Posted on 01/13/2004 1:11:29 AM PST by kattracks
Until the nineteenth century, religion was usually the only acceptable justification of terror. It is not hard to understand why: religion gives its true believers an account of the good life and a way of recognizing evil; if you believe that evil in the form of wrong beliefs and mistaken customs weakens or corrupts a life ordained by God, you are under a profound obligation to combat that evil. If you enjoy the companionship of like-minded believers, combating that evil can require that you commit violent, even suicidal, acts.The Thuggees of India during their several centuries of existence may have killed by slow strangulation 1 million people as sacrifices to the Hindu goddess Kali. The Thugs had no political objective and, when caught, looked forward to their execution as a quick route to paradise.
In the Muslim world, one kind of terrorism, assassination, has existed since shortly after the death of the prophet Muhammad. Of his early successors, three were killed with daggers. The very word “assassin” comes from a group founded by Hasan Ibn al-Sabbah, whose devotees, starting in the eleventh century, spread terror throughout the Muslim world until they were virtually exterminated two centuries later. They killed rival Sunni Muslims, probably in large numbers. Perhaps one-third of all Muslim caliphs have been killed.
The Assassins were perhaps the world’s first terrorists in two senses. They did not seek simply to change rulers through murder but to replace a social system by changing an allegedly corrupt Sunni regime into a supposedly ideal Shiite one. Moreover, the Assassins attacked using only daggers, in ways that made their capture and execution, often after gruesome torture, inevitable. Murder was an act of piety, and as Bernard Lewis has suggested, surviving such a mission was often viewed as shameful.
In modern times, killers have taken the lives of the presidents of Syria and of Sri Lanka; two prime ministers each of Iran and India; the presidents of Aden, Afghanistan, and South Yemen; the president-elect of Lebanon and the president of Egypt; and countless judges and political leaders.
But religiously oriented violence has by no means been confined to Islam. In the United States, abortion clinics have been bombed and their doctors shot because, to the perpetrators, the Christian Bible commands it. Jim Jones killed or required the suicide of his own followers at his camp in Guyana, and David Koresh did nothing to prevent the mass death of his followers at Waco. As Blaise Pascal put it, “men never do evil so openly and contentedly as when they do it from religious conviction.” Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, found that suicide attacks kill four times as many people per incident as do other forms of terrorism; since September 2000, they have taken about 750 lives—not including the 3,000 who died from the 9/11 suicide attacks. Of course, most religious people have nothing to do with terror, and in the past many important instances of suicide attacks, such as the Kamikaze aircraft sent by the Japanese against American warships, had no religious impulse. Terrorists among the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka were not driven by religion. Today, however, religious belief, and especially a certain interpretation of the Muslim religion, has come to dominate the motives of suicide terrorists, even when religious aspirations do not govern the organizations that recruit them. Some Middle Eastern terrorist groups, such as Fatah, are secular, and some people join even fundamentalist terrorist organizations for non-religious reasons.
Terrorism, however motivated, baffles people, because they cannot imagine doing these things themselves. This bafflement often leads us to assume that terrorists are either mentally deranged or products of a hostile environment.
In a powerful essay, Cynthia Ozick describes “the barbarous Palestinian societal invention”: recruiting children to blow themselves up. She argues that these are acts of “anti-instinct,” because they are contrary to the drive to live, the product of a grotesque cultural ideal. She is correct to say that this recruitment is not psychopathological, but not quite right to say that it defies instinct. It defies some instincts but is in accord with others.
To explain why people join these different groups, let me make some distinctions. One, suggested by Professor Jerrold Post at George Washington University, is between anarchic ideologues and nationalists.
Anarchist or ideological groups include the Red Army Faction in Germany (popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang), the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Weathermen in America. The German government carried out a massive inquiry into the Red Army Faction and some right-wing terrorist groups in the early 1980s. (Since it was done in Germany, you will not be surprised to learn that it was published in four volumes.) The Red Army members were middle-class people, who came, in about 25 percent of the cases, from broken families. Over three-fourths said they had severe conflicts with their parents. About one-third had been convicted in juvenile court. They wanted to denounce “the establishment” and bourgeois society generally, and joined peer groups that led them steadily into more radical actions that in time took over their lives. Italians in the Red Brigades had comparable backgrounds.
Ideological terrorists offer up no clear view of the world they are trying to create. They speak vaguely about bringing people into some new relationship with one another but never tell us what that relationship might be. Their goal is destruction, not creation. To the extent they are Marxists, this vagueness is hardly surprising, since Marx himself never described the world he hoped to create, except with a few glittering but empty generalities.
A further distinction: in Germany, left-wing terrorists, such as the Red Army Faction, were much better educated, had a larger fraction of women as members, and were better organized than were right-wing terrorists. Similar differences have existed in the United States between, say, the Weather Underground and the Aryan Nation. Left-wing terrorists often have a well-rehearsed ideology; right-wing ones are more likely to be pathological.
