Aside from law enforcement intervention and deterrence using the criminal justice system, is there a way for society to ‘prevent’ potential terrorists from becoming mass murderers? In other words, convincing them that it’s better to choose this comfortable life than blowing yourself up and take others in the process?
I’m of the opinion that with true terrorists, this is a fruitless endeavour. For the guys from ghettos and slums like some of those involved in the Paris attacks, it may work. It seems that lack of academic opportunities, no job prospects, racism, and no meaningful social support group for these young men leaves them with no better options in their mind; so perhaps things may change.
However, with men like Mohammad Atta who excel academically, live ‘normally’ in the Western World and still have a desire to commit mass murder, what can really be done with them? They’re not poor, have jobs and are able to superficially fit into society (show respect/courtesy, socialize with others). Whats the option?
This seems to be a more general question given as a particular example. The question is “can people change their minds about things?.” The answer is yes, people can change their minds about things.
I’ve never considered them radicalised. They were mostly professional men who had come to the conclusion it was time, after decades of imperial imposition on their countries, culture and religion, to stand up - you see the Hollywood trope all the time; Star Wars Terminator, Die Hard, etc.
Good point about the “not radicalized.” If the other side says “it’s okay to kill this group of people because they are the enemies of our god” they are radicals. If your side says “it is okay to kill this group of people because they are the enemies of our god”, they become the heroes of an episode of Veggietales.
The only way to prevent these people from becoming radicalized is to monitor them at the local level. That means each mosque looking out for people becoming radicalized and actively fighting that view of Islam. The problem is that it is hard for people to know exactly what the difference between angry person and dangerous person, between suddenly devout and radicalized.
Ultimately it is going to be a question of better law enforcement and more people being educated as to what to look for.
The problem is that some mosques are ‘radical’ which means that if suspected of being surveilled they will attempt to make their activities even more covert.
Yeah, that whole defended Saudi and kicked Saddam out of Kuwait thingy certainly should have been done differently, since that was the core of OBLs gripe. We should never have supported Saudi and stationed troops there nor kicked Saddam out of Kuwait since it so obviously pissed AQ off when they didn’t get the chance to do it as OBL planned.
There are certainly good reasons for some folks to hate America, and no doubt we could and should do something about some of them. In THIS case, however, your answer is total horseshit…as is up_the_junction, though that’s not unusual for him while it is for you.
It was his gripe because he hated the Saudi regime as US puppets. He considered working with the US to be wrong for multiple reasons, among them US support for Israel, and the Iraq embargo. In short, I think you have his reasoning reversed.
There will always be charismatic madmen like Shoko Asahara who can’t be appeased by any rational policy. That said, the more people there are with good reasons to hate America, the easier it is to recruit fighters and arrange funding; the harder it is to break the narrative of the US as an oppressor; and the harder it is for pro-US regimes to take power without being tyrants.
Bin Laden didn’t do anything alone, he needed followers, and lots of them.
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It was his gripe because he hated the Saudi regime as US puppets. He considered working with the US to be wrong for multiple reasons, among them US support for Israel, and the Iraq embargo. In short, I think you have his reasoning reversed.
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I don’t think so. OBL and AQ were pissed off because they made statements and had expectations that, when Saddam and Iraq invaded Kuwait that THEY would repel the invaders and protect Saudi as they had in Afghanistan and got seriously bent out of shape when the Kingdom looked to the US for support and aid…and when the US basically made it look easy kicking Saddam out of Kuwait and back to Iraq.
Certainly, there were other factors, but the US had supported Israel as much in 1990 as we had in 1980 and as much as we had when AQ decided to start attacking US assets in the region and later at home. What changed, for them, was the first Iraqi war and the fact that US troops had been staged and stationed in Saudi…and that we were successful in what we did. None of that is a rational basis for hating the US nor was there any way that, in this case the US could ‘stop giving people good reasons to hate America and Americans’…which is why your answer was BS in this case.
There certainly are reasons to hate the US, both rational and irrational. And the ME is one of the regions that the US has done some heavy handed things, supported unpopular regimes and had policies that irritated the folks who live there. If you were talking about Iran, for instance, I’d say your answer would be a good one…the Iranians certainly have a lot of reasons to dislike the US (and vice versa of course). But AQ? No, their reasons are mainly irrational or are so opposed to our own strategic needs that they are automatically going to be impossible for us to ‘stop giving people good reasons to hate America and Americans’ . They TALK about Israel, but their focus was and probably still is to create a fundamentalist Islamic super state, with themselves in charge, and their main gripe with the US is we are in their way.
