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. |
It depends on what you mean by "desperation". And what's the chicken and the egg?
Obviously terror organizations often are cynical and recruit desperate and disturbed individuals to carry out the dirty work, like very risky operations and suicide bombings. Indivuduals who because they are desperate are drawn into strong ideologies.
But the Prophet Muhammad back in the day when he used terrorism and war to spread his new found religion, was he desperate or ideologically driven? Is the leadership of Hamas "desperate"? The few hundred muslim foreign fighters in Mali destroying holy sites and terrorizing the people, would you call them "desperate"?
I certainly wouldn't. I think only a very naive individual would.
A man can be so strongly into an ideology and its goals and when he realizes that the majority doesn't agree with him he can become "desperate" in one sense (I can feel "desperate" about the fact that mosts Swedes are social democrats ready to give away our country to foreigners instead of being conservative nationalists), but it still usually starts from ideology.
