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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Terrorists don’t often fit stereotype, expert says

Jul 2, 2004 2:42 pm By Robert Spencer

Terrorists are desperately poor and uneducated, and easily enticed by the promise of a few dollars or a bit of manipulative religious twaddle that the cynical power elite purvey but don’t believe in themselves … right?

Sorry. I have maintained throughout the life of Jihad Watch and in my books that this a false, misleading picture. The reality is that educated people who begin to get serious about their Islamic faith all too often turn to terrorism because they consider acts of violence against unbelievers to be part of their religious responsibility. But most analysts in the West would prefer to cling to the stereotype rather than face the unpleasant reality, because the latter presents a picture of a religion that is instilling violence in its most faithful adherents and is thus in dire need of massive reform, rather than the rosy view of a peaceful tradition that has been hijacked by a few extremists.

From Knight Ridder, with thanks to nevermindlv:

WASHINGTON – Most Americans have a false idea of the shadowy, worldwide terrorist network led by al-Qaida, according to a former CIA operative who collected the life histories of almost 400 members of the deadly movement.

The stereotype that these terrorists are poor, desperate, single young men from Third World countries, vulnerable to brainwashing, is wrong, Dr. Marc Sageman told an international terrorism conference in Washington this week.

Most Arab terrorists he studied were well-educated, married men from middle- or upper-class families, in their mid-20s and psychologically stable, said Sageman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Many of them knew several languages and traveled widely.

But when they settled in foreign countries, they became lonely, homesick and embittered, he said. They felt humiliated by the weakness and backwardness of their homelands. They formed tight cliques with fellow Arabs and drifted into mosques more for companionship than for religion. Radical preachers convinced them it was their duty to drive Americans from Muslim holy lands, killing as many as possible.

Sageman served as a CIA case officer in Afghanistan from 1987 to 1989, running agents against the Soviet occupation. In a book, “Understanding Terror Networks,” published in May, he traced the roots of the movement to a centuries-old Islamic tradition dedicated to purifying Muslim lands of “infidels” and restoring the past glories of Islam.

He described al-Qaida and its global allies as “a violent Islamist social movement held together by an idea: the use of violence against foreign and non-Muslim governments or populations to establish an Islamist state in the core Arab region.”

For its members, terrorism is “an answer to Islamic decadence – a feeling that Islam has lost its way,” he said.

Yes. And as such it is not a movement that is purveying some newly-minted heresy, but one that is forthrightly, even defiantly, traditionalist.

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Filed Under: Jihad doctrine, United States


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