Mr Khan said:
One merely needs to look at the psychology of terrorists. Some are mentally disturbed, like Breivik (although not mentally disturbed enough to qualify as insane). But one has to look at who the terrorists are, and why the slogan "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" exists. I said in my own sentence, the start of terrorism is desperation. The desperate individual then latches on to a pre-existing ideology. This isn't to say that all desperate people are terrorists, but all terrorists are seeking something that they feel they cannot get through normal life. They may not be poor (Bin Laden certainly wasn't), but they will often feel that what they desire cannot be obtained through normal means. The IRA was born of those who were the more radical anti-British faction within Ireland, and dealt with centuries of oppression by the British to get to that point. Similarly so with the Basques and Spanish rule. Breivik was less-than-sane, but a lot of White Supremacists are people who feel that the world is out to get them, and who then scapegoat some other race, or, as Breivik did, members of their own race that they feel are selling out to the other races. When the Pakistani military failed, several times, to wrest Kashmir from India, terrorism was the answer. Muslims in Southeast Asia are often oppressed by Buddhist power-structures, Somalia is a pit of desperation, the Tamil know that they can never, democratically, have a proper voice in Sri Lanka. Sectarian violence in Iraq comes about because of abuses of power by one camp or another, the Shiites who have control under democracy, the Sunnis who seized power under Baathism. Modern Japan has a large number of disaffected young people, which helped enable Aum Shinrikyo to gain the ground that it did. In no case am i saying that violent terrorism is justified, but most terrorists are usually sane, and simply believe that they have run out of options for their life, and so look to an ideology that gives them an easy answer. A young Muslim man who can't get a job, or who can't get a good job, or who feels out of place in this world, can find easy answers in radical Islam: "Kill yourself for Allah, go to martyr's heaven." A far easier solution than having to toil through this world of ours, but a route that most people would not take because no matter how fervently we profess our belief, only the desperate are willing to die for their faith. |
I like this.
To add to this, there IS a human instinct that triggers a reaction known as "fight or flight". It's a desperation move in which the individual feels cornered and there feels like is no other way out.
To many Palestinians, what can they do? If they're driven from their home, they cannot go to the police about it. They try the UN, and only get vetoed on any kind of resolution. So what's the only other thing to do?
This is why I think a lot of first-world citizens do not understand this concept. If somebody walked onto your land, said "It's mine now", they'd most likely notify the police. They cannot understand what happens in the world with no (or corrupt) police. They generally find that matter have to be taken into their own hands, and thus the liberator/terrorist faceat arises, depending on the side of perspective.
