Sydney stabbing: Seeking answers amid fog of terror

Mert Ney in in Sydney’s CBD yesterday. Picture: 7News

An agitated and bloodied man runs amok with a knife in a city centre. One woman is found dead, another is wounded but alive. Passers-by subdue the man, caging his head in a humble milk crate, Australia’s version of mixed martial arts.

Apart from that local flourish, this is a script we have watched acted out on the global stage again and again.

It strikes terror into our hearts, obviously, but is it terrorism?

Alleged killer Mert Ney wields a knife as he stands on top of a car in Sydney's CBD. Picture: 7 News

The rush of competing ­answers, jostling for attention, is another familiar narrative.

As he lunged at office workers, the man shouted “Allahu akbar!’’ — God is Great, probably the best known Arabic phrase in the West; the sublime poetic tradition of ­that language is sadly obscured.

Yet it appears the accused, Mert Ney, 21, also had a diagnosis within the modern psychiatric lexicon. A mentally disturbed person, then, not a terrorist driven by abstract ideology?

These are not mutually exclusive categories. The unbalanced are more likely to tip over into extremism, religious or political. And in what sense can a jihadist or neo-Nazi be judged “sane”?

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Sydney CBD stabbing and graphic

In the turmoil of personal delusion and theory-laden hatred, who can say which is the final pressure that pulls the trigger.

Legend has it the word ­assassin goes back to a medieval ­Islamic sect in the Middle East. Known as the assassins, they were said to partake of hashish before they struck at a trembling ­caliph or crusader. These prototype terrorists targeted both Christians and rival Muslims, just as today.

But parroting a single Arabic phrase can’t be enough to make a sworn jihadi, and yesterday police knew of nothing to link Ney to terrorist organisations.

In the fog of terror, facts can get garbled and analysis overreaches.

The same goes for another clue, the weight and significance of which it’s too early to gauge. Police say they recovered a thumb drive reprising “mass casualty” attacks — apparently including March’s horrific slaughter of 51 Muslims in Christchurch.

What unifies all stripes of terror is the fierce determination to ­poison the wells of intercommunal harmony, to make daily life a grim and dangerous ordeal, to weaken the spirit of idealism and curiosity that reaches out across barriers of alienation and resentment. We win by living well, together.