The present wave of suicide terrorism associated with al-Qaida defies easy explanation. As a result, many myths govern the conventional wisdom about this form of terrorism. The following remarks are based on biographical material from more than 400 al-Qaida-affiliated terrorists and test this conventional wisdom. Myth:Terrorism comes from poverty. Actuality:The vast majority of terrorists in the sample came from solid middle class backgrounds, and its leadership came from the upper class. This has been true for most political movements, including terrorist movements, and al-Qaida is no different. Although al-Qaida justifies its operations by claiming to act on behalf of its poor brothers, its links to poverty are at best vicarious. Myth: Terrorists are naïve young men. Actuality: The average age of those joining terrorist organizations was about 26. They are young adult males, fully responsible for their actions. However, possibly due to the increasing importance of the Internet, which appeals to younger people, the average age is dropping. On the Internet, they encounter al-Qaida myths, which inspire some to perform operations on its behalf, even though they have never met or been directed by al-Qaida proper. In the past two years, the average age of arrested al-Qaida-affiliated terrorists has decreased to about 22. Myth: Madrassahs, Islamist boarding schools which preach hatred of the West, brainwash young Muslims into becoming terrorists. Actuality: In my sample, only 13 percent of terrorists went to madrassahs, and this practice was specific to Southeast Asia, where two school masters, Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Baasyir, recruited their best students to form the backbone of the Jamaah Islamiyah, the Indonesian al-Qaida affiliate. This means that 87 percent of terrorists in the sample had a secular education. Myth: Islam radicalized young Muslims into becoming terrorists and exported violence to the West from their home countries. Actuality: The vast majority of al-Qaida terrorists in the sample came from families with very moderate religious beliefs or a completely secular outlook. Indeed, 84 percent were radicalized in the West, rather than in their countries of origin. Most had come to the West to study, and at the time they had no intention of ever becoming terrorists. Another 8 percent consisted of Christian converts to Islam, who could not have been brainwashed into violence by their culture. Myth: Al-Qaida terrorists are poorly educated, joining al-Qaida out of ignorance. Actuality: About two-thirds of the sample had attended college, a sharp contrast with the less than 10 percent of their original communities who did so. Despite their education, they did not know much about religion; however, many had studied engineering, which made them doubly dangerous. Their relative lack of religious education made them especially vulnerable to an extreme version of Islam, and they had the skills to build bombs. Myth: Al-Qaida suicide terrorists are single males, without any family responsibility. Actuality: Some argue that lack of sexual opportunity for young Muslim men transforms their sexual frustration into suicide terrorism to reap the rewards of heaven, especially access to the 72 virgins. In fact, three-fourths of al-Qaida terrorists are married, and two-thirds of them have children (and many children at that). This apparent paradox is explained by the fact that they want many children to pursue the jihad, while they sacrifice themselves for their cause and comrades. Myth: Al-Qaida terrorists join their organization out of desperation, because they don't have any marketable occupational skills. Actuality: About 60 percent of al-Qaida terrorists in the sample have professional or semi-professional occupations. This is changing, as the new generation of terrorists is getting younger, with fewer skills than those of the previous generation. Myth: Al-Qaida terrorists are simply criminals. Actuality: Very few al-Qaida terrorists had any criminal history. None of the 19 perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States had a criminal record in any country. This is changing, especially in Western Europe, where new al-Qaida recruits come from the "excluded" generation and turned to petty crime or drug dealing to make ends meet. Myth: Al-Qaida terrorists, especially those who kill themselves, are simply mad or suffer from a personality disorder. Actuality: There was a near total lack of mental disorders in the sample. This makes sense, as individuals with mental disorders are usually weeded out early from any clandestine organization for security reasons. Myth: Al-Qaida terrorists are recruited by charismatic leaders, who prey on lonely, vulnerable victims. Actuality: Recruitment into al-Qaida was through friendship and kinship rather than dedicated recruiters. About two-thirds of the sample were friends before ever thinking of joining a terrorist organization. They radicalized themselves in a group and collectively decided to join al-Qaida. The best example of this is the Hamburg group, which led the 9/11 operation. Eight friends collectively decided to join and traveled together to Afghanistan in two waves. The first wave became the pilots and the second wave the support group. Another fifth joined out of kinship. They had close relatives, fathers, brothers, or first cousins, who were already members of al-Qaida. They simply joined their families. http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/0806/ijpe/sageman.htm
