Excellent pre-9/11 review of "terrorist minds"...However, does not at all address the Islamic terrorist mind...in fact, Evans makes the mistake of saying that Islam (and all great religions) condemn violence against "innocents"...problem is how Islam defines "innocents"...non-Muslims are not "innocent"...at the least they are guilty of refusing God's words and working for Satan.
Bruce The Mind of a Terrorist Evans, Ernest World Affairs; Spring2005, Vol. 167 Issue 4, p175, 5p Abstract: This article discusses how terrorists see the world, both strategically and morally. The article begins by responding to a criticism that in some way the author is justifying terroristic violence. The author insists that he is not doing so. According to him, that violence against the innocent is immoral should be taken as a given. However, in his view, if the world is to end terrorism, people must first understand its nature. The central argument of this article can be summarized as follows: Terroristic violence is so horrible that people tend to instinctively believe that terrorists are both sociopathic and irrational. It is the author's firm conviction that most of the time this is not true; on the contrary, terrorism is a rational strategy of coercing an opponent to agree to one's aims, and those who carry it out are usually not amoral sociopaths. This article is based on over thirty years of research on the problem of terrorism. The author has read hundreds of memoirs of terrorist leaders, and in the course of extensive field research in the 1970s and 1980s in Israel and the occupied territories, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, and Central America, he personally interviewed some two hundred active and retired terrorists. The Mind of a Terrorist By ERNEST EVANS The purpose of this talk is to give the audience an overview of how terrorists see the world, both strategically and morally. Now, I have given this talk over one hundred times since the tragic event of September 11, 2001, so at outset let me respond to a criticism I sometimes get concerning this talk. Specifically, because I attempt to explain how terrorists see the world, some listeners have felt that in some way I am justifying terroristic violence. I am not doing so; quite correctly, all of the world's great religions-Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.-strongly condemn violence against the innocent. That violence against the innocent is immoral should be taken as a given. However, if the world is to end terrorism, people must first understand its nature; as the great British soldier Lord Montgomery of El Alamain once said, "If you want peace, you must understand war." This talk is based on over thirty years of research on the problem of terrorism. I have read hundreds of memoirs of terrorist leaders, and in the course of extensive field research in the 1970s and 1980s in Israel and the occupied territories, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, and Central America, I personally interviewed some two hundred active and retired terrorists. The central argument of this talk can be summarized as follows: Terroristic violence is so horrible that people tend to instinctively believe that terrorists are both sociopathic and irrational. It is my firm conviction that most of the time this is not true; on the contrary, terrorism is a rational strategy of coercing an opponent to agree to one's aims, and those who carry it out are usually not amoral sociopaths. Broadly defined, terrorism can be described as a strategy of using violence to force an opponent to give in to one's demands. Within this broad definition are the following five tactical goals of a terroristic campaign: 1. Publicize the cause for which the terrorists are fighting. In 1975, I had a lengthy interview with Nathan Yallin-Mor, one of the three leaders of Lehi (the Stern Gang). In this interview, I asked him why Lehi had assassinated Lord Moyne in 1943 (Moyne was the British High Commissioner for the Middle East). Yallin-Mor said that during World War II the British refused to allow Jews fleeing the Nazi Holocaust to go to Palestine. This policy led to such tragic incidents as the steamship Sturma, which, after being refused permission to land its several hundred Jewish refugees in Palestine, was then sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Turkey; only one person survived. Yallin-Mor stated that because of censorship, the plight of these Jewish refugees was not receiving any publicity, that this policy would be "forced into the open" by the coverage of the death of a prominent British official. A second example of the need to get publicity is the 1979 assassination of Lord Mountbatten by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). The day of the assassination, a journalist from New Zealand called the office of the IRA's political wing (the Sinn Fein) in Dublin and demanded, "Why did you kill that harmless old man?" The individual answering the phone replied, "Why are you calling me from New Zealand?" The classic example of terrorists using violence to publicize their cause is the 1972 Munich Olympics incident. There is massive international coverage of the Olympics, so the terrorists knew that they would receive huge international attention for their attack. 