihad Syndrome” as argued by Jihad Watch.

The authors cite emotion-inducing headlines from Little Green Footballs and MichaelSavage.com as incorrectly distilling the tragedy in Salt Lake City down to a single theme: “Salt Lake City Killer Was a Muslim.” As a regular reader of both sites criticized in this article, and as Spy The News! readers know, I have dedicated a career to countering ideologies like radical Islam. However, I sided with the authors in their assessment that the shooter’s religion played an important role in the incident, but not for the “jihadist” reasons headlined by Jihad Watch and Little Green Footballs.

Before casting stones at Muslims in general or specifically Sulejman Talovic himself, perhaps news sites and bloggers should have delved into the background of this young man prior to publishing scathing headlines designed to incite hatred and fear.

The second Deseret Morning News article, by Ben Winslow with the assistance of a Bosnian news reporter, described in great detail the experiences that make the Trolley Square shooter very different from the teen slayers at Columbine or other youthful murderers. The article, “A Child of Violence: Talovic Survived Genocide,” should cause many to rethink their assumptions that Talovic acted out any “jihad” impulse. While it is true that he was Muslim, there is no evidence he was active in any local mosques and most of his ties to regular Islamic worship were cut when his family emigrated to the U.S. after five years as refugees from Milosevic’s genocide in Bosnia.

From Winslow’s article, the following excerpts shed light on what Talovic experienced at the tender age of 7 and through more than 5 years of his youth. Spy The News! urges readers and fellow bloggers to see the forest in this situation (suffered genocide trauma), and not merely the trees (he was Muslim):

As a little boy in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sulejman Talovic hid in fear from the Serb military forces who were slaughtering Muslim men and boys as war and genocide ravaged his country . . . . neighbors also acknowledged that the war in Bosnia likely left its mark on the boy. During the war, the family lived for five years as refugees in Bosnia, and spent almost a year in the mountains hiding from the Serb military forces, neighbors said. Up to 200,000 people were killed and 1.8 million others lost their homes in Bosnia's 1992-95 war. . . .

The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina forced the Talovic family to live as refugees. From 1993 until they emigrated to the United States in 1998, they were on the run, moving from village to village.

They lived near Srebrenica, where more than 8,300 Muslim boys and men were killed in 1995 by Serb forces loyal to ex-Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milosevic. Sulejman Talovic was 7 years old then.

The atrocities of war and "ethnic cleansing," and the pressures of daily life in a new country after he immigrated to the United States, could have created immense pressure on Talovic, according to Greg Jurkovic, a psychology professor at Georgia State University who has studied Bosnian teenagers in both Atlanta and Sarajevo.

"What we're finding is that so many of these kids are suffering from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)," he said. "What seems to be most important is what they were exposed to, their war exposure." [emphasis added]

Some argue that because he survived genocide against Muslims at the hands of “Christian” Serbs he was thus acting out a desire to kill infidels when he entered the Trolley Square Mall. However, that conclusion ignores the fact that the genocide was a personally traumatic experience that scarred the boy psychologically. Perhaps the authors of Little Green Footballs and Jihad Watch should visit the psychiatric emergency units at various Veterans Administration hospitals to witness firsthand the mental illnesses produced by battlefield trauma. Schizophrenia (acute or paranoid types), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, sleep disorders, Bi-Polar Disorder, and these merely scratch the surface of what one finds. The veterans in those wards were combatants in wars they may or may not have understood, at ages similar to Talovic’s youthful eighteen years.

Many of these precious veterans have attempted suicide with various weapons or available household items; many have assaulted family members they love and responding law enforcement, not because they truly wanted to hurt anyone but because they were no longer in control. A break from reality, or psychotic episode, can occur rapidly or gradually, and the fact that Talovic was calmly walking through the mall does not indicate he was acting rationally or with legally defined criminal intent. A comparison of PTSD manifestations in a U.S. Military veteran and in Talovic is enlightening. Consider the tragic situation of just one Marine, Jonathan Schulze:

Schulze, a machine gunner and a corporal, had fought in Iraq in battles where Marine casualties were high. He had told his family that he felt guilty that he had lived and close friends had died [emphasis added]. He left the Marines in late 2005 after four years of service.

Schulze's stepmother said that she witnessed Jonathan telling VA staff workers in St. Cloud that he felt like killing himself. She said she also heard him tell a VA counselor over the phone the next day that he was suicidal. After that conversation he told his stepmother that he learned that he was No. 26 on a waiting list for admittance to the St. Cloud psychiatric unit.

The St. Cloud VA has no waiting list for its locked, acute psychiatric unit -- where suicidal or homicidal veterans would be taken . . . [emphasis added]

Two other members of Minnesota's congressional delegation expressed concern about the VA's ability to cope with a growing wave of troops returning from Iraq. Many of those veterans are expected to need counseling because of combat stress, lengthy separation from families, financial problems and other worries. [emphasis added]

"The hidden costs of this war are not being addressed," said Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., a member of the U.S. House Veterans' Affairs Committee and a veteran. "I've been deeply concerned. I think there's been almost nothing done to prepare for this."

Examine carefully the words or phrases emphasized in red. All of these were a part of daily life for Talovic. Survivor's guilt? Watching your friends and neighbors being exterminated while you manage to flee would cause that. This was also common among Jewish Holocaust survivors. Combat Stress? Being hunted for extermination in the middle of a war zone seems to fit that criteria. Separation from families? Talovic's extended family remain in Bosnia today. Financial problems? Talovic's family fled and lived in abandoned shacks, working odd jobs to survive in Bosnia until they could emigrate to America. In America Talovic's father and Talovic himself have worked many low wage jobs to provide for the family and save money to help bring family from Bosnia to the U.S. Other Worries? Wouldn't these other factors be enough? Add being a teenager in a new country, with few friends to the stresses already described, and a very different picture of Talovic emerges from the "Mall Killer is a Muslim" frenzy.

Note the use of the word "homicidal" by the VA hospital official. Clearly PTSD and other psychological problems stemming from war trauma have led some of our veterans to act on homicidal impulse. Is it so hard to imagine someone who had gone through what Talovic experienced acting similarly? Or is it just easier and more newsworthy to assume he killed because he was nominally Muslim?

Many who suffer mental illnesses are “high functioning” and it is only when you sit down to interview or visit with them does the paranoia become apparent. Talovic’s actions, although horrendous, likely had no connection to the U.S. War on Terror, the Iraq War, or jihad against America despite current events. America is where his family fled to in order to escape Bosnia and find safety. By all accounts, Talovic’s family had no ties to any groups sympathetic to radical Islam, and the FBI has ruled out terrorism in this incident. Talovic’s family worked various jobs in an effort to provide funds for extended family to emigrate to the U.S. as well. This does not appear to be the portrait of a jihadist family.

Ascribing Talovic’s actions to his religion itself or some jihadist mentality may have shock value in the headlines, but it omits the central factors of the incident: The perpetrator’s mental capacity and intent. Both of those were likely influenced tremendously by his childhood experiences in Bosnia. In our criminal justice codes, those with mental illness or even “temporary insanity” are judged by different and more compassionate standards than criminals with clear intent. While Talovic’s death in this incident prevents a definitive assessment of his intent, there is far more in his background that points to genocide trauma, rather than jihad, to explain his terrible actions.