When a professional gunman, wearing a baseball cap and carrying a simple sports bag, walked into the Brussels Jewish Museum last Saturday and opened fire on four innocent victims, killing three and leaving the fourth with critical brain injuries, the media in both Israel and Belgium were quick to posit that this was the work of a well-oiled Islamist machine targeting members of the Israeli intelligence community.
The fact that Emanuel and Mira Riva, who were killed in the shootout, were both employees of Israeli government factions under the auspices of the Prime Minister's Office, led to early and uncorroborated assumptions that the two – or at least the wife - were Mossad operatives and deliberate targets of the shooter, tied to either Hezbollah or Al-Qaida.
While the calculated manner of the shooting, as well as the choice of a Jewish institution, indeed point to the hand of a trained Islamist terrorist, it is highly doubtful that the Rivas were specifically targeted as representatives of the Israeli intelligence community.
It is true that Hezbollah has long targeted Israeli and Jewish targets the world over, a threat it intensified in the wake of its senior commander Imad Mughniyeh's assassination in 2009, with a particular focus on Israelis part and parcel to the office of those perpetuators – the Mossad, or better known in covert Israeli speak, the Prime Minister's Office.
But it is also true that neither of the Rivas was a Mossad operative: both were accountants, he a former employee of the Nativ immigration agency that aided Russian Jewish emigres, and she a clerk. Neither were prime targets for the organization, as an Israeli officer would have been.
While the possibility remains that the attack was orchestrated by affiliates of Hezbollah or Al-Qaida, there is little to indicate that it was ordered by the higher ranks of either.
The evidence collected so far, including the lack of organizational support at the scene of the crime and the failure to pinpoint a network of other suspects, indicate that the shooting was carried out by either a local cell of the Islamic Jihad or by a lone gunman.
The Brussels shooter was a professional; that is a fact that cannot be disputed. With little forensic evidence to narrow down the identity of the gunman, investigators are relying on security footage from the museum, which captured him walking calmly into the tourist attraction, pulling out an AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle, shooting at his targets, and in just as measured a walk with which he entered, leaving the premises after completing the deed. He even remembered to zip his bag. Despite earlier reports, the gunman was alone at the scene of the shooting, and no getaway car awaited him, nor is there evidence that he received on-spot logistical support.
A viable suspect has been arrested, a 29-year-old Frenchmen of Algerian descent, named Mehdi Nemmouche. He was caught by authorities at a bus station in Marseille, en route from Amsterdam with a stop in Brussels. In his bag, which French police say was searched as part of a routine drug inspection, was an AK-47 Kalshnikov rifle, a revolver and ammunition, a GoPro camera said to be worn by the Brussels shooter and the baseball cap and clothing seen in CCTV on the body of the gunman during the attack.
A French police source called Nemmouche, who is still in custody and maintained the right to silence in the first 24 hours of his arrest, "an expert gunman and a crap fugitive." Shortly after Nemmouche's arrest, authorities released a video in which a voice, apparently belonging to the Frenchman, describes the shooting as an "attack against the Jews."
Nemmouche was not stopped by chance. He was already circulating in the French database as a national who had traveled to Syria to train and fight with jihadis there. His inspiration for Islamist warfare was apparently gleaned during his near year-long stay in a French prison, where he was incarcerated for robbing a convenience store.
The Brussels shooting bears remarkable similarities to the attack in Toulouse in 2012, when gunman Mohamed Mera, affiliated with Jihad but acting alone, shot and killed four people outside a Jewish school.
Like Mera, the Brussels gunman wore a personal miniature camera on his chest. And like Mera, his was clearly the work of an Islamist targeting Jews, though not specifically Israelis, and not necessarily ordered by the higher ranks of a global Jihad movement.
Just hours after the attack in Brussels, two Jewish men were assaulted leaving a synagogue in Paris and left in serious condition, harping back to the grotesque murder of Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French Jew tortured, burned and dismembered by a "lone" group in 2007.
If the Brussels attack was indeed carried out without instruction by the greatest terrorist groups of our time, the act of a "lone" wolf must not be dismissed as less threatening than if it were. The other two anti-Jewish attacks this week - both at the Kansas Jewish center and in Paris – were also carried out by "lone wolves".
A world war is on the rise, by an army of rogue soldiers whose motives are the same but do not answer to a specific commander. Thousands of Westerners have joined this war, both within the ranks of the jihadi groups in the Middle East and on their own accord in Europe and the United States.
Nowhere is safe, not on the green lawns of Kansas, nor on the cobblestone streets of Brussels, and certainly not in the war-torn cities of Syria. These lone wolves are not alone.
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