2. Impose strategic costs on one's opponent. When I asked Yallin-Mor what his strategy was vis-à-vis the British, he replied: "We were going to make life so unbearable for them that they would leave." He noted that in an effort to pacify the Palestine Mandate, the British had to deploy over one hundred thousand troops there; such a large deployment was costing Great Britain heavily in terms of lives lost and money expended. In 1976, I had several lengthy interviews with senior IRA member Gerry Kelly. He said that the IRA's campaign was imposing heavy losses in life and money on the British and that-as they had done in response to insurgencies in Palestine, Kenya, Cyprus, Malaya, and South Yemen-they would eventually no longer be willing to accept such losses. The Second Intifada that the Palestinian radicals launched in 2000 was due to several factors, but one was the feeling that the just-concluded Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon indicated that if subjected to enough violence, the Israelis would agree to all the demands of the Palestinians. The 9/11 attack on the United States flowed from the calculation of the leadership of al Qaeda that the American withdrawals from Lebanon after the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks and from Somalia after the 1993 "Blackhawk Down" shootout were convincing evidence that enough terroristic violence would force the United States to agree to its demands. 3. Force a governmental overreaction that will serve to discredit it. In interviews with IRA members in 1976, they said that in the early years of the "troubles" in 1969-71, they engaged in carefully calculated provocations of the British army to cause it to overreact. This strategy of calculated provocations paid off handsomely in 1971 when the British ordered the internment of suspected IRA members without trial; the year that followed was the bloodiest of the "troubles." In his "Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla," terrorist Carlos Maighella also endorsed this tactic of calculated provocation. Maighella claimed that the resulting governmental overreaction would serve to destroy the government's legitimacy in the eyes of the population. As a sidebar, I should note that while most of the time terrorists are not amoral sociopaths, they do share one personality trait with sociopaths-namely, a profound understanding of the "psychology of violence." For example, it is now standard operating procedure for terrorists to kill at least one of their hostages in the course of the actual hostage-taking incident. Terrorists have learned through experience that when people unexpectedly see graphic violence, they usually go into a form of shock that causes them to have a childlike willingness to obey their captors. So, it was definitely by design that in each of the 9/11 hijackings, individuals were brutally killed in the course of the plane being seized. (This psychological reaction to terroristic violence is often called Stockholm Syndrome.) Another example of the deep understanding by terrorists of the psychology of violence that is of particular importance to "First Responders" (soldiers, police, firemen, emergency workers, etc.) is the so-called "gotcha" bomb. In these incidents, terrorists plant two bombs close together: One is calculated to go off a few minutes after the other one. Terrorists know that first responders, by both temperament and training, automatically rush in to help injured victims, thereby becoming casualties themselves. 4. Polarize society between the radicals on both sides. This is a tactic I personally witnessed in the 1968 presidential election between Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace. In the fall of 1968, while campaigning for Humphrey, it became clear to me that the radical members of the Students for Democratic Society were hoping that Nixon (or, ideally, Wallace) would win the election so as to "pave the way" for a revolution; as one SDS member said to me, "After the revolution, you miserable social democrats will be the first ones shot." In the final year of the Weimar Republic, the German communists similarly pursued a policy of deliberately polarizing German society between the radical extremes: These communists explained their tacit alliance with the Nazis by the slogan, "After Hitler, us." In the terrible ongoing violence between Israelis and Palestinians, it is clear that extremists on both sides are trying to polarize public opinion in their respective communities. Take, for example, the killings by an Israeli settler in Hebron in 1994 and the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; on the Palestinian side, every time there is any hint of a compromise settlement, there will quickly be a spectacular suicide bombing. 