FAUSTO GIUDICEAnnecy, France: an amok “in the name of Jesus Christ”

 Fausto Giudice,  Tlaxcala, 9/6/2023

Amok, a term derived from the Malay word amuk meaning “uncontrollable rage”, refers to acts committed by people - usually men - suddenly gripped by a murderous madness, engaging in knife attacks against random individuals in a race that generally ends with the murderer's death or suicide. This extreme form of suicidal decompensation, observed in Malaysia and other countries, has been the subject of countless ethnological and psychiatric studies, literary works - from Rudyard Kipling to Romain Gary and Stefan Zweig - and films (at least 9 since 1927).

What happened on the shores of Lake Annecy on Thursday, June 8, 2023 is a typical case of amok: Abdelmasih Hannoun, a 31-year-old Syrian, stabbed 4 small children to death before the eyes of their horrified mothers, and then two seniors. A young man, Henri, 24, who was passing by, tried to stop him with his backpack, but failed. This was all it took for the marketing student, who is currently on a tour of France's cathedrals, to become the “backpack hero” of the so-called social networks. The police, alerted, intervened, putting an end to the mad race, without killing the aggressor, but by shooting him in the legs.

“As things stand, we have no evidence to suggest that there was any terrorist motivation,” said Annecy public prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis at a press briefing on the scene 6 hours later. As the assailant was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, the investigation is focusing on his psychiatric history and psychological state. The investigators, who probably hasn’t read neither Stefan Zweig nor Émile Durkheim, will have have a hard time explaining this amok.

As the hours passed, details emerged about Abdelmasih Hannoun [literal translation: Merciful Slave of the Messiah]: a refugee in Sweden, where he married a Swedish woman from Trollhättan known in Turkey, this Syriac (“Assyrian”) Christian originally from Hassake, in northeastern Syria, spent some ten years in Sweden before divorcing and leaving the country. He applied for asylum in France, Italy and Switzerland before his first application for asylum in Sweden was finally accepted on April 26, 2023, resulting in the rejection of his application in France, notified on June 4. Having obtained a permanent residence permit in Sweden in 2013, he had applied for Swedish citizenship from 2017, which was rejected three times, despite having a child, now aged 3, and studying to become a nurse.

During his amok, this servant of the messiah shouted twice: “In the name of Jesus Christ”. He was carrying a cross and, in addition to his knife, a prayer book. As a result, the police did not shoot him in the head, which would certainly have been the case had he shouted “Allahu Akhbar”. This would have saved Mr. Darmanin, the Interior Minister, the trouble of racking his brain about “troubling coincidences” and calmed “the awe that is overwhelming our country” (Aurore Bergé, leader of the Macronist parliamentary group Renaissance, who took advantage of the Savoyard amok to denounce the “rag-tag battle” at the National Assembly over pension reform).

We could therefore add this definition to Gustave Flaubert’s  Dictionary of Received Ideas:

“Amok: a form of terrorism when the perpetrator is a Muslim, a simply frightening and disturbing act when the perpetrator is Christian, even if he is a bearded Arab”.