By Sameer El-hajj
Fear is a complex human emotion. While fear is ubiquitous and felt by every living creature, the actual sources of dread are socially distributed. Different societies have developed different ways of living with the dangers that haunt them.
Yet contemporary terms like the ‘politics of fear’, ‘fear of crime’, ‘age of anxiety’, ‘risk society’ and most recently ‘liquid fear’ each suggest that we are living in times of such heightened insecurity that danger lurks everywhere.
A number of important social changes are said to herald this new era and break with the past – the mass media now provide us with round-the-clock news of crisis, disaster and trauma; rising social mobility brings a greater range of experiences, expectations and troubles; technological innovations have brought with them immense global dangers.
Perhaps one of the most explicit connections drawn between crime and a specific emotion in recent years concerns the emergence of the concept of ‘hate crime’ in the criminological enterprise. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines hate crimes as offences that are ‘motivated in part or singularly by personal prejudice against others because of diversity – race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity/national origin, or disability’.
It is contestable, however, whether ‘hate crime’ does in fact manifest hate. For many people, the term hate crime arguably conjures up an image of a violent crime committed by extremists, by neo-Nazis, by Wahabists, by Kirikous and other committed bigots – in other words, hate-fuelled individuals who subscribe to racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and other bigoted ideologies.
Out of hatred, the Kirikou of our time, also known as the Lombroso type governor, decided to outlaw the Islamic movement in Nigeria and label it as an unlawful society.
The Lombroso type Governor is trying harder out of hatred to bury the shameful involvement of the state government in December 2015 Zaria Massacre. Unfortunately enough for the Lombroso type Governor, his security wise lieutenants failed to advise him on the dangers of using excessive coercion as a tool of crushing an ideology.
The Lombroso type Governor should know that no amounts of cosmetics can wipe away the role played by the Kaduna state government in the massacre of over 1,000 citizens of Nigeria, and the century’s blunder of creating mass grave for over 300 dead bodies without proper rites.
For Lombroso (a classical scholar of Criminology), criminal types could be identified by a collection of anatomical features. He investigated the appearance and physical characteristics of convicted criminals, such as the shape of the skull and forehead, jaw size and arm length.
According to Lombroso, you can easily identify a would-be criminal by his physical characteristics, from the way they look. Please take a look at Governor El-Rufai’s picture, and make sense out of Lombroso.
Sameer El-hajj
elhajsameer@yahoo.com