What Makes a Terrorist?

[Northside Storm]

An interesting alternative perspective on a hotly debated topic in this forum.

It’s not poverty and lack of education, according to economic research by Princeton’s ALAN KRUEGER. Look elsewhere.

Claude Berrebi, now of the RAND Corporation’s Institute for Civil Justice, wrote his dissertation at Princeton on the characteristics of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who were involved in terrorist activities. For example, he compared suicide bombers to the whole male population aged 16 to 50 and found that the suicide bombers were less than half as likely to come from families that were below the poverty line. In addition, almost 60 percent of the suicide bombers had more than a high school education, compared with less than 15 percent of the general population. The Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project conducted public opinion surveys in February 2004 in Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey, involving about 1,000 respondents in each country. One of the questions asked was, “What about suicide bombing carried out against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq? Do you personally believe that this is justifiable or not justifiable?” Pew kindly provided me with tabulations of these data by respondents’ personal characteristics. The clear finding was that people with a higher level of education are in general more likely to say that suicide attacks against Westerners in Iraq are justified. I have also broken this pattern down by income level. There is no indication that people with higher incomes are less likely to say that suicide-bombing attacks are justified. Another source of opinion data is the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, headquartered in Ramallah. The center collects data in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. One question, asked in December 2001 of 1,300 adults, addressed attitudes toward armed attacks on Israeli targets. Options were “strongly support,” “support,” “oppose,” “strongly oppose,” or “no opinion.” Support turned out to be stronger among those with a higher level of education. For example, while 26 percent of illiterates and 18 percent of those with only an elementary education opposed or strongly opposed armed attacks, the figure for those with a high school education was just 12 percent. The least supportive group turned out to be the unemployed, 74 percent of whom said they support or strongly back armed attacks. By comparison, the support level for merchants and professionals was 87 percent.

Public opinion is one thing; actual participation in terrorism is another. There is striking anecdotal evidence from Nasra Hassan, a United Nations relief worker in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who described interviews with 250 militants and their associates who were involved in the Palestinian cause in the late 1990s. Hassan concluded that “none of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs. Two were the sons of millionaires.”

One set of factors that I examined did consistently raise the likelihood that people from a given country will participate in terrorism—namely, the suppression of civil liberties and political rights, including freedom of the press, the freedom to assemble, and democratic rights. Using data from the Freedom House Index, for example, I found that countries with low levels of civil liberties are more likely to be the countries of origin of the perpetrators of terrorist attacks. In addition, terrorists tend to attack nearby targets. Even international terrorism tends to be motivated by local concerns.

The evidence suggests that terrorists care about influencing political outcomes. They are often motivated by geopolitical grievances. To understand who joins terrorist organizations, instead of asking who has a low salary and few opportunities, we should ask: Who holds strong political views and is confident enough to try to impose an extremist vision by violent means? Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead, they are people who care so fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it.

http://www.american.com/archive/2007...es-a-terrorist

Evidence might be a bit skewed; Krueger looked at GDP per capita as a metric to measure whether or not outrage at economic conditions in one's host country contributed to joining terrorist campaigns. That measure is hard to disentangle with the prevalent inequality behind the distribution of oil resources that markedly inflate GDP in the region. There may still be evidence that poverty causes terrorism (albeit indirectly).

This is an interesting, and unconventional perspective on an issue that seems too often to have been relegated to dogma; poverty causes terrorism. Solve poverty. They hate our culture. They hate our freedom. etc.

It turns out that it might be more complicated than it seems. It is not the ignorant who go haphazardly to their deaths; it is, more likely then not, the educated who do it purposefully. Learning more about the system causes certain people to be angrier, rather than more complacent. Perhaps with the resurgence of populist movements that have a hope of creating a better framework for civil liberties in the region, there can be some hope to counteract this.

[Mathloom]

That's interesting, especially given there are PEOPLE on this board who simultaneously support supression of freedoms and civil liberties and claim to oppose terrorism.