No, it don't! But it's not just al Queda ...it's all terrorism. Terrorism is simple ....it's vicious, violent individuals who refuse to abide by the law, and who take the law into their own hands to try to get what they want. It's vigilantiism in it's most violent form. Only idiots would try to complicate such murderous acts in some foolish attempt to justify it. Baron Max
Then, that would not appear to be a myth. Then again, that isn't a myth. Pakistan's Madrasah's are frequently deemed as ideological training grounds for hatred against the west. Yet, the 9/11 participants were recruited upon their return to Mecca for the pilgrimage. There are videos of these men at training camps in Afghanistan. Not true, although they may have not have had a strict religious upbringing, they did become devout Muslims before and after being recruited. Specious, at best. Senior members are recruited to run the organization, yet the suicide bombers themselves are primarily single males and females. Once again then, it appears not to be a myth. Another non-myth, as you report. A religious disorder is still a mental disorder. Muslim families are wonderful, aren't they? http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/0806/ijpe/sageman.htm Let's not forget this little tidbit at the bottom of the article: "The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government."
I understand what you are saying. Terrorism however is like a disease. Understanding its root causes goes a long way to preventing its recurrence.
Seems like the root cause is evident: Al-qaeda - "the Law", "the foundation", or "the base") is an armed Sunni Islamist organization with the stated objective of eliminating foreign influence in Muslim countries, eradicating those they deem to be "infidels", and reestablishing the califate.
More: In December 2001, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, conducted a public-opinion poll of 1,357 Palestinians age 18 or older in the West Bank and Gaza on topics including the September 11 attacks in the United States, support for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, and attacks against Israel. The poll reveals several things. First, support for attacks against Israeli targets by the Palestinian population is widespread (from 74 percent to 90 percent, depending on the subgroup), though it is important to emphasize that there is a distinction between support for attacks expressed in a poll at a particular moment and participation or active collusion in such attacks. Second, a majority, more than 60 percent of the population surveyed, believes that attacks against Israeli civilians have helped to achieve Palestinian rights in a way that negotiations could not have. These results offer no evidence that educated people are less supportive of attacks against Israeli targets. In fact, the support for attacks against Israeli targets is higher among those with more than a secondary-school education than among those with only an elementary-school education, and the support is considerably lower among those who are illiterate. The study showed also that support for attacks against Israeli targets is particularly strong among students, merchants, and professionals. Notably, the unemployed are somewhat less likely to support such attacks. If poverty were indeed the wellspring of support for terrorism or politically motivated violence, one would have expected the unemployed to be more supportive of attacks than were merchants and professionals, but the evidence points the other way. News reports often create the impression that Islam is a source of terrorism. Note, though, that suicide attacks are a relatively new, alien element in the history of mainstream Islam. The Koran rejects suicide, and classical Islamic legal texts consider it a serious sin. True, a fighter who dies for faith or another noble cause is held in great esteem in both legal and cultural tradition, and those who die on the path of God are promised immediate recompense. Individuals or Islamic sects have used political assassinations (including an 11th-century Shiite sect in Northern Iran, the corrupted nickname of which is the origin of the term "assassin"). Those fighters, however, did not commit suicide attacks. Also, suicide attacks and other forms of terrorism have been carried out by people belonging to other established religions, too, and by individuals professing no religious faith at all. Timothy McVeigh's heinous terrorist attack on American soil, for instance, cannot be linked to organized religion. To study the correlates of involvement in a terrorist organization more directly, we performed a detailed analysis of participation in Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah is a multifaceted organization that provides health and educational services, has a political wing, and is also believed to engage in terrorism. The U.S. State Department and British Home Office have both classified Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. We compared the background characteristics of 129 members of Hezbollah's militant wing who died in action in the 1980s and early 1990s to the Lebanese population from which they were drawn. We culled a data set from the biographies gathered by Eli Hurvitz, of Tel-Aviv University, in 1998 that included the individuals' age at death, highest level of school attended, poverty, region of residence, and marital status, and compared it to data on the general population in Lebanon. Despite the limitations of both data sets, several findings are of interest. The poverty rate is 28 percent among the Hezbollah militants and 33 percent for the population. In terms of education the Hezbollah fighters are more likely to have attended secondary school than are people in the general population (47 versus 38 percent). The results suggest that poverty is inversely related, and education positively