“TERRORISTS are a bit like you and me, or so Marc Sageman suggests. It might be comforting to think that angry young Islamists are crazed psychopaths or sex-starved adolescents who have been brainwashed in malign madrassas. But Mr Sageman, a senior fellow at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, explodes each of these myths, and others besides, in an unsettling account of how al-Qaeda has evolved from the organisation headed by Osama bin Laden into an amorphous movement—a “leaderless jihad”.

Mr Sageman is a leading advocate of what is called the “buddy” theory of terrorism. He has spent much time asking why well-educated young men, from middle-class backgrounds, often with a secular education and wives and children, become suicide bombers. He suggests that radicalisation is a collective rather than an individual process in which friendship and kinship are key components.”

“In truth, notions of “cowardice” and “bravery” are entirely irrelevant when we contemplate the horrors of terrorism. To call a terrorist “cowardly” is to substitute testosterone for morality. Somehow it isn’t enough to abhor an act of terrorism or even to promise to make the terrorist pay dearly. The rules demand that the terrorist be branded a sissy. This is not only a childish reflex, but one that weakens the moral force of the condemnation and thereby dishonors terrorism’s victims. After all, we don’t want brave people to slaughter innocent people any more than we want cowardly people to do so. Still, the public seems to demand that our presidents call terrorists cowards, and our presidents are too–well, cowardly–to deny them.”

“Talk about handing an aesthetic victory to the bad guys. Someone has decided to include siege mentality in the brief for building Britain.”

“Why is an economist studying terrorism? I have two answers. First, participation in terrorism is just a special application of the economics of occupational choice. Some peo ple choose to become doctors or lawyers, and others pursue careers in terrorism. Economics can help us understand why.

The second answer is that, together with Jörn-Steffen Pischke, now at the London School of Economics, I studied the outbreak of hate crimes against foreigners in Germany in the early 1990s. Through this work, I concluded that poor economic conditions do not seem to motivate people to par ticipate in hate crimes.”

“Kamoze Ini’s Lyrical Gangster ditty kept popping in to my head last week every time Samina Malik, the “lyrical terrorist“, flashed by on a news bulletin. To be honest both the Lyrical Gangster and the lyrical terrorist have about as much to do with poetry or terrorism as each other – which is next to nothing.”

(…)

“What had she done? Well, she downloaded various documents from terrorist websites including weapons manuals and The Mujaheddin Poisoner’s Handbook, niftily designed with a skull and crossbones on the cover (I’m still not sure if this is a spoof). Compounding all of this, Malik went all Web 2.0 and posted poems – terrible, terrible poems – on various websites. That’s about the extent of her terrorist activity. But never fear. The judge and prosecutors went the extra mile to give her a notoriety that her very, very bad poetry and infantile fantasies about being a terrorist really don’t warrant.”

“I used to find it hard to fully imagine the mind-set of a terrorist.
That is, until I played Halo 3 online, where I found myself adopting — with great success — terrorist tactics. Including a form of suicide bombing.”

(…)

“It’s not just that I’m willing to sacrifice my life to kill someone else. It’s that I’m exploiting the psychology of asymmetrical warfare.”

“”We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.”

Zie en luister ook Fresh Air: TV Torture Changes Real Interrogation Techniques.

Extreem rechtse vandalen vernielen The History of Sex. (sic)

New York Times:

“A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.”

Het tinnef in actie op YouTube: Nationalists Action Against Degenerate “Art”

“There is an unquestionable need for clear thinking about suicide bombing. But thinking is muddied by the powerful emotions of horror and repulsion it properly stirs. Suicide bombing, as anthropologist Talal Asad notes, is not the most deadly weapon even in conflicts where it is endemic. Rather, the suicide attack is among the most effective ways of attaining another goal: the production of terror though the prospect of uncontrolled and indiscriminate violence. Reckoning with suicide bombing, therefore, means not just taking account of the tactic itself, but also the reactions it purposefully provokes.”

The American Prospect: Explosive Reactions

Ironic Sans: Terrorist organization logos.

“Finally, consider our personalities. Most of us are grounded, normal people. But messianic and visionary delusions come naturally with the medical territory.

The everyday business of medicine creates a god complex in some practitioners that first blinds them, and then seduces them to view their deviltry as noble work toward higher purposes.”

Regina Dwyer: Doctors who kill

This study analyzes the political plights of twenty-eight terrorist groups — the complete list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) as designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001. The data yield two unexpected findings. First, the groups accomplished their forty-two policy objectives only 7 percent of the time. Second, although the groups achieved certain types of policy objectives more than others, the key variable for terrorist success was a tactical one: target selection. Groups whose attacks on civilian targets outnumbered attacks on military targets systematically failed to achieve their policy objectives, regardless of their nature.”

Bruce Schneier: Why Terrorism Doesn’t Work