I am not entirely certain why this difference should exist. One possibility is that right-wing terrorist organizations are looking backward at a world they think has been lost, whereas left-wing ones are looking ahead at a world they hope will arrive. Higher education is useful to those who wish to imagine a future but of little value to those who think they know the past. Leftists get from books and professors a glimpse of the future, and they struggle to create it. Right-wingers base their discontent on a sense of the past, and they work to restore it. To join the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nation, it is only necessary that members suppose that it is good to oppress blacks or Catholics or Jews; to join the Weather Underground, somebody had to teach recruits that bourgeois society is decadent and oppressive.
By contrast, nationalistic and religious terrorists are a very different matter. The fragmentary research that has been done on them makes clear that they are rarely in conflict with their parents; on the contrary, they seek to carry out in extreme ways ideas learned at home. Moreover, they usually have a very good idea of the kind of world they wish to create: it is the world given to them by their religious or nationalistic leaders. These leaders, of course, may completely misrepresent the doctrines they espouse, but the misrepresentation acquires a commanding power.
Marc Sageman at the University of Pennsylvania has analyzed what we know so far about members of al-Qaida. Unlike ideological terrorists, they felt close to their families and described them as intact and caring. They rarely had criminal records; indeed, most were devout Muslims. The great majority were married; many had children. None had any obvious signs of mental disorder. The appeal of al-Qaida was that the group provided a social community that helped them define and resist the decadent values of the West. The appeal of that community seems to have been especially strong to the men who had been sent abroad to study and found themselves alone and underemployed.
A preeminent nationalistic terrorist, Sabri al-Bana (otherwise known as Abu Nidal), was born to a wealthy father in Jaffa, and through his organization, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, also known as the Abu Nidal Organization, sought to destroy Israel and to attack Palestinian leaders who showed any inclination to engage in diplomacy. He was hardly a member of the wretched poor.
Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova have come to similar conclusions from their analysis of what we know about deceased soldiers in Hezbollah, the Iran-sponsored Shiite fighting group in Lebanon. Compared with the Lebanese population generally, the Hezbollah soldiers were relatively well-to-do and well-educated young males. Neither poor nor uneducated, they were much like Israeli Jews who were members of the “bloc of the faithful” group that tried to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem: well paid, well educated, and of course deeply religious.
In Singapore a major terrorist organization is Jemaah Islamiyah. Singaporean psychologists studied 31 of its members and found them normal in most respects. All were male, had average to above-average intelligence, and held jobs ranging from taxi driver to engineer. As with al-Qaida and Hezbollah members, they did not come from unstable families, nor did they display any peculiar desire toward suicidal behavior. Though graduates of secular schools, they attached great importance to religion.
Of late, women have been recruited for terrorist acts—a remarkable development in the Islamic world, where custom keeps women in subordinate roles. Precisely because of their traditional attire, female suicide bombers can easily hide their identities and disguise themselves as Israelis by wearing tight, Western clothing. Security sources in Israel have suggested that some of these women became suicide bombers to expunge some personal dishonor. Death in a holy cause could wash away the shame of divorce, infertility, or promiscuity. According to some accounts, a few women have deliberately been seduced and then emotionally blackmailed into becoming bombers.
That terrorists themselves are reasonably well-off does not by itself disprove the argument that terrorism springs from poverty and ignorance. Terrorists might simply be a self-selected elite, who hope to serve the needs of an impoverished and despondent populace—in which case, providing money and education to the masses would be the best way to prevent terrorism.
From what we know now, this theory appears to be false. Krueger and Maleckova compared terrorist incidents in the Middle East with changes in the gross domestic product of the region and found that the number of such incidents per year increased as economic conditions improved. On the eve of the intifada that began in 2000, the unemployment rate among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was falling, and the Palestinians thought that economic conditions were improving. The same economic conditions existed at the time of the 1988 intifada. Terror did not spread as the economy got worse but as it got better.
This study agrees with the view of Franklin L. Ford, whose book Political Murder covers terrorist acts from ancient times down to the 1980s. Assassinations, he finds, were least common in fifth-century Athens, during the Roman republic, and in eighteenth-century Europe—periods in which “a certain quality of balance, as between authority and forbearance” was reinforced by a commitment to “customary rights.” Terrorism has not corresponded to high levels of repression or social injustice or high rates of ordinary crime. It seems to occur, Ford suggests, in periods of partial reform, popular excitement, high expectations, and impatient demands for still more rapid change.
But if terrorists—suicide bombers and other murderers of innocent people—are not desperate, perhaps they are psychologically disturbed. But I cannot think of a single major scholar who has studied this matter who has found any psychosis. Terrorists are likely to be different from non-terrorists, but not because of any obvious disease.
In short, recruiting religiously inspired or nationalistically oriented terrorists seems to have little to do with personal psychosis, material deprivation, or family rejection. It may not even have much to do with well-known, high-status leaders. Among West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, for example, there is broad support for suicide bombings and a widespread belief that violence has helped the Palestinian cause, even though as late as June 2003 only about one-third of all Palestinians thought Yasser Arafat was doing a good job. Indeed, his popularity has declined since the intifada began.
Shatan is pleased. (But don't expect mercy or reward from him.)
The terrorist thugs of the 21st century kill more violently, and, of utmost importance, they have a definite political objective.
The Thuggees worshipped Kali. The terrorist thugs worship Satan.
Both consider murder, violence, and other forms of evil to be a ticket to paradise.
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