related, to the likelihood that someone becomes a Hezbollah fighter. Similarly, Claude Berrebi, a graduate student in economics at Princeton, has studied the characteristics of recent suicide bombers in Israel. From information on the Web sites of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, he was able to paint a statistical picture of suicide bombers. He compared that to survey-based data on the broader Palestinian population of roughly comparable age. His results indicate that suicide bombers are less than half as likely to come from impoverished families than is the population as a whole. In addition, more than half of the suicide bombers had attended school after high school, while less than 15 percent of the population in the same age group had any post-high-school education. We regard these findings as suggestive but not definitive. http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39b01001.htm
Lebanese suicide bombers: In writing my book on suicide attackers, I had researchers scour Lebanese sources to collect martyr videos, pictures and testimonials and the biographies of the Hezbollah bombers. Of the 41, we identified the names, birth places and other personal data for 38. Shockingly, only eight were Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were from leftist political groups like the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union. Three were Christians, including a female high-school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon. What these suicide attackers — and their heirs today — shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation. Nearly two decades of Israeli military presence did not root out Hezbollah. The only thing that has proven to end suicide attacks, in Lebanon and elsewhere, is withdrawal by the occupying force. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/o...2d42246904c04b&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
THE ASSASSINATION of Sri Lanka's foreign minister last month has once again raised the question of how the conflict on this ill-fated isle will end. What bedevils conflict analysts most about Sri Lanka is that it defies the most common causal factor raised by terrorism experts -- a lack of education. Among all South Asian countries, Sri Lanka has the highest literacy rate of an astounding 92 percent. Yet this is the country where the cult of suicide bombings finds its origin with more than 200 suicide attacks since 1970 that have claimed thousands of lives. The victims include several politicians including the former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was killed by a female suicide bomber in 1991. Clearly the educational development in this country has not had a direct correlation with conflict reduction. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/06/the_educated_terrorist/
So, this begs the question, if the "foreign occupation" participants are of the same religious group, are they also attacked or readily accepted?
What religion was involved in World War I and II? Do you believe that people will accept occupation by a foreign regime if it is of the same religious persuasion?
Islamic Jihad group: With a queue of willing participants, how do terrorist or militant groups choose their suicide bombers? A planner for Islamic Jihad explained to Hassan that his group scrutinizes the motives of a potential bomber to be sure that the individual is committed to carrying out the task. Now, a high level of educational attainment is probably a signal of one's commitment to a cause, as well as of one's ability to prepare for an assignment and carry it out. For this reason, the stereotype of suicide bombers being drawn from the ranks of those who are so impoverished that they have nothing to live for may be wildly incorrect. This interpretation is also consistent with another of Hassan's observations about suicide bombers: "None of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs. More than half of them were refugees from what is now Israel. Two were the sons of millionaires. http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39b01001.htm Papes study: Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists. To advance our understanding of this growing phenomenon, this study collects the universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001, 188 in all. In contrast to the existing explanations, this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism has been rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays. Suicide terrorists sought to compel American and French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983, Israeli forces to leave Lebanon in 1985, Israeli forces to quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995, the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state from 1990 on, and the Turkish government to grant autonomy to the Kurds in the late 1990s. In all but the case of Turkey, the terrorist political cause made more gains after the resort to suicide operations than it had before. Thus, Western democracies should pursue policies that teach terrorists that the lesson of the 1980s and 1990s no longer holds, policies which in practice may have more to do with improving homeland security than with offensive military action. http://www.danieldrezner.com/research/guest/Pape1.pdf
You're cho chweet when you selectively avoid looking at facts.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
How did Charles Manson get people to kill for him? How did Jim Jones get 1000's (100's) of people to commit mass suicide, is there any real distinction?
That totally explains why you are posting in this thread.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
