By GWYNNE DYER ARABNEWS

After Mohamed Merah died in a hail of French police bullets last week, people who had known him talked about “a polite and courteous boy” who liked “cars, bikes, sports and girls.”

His friends had trouble believing that he had murdered seven people, including three children, in a killing spree in the city of Toulouse, and none of them believed his claim to be a member of Al-Qaeda. “Three weeks ago he was in a nightclub,” one said.

The following day, in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, US Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged with murdering 17 Afghans, including nine children, in a lone night-time attack on sleeping civilians in two villages near Kandahar two weeks ago. “I can’t believe it was him,” said Kasie Holland, his next-door neighbor in Lake Tapps, Washington. “There were no signs. It’s really sad. I don’t want to believe that he did it.”

There are startling parallels in these cases, right down to the fact that Mohamed Merah held a little girl by the hair as he shot her in the head, and that Robert Bales allegedly pulled little girls from their beds by their hair to shoot them. And there is, of course, the underlying symmetry of the motives: Both men were responding, in confused ways, to the “war on terror” that former US President George W. Bush launched after the 9/11 attacks.

In Bales’s case, the trigger may have been a fourth deployment to a combat zone after three one-year deployments in Iraq since 2003, during which he suffered concussion and lost part of a foot. He also had money problems, but it was Afghans he shot, not bankers. In his mind it was Afghans, Muslims, whatever, who were causing his problems.

Both men had had run-ins with the law: Bales for assault in 2002, Merah for stealing a woman’s handbag in 2007. But Merah spent two years in prison for the mugging, and while there, as is often the case with teenage thugs, he was converted to the extremist ideology.