Terrorism with a Human Face

It's all in the face, apparently. Just check out that terrifying mug shot of Mohammad Atta, the so-called “ringleader” of the 19 hijackers who staged the 9/11 attacks. His face, wrote the novelist Martin Amis in a short story about Atta, was “gangrenous” and “almost comically malevolent.” Hateful, too:

In his investigative study Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, Bernard-Henri Levy described Pearl's convicted murderer, the British-Pakistani Omar Sheikh, as “handsome,” his face showing no “vice or malice though somewhat veiled.” He looked “intelligent and rather frank … a strong chin under a well-trimmed beard, a good man it would seem, slightly tart smile, an intellectual demeanor, very Westernized— nothing, in any case, that signals the obtuse Islamist, the fanatic.”

So it's not, apparently, all in the face, although the implication in Levy's portrait, as in Amis's fictionalized account of Atta, is that it should be, and that Pearl's killer was somehow an aberration.

The idea that human evil is inscribed into the body and face of the criminal offender has deep roots, and is in fact the animating throb behind modern scientific criminology and its founding document, Cesare Lombroso's The Criminal Man, published in 1876. It is also an underlying assumption in much of the news coverage of the Kuwaiti-born Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, who was exposed recently as the ISIS executioner “Jihadi John.”

Lombroso was convinced he had found the root causes of crime after studying “the skull of a brigand” and finding in it “a very long series of atavistic abnormalities.” Against the prevailing theology at the time, he concluded the “criminal man” was not innately sinful, still less possessed of the devil, but genetically abnormal, a subhuman throwback to an earlier, less advanced, stage of human evolution, proof of which could be found in his beastly appearance (“crooked noses, sloping foreheads, large ears, protruding jaws, dark eyes”).