Jihad Against Palestinians? The Herostratos Syndrome and the Paradox of Targeting European Jews

Abstract

This paper addresses the waves of mass killings recently perpetrated by individuals with a weak or nonexistent ideological motivation, whose acts either appear to contradict their purported political cause or are admittedly driven by a quest for notoriety. Examples range from killers who have been waging jihad against European Jews to unattached mass killers such as the Germanwings pilot to the perpetrators of mass school shootings in America and worldwide. We argue that these phenomena can be understood as instances of the Herostratos syndrome, which has been known for thousands of years as characterizing the behavior of people who seek to survive in the collective memory by excelling in their infamous acts. We provide a model of hybrid killers which accommodates the Herostratic motive alongside a political motive and characterize a well-behaved Nash equilibrium where Herostratic killers are competing with one another with a view to make a name for themselves in infamy. The policy implications point towards reducing the publicity the killers enjoy, thus frustrating their quest for notoriety.

Keywords:

• Terrorism
• Herostratos
• cult
• competition for infamy
• jihad
• school shootings

JEL codes:

• C72
• D74

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the European Public Choice Society (University of Freiburg, 30 March–2 April 2016) and at the 16^th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference (Catholic University of Milan, 20–22 June 2016); participants in both events provided interesting discussion. The authors are particularly indebted to Ranan Kuperman and Soeren Schwuchow for helpful comments. Helpful comments by an anonymous reviewer of this journal are gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. A very short presentation of our approach, including a brief description of the model and its policy implications, was published in the proceedings of the 16^th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference (Azam and Ferrero 2016). The present paper analyzes the full model with all the different cases (including the possibility of multiple equilibria), elaborates on its policy implications in detail, and addresses a broad variety of historical and current applications as a testing ground.

2. In an interesting variation, Bartlett (1993) shows that such a quest was common among the pagan Slav tribes of North-Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, as the funeral orations of their prestigious members were praising their most infamous deeds.

3. In an interesting contribution to this line of thinking, Apolte (2017) argues that an individual’s decision to embark on a suicide-killing path may be time-inconsistent and addresses this commitment problem by postulating different profiles of lifetime reservation utility. He finds that only a person beset by a serious ‘burden of life’ will fulfill his ‘contract with himself’ and carry out the suicidal attack as a ‘lone wolf’, while those not so burdened will need an external enforcement mechanism such as one provided by a terrorist organization. The incentive role played by Herostratic competition among agents is, however, not addressed by his model.

4. It is interesting that at a much earlier time, a name ban was decreed by God on Amalek, an arch-enemy of the Israelites during the period of their exodus from Egypt: they were enjoined to ‘blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven’ (Deuteronomy 25: 19; cf. Exodus 17: 14). This ban too obviously failed as the writers of the Bible later recorded his name and deeds, although this has survived in Judaism to this day as a ritual curse against the most egregious enemies of the Jewish people.