5. Finally, there is the tactical goal of gaining material benefits. Terrorist organizations need to raise money for their cause, and they need to secure the release of imprisoned comrades. In the ongoing civil war in Colombia, the two main leftist rebel groups (the FARC and ELN) have both raised large sums of money in ransoms for the release of kidnapped individuals. And just recently, the Hamas terrorist organization told its members to try and capture Israelis so as to bargain for the release of imprisoned compatriots. (Israel recently freed several hundred Palestinian prisoners in a deal with Hezbollah for the release of a captured Israeli civilian and for the return of the bodies of three Israeli soldiers killed in southern Lebanon.) With respect to how terrorists see moral issues, I think that it is critically important for those responsible for countering terrorism to realize that, for the most part, terrorists are not sociopaths. In a moment, I will say why this is so important, but first let me explain why most terrorists are not sociopaths: 1. Sociopaths have no conscience; they feel entitled to do whatever they want to do. In contrast, terrorists often observe moral restraints on their actions. For example, in tsarist Russia, the Narodnik terrorists aborted several attempts to assassinate the tsar because of the dangers posed to innocent bystanders. (They did eventually successfully kill Tsar Alexander II in 1881.) And, in an interview with former Irgun member Eli Tavin in 1975, he insisted that in the Irgun's most famous attack-namely, the destruction of the British military headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem-the Irgun called to warn the British that they must evacuate the hotel. (For reasons that are still unclear, the British did not do so, and several dozen people were killed.) 2. Sociopaths feel no need to justify their actions; if they want to do something, they feel fully entitled to do it, regardless of what society thinks. In contrast, terrorists generally go to great lengths to morally justify their activities. For example, in my interview with Nathan Yallin-Mor in 1975, he spent nearly an hour of the interview justifying the killing of Lord Moyne. 3. Sociopaths get a sadistic "power trip" from watching the pain and suffering of their victims, and so appealing to them for mercy is a complete waste of time. Take, for instance, the case of America's most notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy. In the last four days before Bundy's execution, Rev. James Dobson, an evangelical Christian minister, met for hours with Bundy, urging him to do the final decent thing by making a full account of his victims and by telling where he had buried all the bodies. Bundy refused; to him it was such a "high" to think of all the anguish he was causing to his victims' families that [he] was not going to confess unless he was promised not to be executed in return. The last thing he said as he was being strapped into the electric chair was, "If you let me live I'll tell you where I buried the bodies." Contrast Bundy's glee at the anguish of the families of his victims with a case that I was personally involved with concerning the IRA. In 1973, Thomas Niedermayer, the honorary West German consul in Belfast, was kidnapped by a unit of the IRA acting without authorization of that organization's leadership. After being kidnapped, Mr. Niedermayer had a massive heart attack and died instantly. The IRA, embarrassed by the incident, secretly buried the body and refused to tell anyone what had happened. In 1976, while doing field research in Ireland, I mentioned to several members of the IRA that from my work with the human rights group Amnesty International I had firsthand knowledge of the great anguish that the families of missing political prisoners go through because they have no accounting of how their loved one died. I suggested that it would be a "generous gesture" to let Mrs. Niedermayer know what had happened to her husband. My contacts were noncommittal at the time; however, a few months after I left Ireland, I got a letter postmarked Dublin, Ireland. Inside was a full account of what had happened to Mr. Niedermayer and a note requesting that this information be passed on to Mrs. Niedermayer. (I gave the note to the German Embassy in Washington, DC, and they had their diplomatic staff deliver it to Mrs. Niedermayer; Mr. Niedermayer's body was found in 1980.) The reason I stress that most terrorists are not sociopaths is that the sort of strategies that are effective in dealing with sociopaths will not be effective in dealing with terrorists. Take, for example, that great "one-size-fits-all" strategy of the "get-tough-with-crime" crowd-namely, liberal use of the death penalty. Threatening a sociopath with the death penalty often gets results; the authorities learned from the Bundy case that it is futile to appeal to a moral sense in such individuals, and, therefore, in the case of the "Green River Killer" Gary Ridgway they reluctantly agreed not to execute him in exchange for him telling where he had buried all the bodies. In contrast, the death penalty is at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive in dealing with terrorists. It is ineffective because serious, committed terrorists are willing to die for their cause, and it is counterproductive because it creates martyrs. If most terrorists are not sociopaths, how, then, do they justify what all the world's great religions condemn-namely, the killing of innocent people? There are five standard justifications that terrorists offer for their actions: 1. Their victims are not innocent people. I mentioned earlier that