IMO it's always been blatantly clear that terrorism causes terrorism, and these factors are the fuel of that terrorism. So wherever you see terrorism, you can figure out why it's happening by finding the other terrorist, and you can understand why it's happening on a certain scale by looking at these factors. This has held true for almost all of human history, and it is something that (based on my conversations with them) virtually all Middle Easterners are well aware of, since they were the Big Chief terrorists just a few centuries ago and they STILL don't call the events of that time terrorism.

You know what they call/called it? They say it was the spreading of an ideology that freed people, that the enemies were not giving their own people their rights, that the new people in charge improved literacy, that their conquests were shown to be righteous due to the boom in schience and technology in their empire. They said that it was based on God's will, and that the Christians had to choose being with them or against them because the empire was at war with oppression. They retaliated against Jews (remember, Jews were a small minority at the time) by demolishing their properties, they gave them sovereignty over their own lands if they followed conditions, they made them wear clothing which would make them identifiable and trackable, etc.

If we take a look at these definitions:

According to the Department of Defense, terrorism is "calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological." [1] Federal law defines terrorism as the "unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives." [2] The U.S. Army Manual defines terrorism as the "calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear. It is intended to coerce or intimidate governments or societies ... [to attain] political, religious, or ideological goals." [3] [1] "DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms", http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/dod...a/t/05360.html [2] 28 Code of Federal Regulations Section 0.85 [3] U.S. Army Field Manual No. FM 3-0, Chapter 9, 37, 14 June 2001, http://www.adtdl.army.mil/cgi-bin/at...ch9.htm#par3-7

I will add to that first definition "political, religious, ideological" and commercial reasons, unless you consider commercial reasons to be an ideology (which I do).

I agree that suppression is a leading cause. But I wouldn't discount poverty and education completely - I haven't read the whole article, but I would be interested to know if he delved into the possibility that wealth DISPARITY and educational DISPARITY also contribute to the problem of terrorism.

[Invisible Fan]

When I took a course on this over a decade ago (god I'm getting old...), main causes were poverty, lack of political representation, and a symbolic ideology that inspires or drives meaning in young people with ****loads of time on their hands.

The first terrorist movements were non-religious and secular. Some sources claim that the French Revolution the birthplace of modern terrorism, I guess because the medium was there to document and spread the news.Then the Communist movements in the early 1900s (and continued many decades later) that attempted to mimic what happened to France a hundred years earlier.

There's a documentary by Adam Curtis that makes the case that leaders of the Iranian revolution were heavily influenced by Sartre. Much like movies by the Wachowski Bros (Matrix, V for Vendetta), they posited that the Western Modern life was a symbol of listless decay of the then-modernizing Middle East.

I forgot the name of the American educated dude that went back and formed the underpinnings of fundamentalist revolutionary Islam in the 50's, but these were leaders with sometimes strong intellectual backgrounds, much different than the cave dwellers you see in the news.

So it's sometimes for the same reason like where people try to find meaning in their early youth and start thinking about their purpose. Some join gangs. Others join cults. A terror group is a little of both.

Like any war or movement, it's mostly the young that are sent off to fight and die. And like any war, without the poor being sympathetic to your cause, you can't properly fight. It's not only because they're raw recruits, but as a sympathetic audience, you can hide and blend in with everyone else when soldiers start kicking down doors. When you're hungry or homeless, you might be invited to a stranger's home as a welcome guest.

A strong case for this theory is Ireland. The Irish were more willing to come to the table as their economy rose from the ashes and briefly outpaced the rest of Europe. As people had more to lose from collateral damage in their backyard, they were less likely to hide terrorists...and more willing to rat them out.

And finally, in the Middle East, there's a strong case that as long as Autocratic, sometimes US-backed, regimes clamp down on other political parties and movements (sometimes with brutal and lengthy reprisals), there will always be a secular component to their locally inspired terror groups.

Kinda makes the Tea Party and their occasionally violently veiled threats an actual Tea Party.

[arno_ed]

Being on the other side of the conflict, otherwise they are freedom fighters.