evolution

From the January 2006 issue of Scientific American comes an article titled “Murdercide,” by Michael Shremer, who chooses to gloss over the primary motivation for al-Qaeda terrorists:

Police have an expression for people who put themselves into circumstances that force officers to shoot them: “suicide by cop.” Following this lingo, suicide bombers commit “suicide by murder,” so I propose we call such acts “murdercide”: the killing of a human or humans with malice aforethought by means of self-murder.

The reason we need semantic precision is that suicide has drawn the attention of scientists, who understand it to be the product of two conditions quite unrelated to murdercide: ineffectiveness and disconnectedness…

…The belief that suicide bombers are poor, uneducated, disaffected or disturbed is contradicted by science. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, found in a study of 400 Al Qaeda members that three quarters of his sample came from the upper or middle class. Moreover, he noted, “the vast majority–90 percent–came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that’s usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways.” Nor were they sans employment and familial duties. “Far from having no family or job responsibilities, 73 percent were married and the vast majority had children…. Three quarters were professionals or semiprofessionals. They are engineers, architects and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion.”

Joiner postulates that a necessary condition for suicide is habituation to the fear about the pain involved in the act. How do terrorist organizations infuse this condition in their recruits? One way is through psychological reinforcement. University of Haifa political scientist Ami Pedahzur writes in Suicide Terrorism (Polity Press, 2005) that the celebration and commemoration of suicide bombings that began in the 1980s changed a culture into one that idolizes martyrdom and its hero. Today murderciders appear in posters like star athletes.

The fact that the sample space of al-Qaeda members not having “had any background in religion” does not preclude religious fervor, as I’m sure you can convince yourselves of rather easily. (We all have that friend or relative who spent his early years boozing and “chasing skirts,” only to become a “holy roller” later in life.) Minds change according to time and place, as we all discover one way or another. Furthermore, what constitutes “background in religion?” That isn’t made clear for the readers of this article.

Perhaps I can answer that question for Mr Shermer. What follows is an excerpt from a State Department report on religious freedom in Saudi Arabia (Osama bin Laden is Saudi, as were 19 of the 20 September 11 hijackers) from 2004:

Freedom of religion does not exist. It is not recognized or protected under the country’s laws, and basic religious freedoms are denied to all but those who adhere to the state-sanctioned version of Sunni Islam. Citizens are denied the freedom to choose or change their religion, and noncitizens practice their beliefs under severe restrictions. Islam is the official religion, and all citizens must be Muslims. The Government limits the practice of all but the officially sanctioned version of Islam and prohibits the public practice of other religions. During the period covered by this report, the Government publicly restated its policy that non-Muslims are free to practice their religions at home and in private. While the Government does not always respect this right in practice, many non-Muslims engage in private worship without harassment. As custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites in Mecca and Medina, the Government considers its legitimacy to rest largely on its interpretation and enforcement of Shari’a. Consequently, the Government has declared the Koran and the Sunna (tradition) of Muhammad to be the country’s Constitution. The Government follows the rigorously conservative and strict interpretation of the Salafi (often referred to as “Wahhabi”) school of the Sunni branch of Islam and discriminates against other branches of Islam. Neither the Government nor society in general accepts the concept of separation of religion and state.

All of the provisions I’ve bolded are provided for under shari’a law. In a culture where those who strike out at the hated Jews and infidel West are, as Mr Shermer notes, glorified in posters for children, it’s little wonder that organizations like al-Qaeda have little trouble finding new recruits.

Mr Shermer quotes a Dr Marc Sageman, a forensic psychologist at the Foriegn Policy Research institute who conducted the survey of 400 al-Qaeda members, as saying:

“The suicide bombers in Spain are another perfect example. Seven terrorists sharing an apartment and one saying, ‘Tonight we’re all going to go, guys.’ You can’t betray your friends, and so you go along. Individually, they probably would not have done it.”

That is certainly true to some extent, but again glosses over the question of how they came to be in Madrid with a large amount of explosives and a plan to use them in the first place. Something had to motivate them all to get into that situation in the first place; that “something” is radical Islam, as the group itself said:

“We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid exactly 2.5 years after the attacks on New York and Washington. It is a response to your collaboration with the criminals Bush and his allies.

“This is a response to the crimes that you have caused in the world, and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there will be more, if God wills it.

“You love life and we love death, which gives an example of what the Prophet Muhammad said. If you don’t stop your injustices, more and more blood will flow and these attacks will seem very small compared to what can occur in what you call terrorism.

“This is a statement by the military spokesman for al-Qaida in Europe, Abu Dujan al Afghani.”

What’s also annoying about this article is that in the very same issue of Scientific American in which this article appears, an article with a more frank discussion of jihad also appears, in the context of the Internet-as-recruiting tool. (Dr Sageman, the forensic psychologist referred to earlier, makes another appearance.) One could reasonably assume that since the same expert is quoted in both articles that the authors at least spoke to each other and perhaps exchanged information. Why then is one so frank and the other trying so hard to avoid a mention of the role of radical Islam in terrorism?

That is a question that becomes more difficult to answer when considering Mr Shermer’s final paragraph, which arrives at conclusions with which I concur.

One method to attenuate murdercide, then, is to target dangerous groups that influence individuals, such as Al ­Qaeda. Another method, says Princeton University economist Alan B. Krueger, is to increase the civil liberties of the countries that breed terrorist groups. In an analysis of State Department data on terrorism, Krueger discovered that “countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil liberties are unlikely to spawn suicide terrorists. Evidently, the freedom to assemble and protest peacefully without interference from the government goes a long way to providing an alternative to terrorism.” Let freedom ring.

Indeed™.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 28th, 2005 at 10:29 and is filed under terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.