This lengthy New York Times article is one long exercise in willful ignorance. “The brothers who carried out suicide bombings in Brussels last week had long, violent criminal records and had been regarded internationally as potential terrorists. But in San Bernardino, Calif., last year, one of the attackers was a county health inspector who lived a life of apparent suburban normality.” The one thing that they, and virtually all other jihad terrorists, have in common is so much ignored or denied by mainstream analysts that it isn’t even considered here: they were all devout, observant, deeply committed Muslims. Not all devout Muslims become jihad terrorists, but despite denials based on dubious evidence (such as the fact that a couple of Islamic State jihadis ordered The Koran For Dummies from Amazon, which could have been for any number of reasons), essentially all jihad terrorists are devout Muslims. Before politically correct denial became the official policy of the Obama administration, that fact was considered by the FBI and other agencies as they tried to determine who merited the most watching. But since 2011, consideration of high Islamic religiosity as a factor in determining who might become a jihad terrorist has been officially forbidden.
And so mainstream analysts pretend that jihadis “defy a single profile,” lump them in with other, non-Muslim terrorists who have entirely different motivations, and waste millions in taxpayer money hunting around for an alternative explanation to a reality they do not wish to face.
Marc Sageman and other clowns like him should stop scratching their heads and look at the Qur’an: one Malaysian Muslim said that the Qur’an led him to join the Islamic State. A Muslima in the U.S. promoted the Islamic State by quoting the Qur’an. An Islamic State propagandist’s parents said of him: “Our son is a devout Muslim. He had learnt the Quran by heart.” A Muslim politician from Jordan said that the Islamic State’s “doctrine stems from the Qur’an and Sunnah.” There are innumerable other examples of this.
One good point in this otherwise completely ridiculous article: “Mr. Krueger’s analysis of economic figures, polls, and data on suicide bombers and hate groups found no link between economic distress and terrorism. More than a decade later, law enforcement officials and government-funded community groups still regard money problems as an indicator of radicalization.” I have been pointing out for years that there is a superabundance of evidence disproving the idea that poverty causes terrorism. Nonetheless, it persists as U.S. government policy, as we shower billions on terror states such as Pakistan, trying to induce them to reform.
The entire mainstream political class, including these self-deluded analysts, needs to be thoroughly rejected and repudiated.
“Who Will Become a Terrorist? Research Yields Few Clues,” by Matt Apuzzo, New York Times, March 27, 2016
WASHINGTON — The brothers who carried out suicide bombings in Brussels last week had long, violent criminal records and had been regarded internationally as potential terrorists. But in San Bernardino, Calif., last year, one of the attackers was a county health inspector who lived a life of apparent suburban normality.
And then there are the dozens of other young American men and women who have been arrested over the past year for trying to help the Islamic State. Their backgrounds are so diverse that they defy a single profile.
What turns people toward violence — and whether they can be steered away from it — are questions that have bedeviled governments around the world for generations. Those questions have taken on fresh urgency with the rise of the Islamic State and the string of attacks in Europe and the United States. Despite millions of dollars of government-sponsored research, and a much-publicized White House pledge to find answers, there is still nothing close to a consensus on why someone becomes a terrorist.
“After all this funding and this flurry of publications, with each new terrorist incident we realize that we are no closer to answering our original question about what leads people to turn to political violence,” Marc Sageman, a psychologist and a longtime government consultant, wrote in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence in 2014. “The same worn-out questions are raised over and over again, and we still have no compelling answers.”
When researchers do come up with possible answers, the government often disregards them. Not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for instance, Alan B. Krueger, the Princeton economist, tested the widespread assumption that poverty was a key factor in the making of a terrorist. Mr. Krueger’s analysis of economic figures, polls, and data on suicide bombers and hate groups found no link between economic distress and terrorism.
More than a decade later, law enforcement officials and government-funded community groups still regard money problems as an indicator of radicalization….