Writing in Quadrant, Dalrymple considers the case of Michaël Harpon, the Paris police employee who stabbed four colleagues to death, and uses the case to examine why Islam appeals to certain converts in the West. He argues that personal resentment, a sense of exclusion, and the desire for a totalising ideology that dignifies grievance can combine in an unstable and dangerous mixture and that the search for a single motive is usually futile.
…we can see that Harpon’s supposed personal resentment at work is not at all incompatible with his conversion to Islam as a partial explanation of his conduct, quite the reverse. Deep resentment can easily bubble under a calm exterior such as Harpon showed to the world for a long time.