Also from this morning’s (London) Times:
If someone hates us so much that he is prepared to sacrifice his own life in order to commit mass murder, then we want to find a rational explanation in his personality or his background to separate him from the rest of us.
He would ideally have grown up in deprivation, with a dysfunctional family, few friends, minimal education, a poverty of expectation and a world view that can be easily moulded by the Islamist zealots whose nihilistic creed offers a simple, deadly solution to all of life’s problems.
The reality, disturbingly, is very different. A study of 172 al-Qaeda terrorists conducted four years ago by Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer in Pakistan, found that 90 per cent came from a relatively stable, secure background.
Three quarters were from middle-class or upper-class families, two thirds went to college and two thirds were professionals or semi-professionals, often engineers, physicians, architects or scientists. The average age for making an active commitment to violent jihad was 26, and three quarters of the terrorists were married, most of them with children. Only one in a hundred had shown any form of psychotic disorder. Two thirds became drawn towards a terror group while living in a country that was not their homeland.
Dr Sageman’s findings, published in 2004 in Understanding Terrorist Networks, led him to conclude that “most of these men were upwardly and geographically mobile”. He wrote: “Because they were the best and brightest, they were sent abroad to study. They came from moderately religious, caring, middle-class families. They spoke three, four, five, six languages.”
This is no surprise to anyone except those who bought the cod Marxist line that all our problems are economic at root. People who can’t take religious ideology seriously aren’t likely to recognize it even when it hits them in the face.
It is good that Muslims in the west are denouncing jihad. But are they aware it is their own mosques and imams that are harboring and nurturing this disease, and their own marriage practices that are reinforcing it? And are they fundamentally committede to the west or just here to make money?
When are they going to speak up for non-Muslims like Lina Joy in Muslim majority countries?
I can remember working near a Muslim electrical engineering student at George Mason University in the early 1990s. His anger towards the United States was vocal and intense. By now, he is probably employed in sensitive engineering work somewhere in our country.
He was the son of an upper class Pakistani diplomat stationed at the World Bank in Washington, DC.
Ideology is a luxery, it’s no surprise that those who fight for one or the other are well off and are thinking more of surrvival. The anger that is bred by poverty and oppression is real, but it is not directed at any one thing or any one direction–the chaos of the Palestinian territories and their infighting shows that. the congressional study published under the title “Who becomes a terrorist and why” released after the first World Trade Center attack came to much the same conclusions as the current study.
excuse me, ideology is a luxury.
Elves, I had a brain freeze. The first line of my comment above should read:
“Ideology is a luxury, it’s no surprise that those who fight for one or the other are well off and are thinking of more than survival.”
Apologies…
“The unexpected profile of the modern terrorist”
Ideas matter. Rich-country jihadists are not prisoners of their past. They act on what they believe.