Yallin-Mor had justified the killing of Lord Moyne by pointing to Lord Moyne's role in preventing Jews from getting anctuary in Palestine. He further told the following story to justify this assassination: Adolf Eichmann, acting through intermediaries, offered a deal to the Jewish Agency. If they would get the British government to give the Germans a certain number of trucks, in return the Germans would let one million Jews escape to Palestine. When the Jewish Agency told Lord Moyne of this offer, he refused it with the comment, "What am I supposed to do with one million Jews?" So, to Yallin-Mor, Lord Moyne was a collaborator in the Nazi Holocaust. When Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974, I was talking with a young Chicano activist about how dismayed I was that an innocent person was being cruelly victimized. This individual angrily disagreed: "She is not an innocent person. She has lived a life of luxury paid for by the sweat of my people. She is getting what she and her family deserve." Sometimes terrorists simply deny that there is such a thing as an innocent person, that all people share in the guilt of society's injustices. In 1975, I interviewed Sir Geoffrey Jackson, the former British ambassador to Uruguay who had been held hostage by the Tupamaro terrorists for several months in 1971. Sir Geoffrey told me that his Tupamaro kidnappers often said to him, "There is no such thing as an innocent bystander." 2. The government is the one really responsible for the violence because it refuses to allow peaceful change. Over and over again in the interviews I had with members of the IRA, they stated that the whole history of British involvement in Ireland shows that the British will not accept peaceful change and that, thus, their only recourse is to violence. In interviews I did with Sandinista activists in Nicaragua in 1983, they repeatedly came back to the event that sparked the 1978-79 revolution in Nicaragua: namely, the assassination in early 1978 by the Somoza regime of the leader of the peaceful opposition, Pedro Joaquin Chamarro. These Sandinista activists said that this killing destroyed all hope of nonviolent change in Somoza's Nicaragua. 3. There is no alternative to violence because the forces of the status quo are so strong; violence is the only weapon available to those who want change. The single most tragic image of the 1992 Los Angeles riot was the televised beating of Reginald Denny, a white truck driver who was caught in the midst of the riot. (It should be remembered that Mr. Denny survived because some black men saw him being beaten on television and rushed out to rescue him.) Shortly after this riot, I asked a black student of mine who advocated violence to get black demands met how he felt about Mr. Denny's beating; this unfortunate individual had nothing whatever to do with the televised beating of Rodney King. My student thought for a moment and then replied: "Have you ever noticed, Dr. Evans, how certain things do not happen? For example, when Congress refuses to cut the capital gains tax, you do not see rich white men rioting in the streets of Beverly Hills." (I did not accept this as a justification for Mr. Denny's beating, but everyone knows that under the current U.S. system of campaign financing, "money talks and people walk.") 4. The group that the terrorists represent [has] suffered greatly, and if others have to suffer, then that is sad but unavoidable. The Palestinian resistance movement has repeatedly argued that the terrible ordeal of their people justifies terrorist violence. When a Palestinian terrorist group killed and wounded several dozen Israeli children at Ma'alot in 1974, a Palestinian publication justified this violence by arguing that Ma'alot was built on the site of the Arab village Tarshila that was destroyed by the Israelis in 1948. 5. Terrorism is a form of war, and in all forms of war innocent people get killed. At his trial for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh said that he considered himself a soldier in a war against the illegitimate government of the United States. He excused the killing of twenty-three children in the federal building's day care center as the sort of "collateral damage" that takes place in all wars. This has been a talk on a pessimistic subject, so I hate to conclude on a pessimistic note, but analytical honesty demands that I do. Specifically, there is strong reason to believe that terroristic violence, which is already quite indiscriminate, will become even more so in the years and decades ahead. The reason is simple: In all of the world's great religions, there are substantial fundamentalist factions who believe that we are living in "End Times": Christian fundamentalists who believe Christ will soon return; Jewish fundamentalists who believe that the Messiah will soon arrive; Islamic fundamentalists who believe that final victory over the infidels is near; and Hindu fundamentalists who believe it is "payback time" for the Muslims who conquered India several centuries ago. Put simply, if one really believes that the world is in "End Times," it is all too easy to justify indiscriminate violence. ------------------------ Yahoo! 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