Certainly. But his followers, kind of by definition, agreed with his motives and strategic and tactical goals. I don’t think there was any way (short of wiping them out before hand) of getting the hijackers to be less radicalized towards the US and the west…not in this case. Again, if you were talking about someone like Iran or even Libya you could make this case, but not AQ. Their goals were always going to bring them into conflict with the US sooner or later.
People made that mistake back in the seventies over Iran. They could see that the Shah ran a brutal regime and they assumed any opposition to him would make Iran a better place.
What they missed was that a good portion of the opposition to the Shah was from people who felt he wasn’t brutal enough - or was being brutal to the wrong people. The result was that when the Shah was overthrown he was replaced by an even worse regime.
Al Qaeda was the same way. They were not trying to make the world a better place. Sure, they wanted to overthrow a lot of regimes, many of them bad, in the Middle East. But the regimes Al Qaeda wanted to establish would have been worse.
The 9/11 attackers were not a band of freedom fighters trying to overthrow an evil regime. They were more like the Brownshirts back in 1929 who were trying to put the Nazis in power. Not all plucky underdog are heroes.
(1) is quite objective, and a considerable volume of proof of a spherical Earth is available. Yet some people are not convinced.
(2) is quite subjective. If some people cannot be convinced of a round Earth, what chance is there of convincing certain people that their subjective opinion is wrong or immoral?
I would be willing to try to make myself see it that way if their targets were military personnel/infrastructure (or, stretching it quite a bit, country’s leadership), and in addition if they could somehow justify their actions by projecting some kind of reaction on behalf of their enemy that would result in the reduction of the “imperial imposition”.
None of that is the case in 9/11. Even the Pentagon strike still involved, by necessity, murdering hundreds of innocent civilians in the plane, and it was obvious to anyone who was not a complete idiot that US reaction would be an increase of the aforementioned “imperial imposition”.
I’ll confess to not being an Al-Qaeda expert, but I’ve read speeches and interviews with Bin Laden wherein he makes some very reasonable critiques of US foreign policy, and says things like this:
The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.
I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.
The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn’t respond.
In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
But as I said, I’m no expert. I’ll take some time and read up on your points above before proceeding. Thank you for your contribution to my understanding.
IMHO, it’s not possible, any more than it is to prevent there from being Charles Mansons or Ted Bundys. It only takes one, or a few, out of millions, for such acts to be perpetrated.
Plus - what we in the West consider to be “radicalized”, is, to some other people, just "a reasonable viewpoint.’ imagine if Republicans said, “How can we prevent people from being “radicalized” into liberals” or Democrats asked, “How can we prevent people from being “radicalized” into Republicans?” The response from the target audience would be a snort of derision and, “We’re not radicalized - our actions are logical and reasonable.”
Sure, and most likely those speeches resonate because like all good speeches they are believed by those who are swayed to that world view. And I have no doubt that OBL believed what he said there as well. But I think if you look into it you’ll see that, while nothing in the above is untrue from OBL and his followers perspective, it’s pretty obvious that the actual REASON for their attacks was based on their own political aspirations towards a fundamentalist Islamic super-state, and that the reason they attacked the US was due to our actions and those of other regional powers during the first Gulf War, and the fact that it was the US who basically formed and drove the coalition that kicked Iraq out of Kuwait, not to mention put our infidel boots on sacred Saudi soil. And basically stymied AQ and OBL from being able to take further steps towards that fundamentalist Islamic super-state…which the US was in the way of, especially after the first Gulf War. All that other stuff, while true enough in their eyes was just a speech to justify the course they were taking for other reasons.
Or, maybe not. Certainly look into it more and if you think you have definitive evidence to the contrary I’m open to looking at it. This was a subject I was deeply into 5 or 10 years ago, but I have to admit I haven’t really bothered keeping up to date on it, since it just seems a never ending blood bath in the region with the US seemingly mired in it forever. That might be skewing my own opinion and view. And at least even when I think you are wrong I think you are a much more thoughtful and coherent poster than knee jerking up_the_junction on anything related to the US.
I’ve never understood why people assume that terrorists think like them.
Trying to get into the mindset of OBL and AQ’s top leaders at the time, I would understand that the American government comes from the people. It’s not some magical entity run by a separate group of humans.
Even if a tiny tiny number of Americans are involved in the government, the policies and mindsets of those in Congress, US miitary, The President, are expressed by a large number of Americans on a spectrum, so these people from my radicalised POV, would not be as ‘innocent’ as some people desperately want them to be.
Hijacking an airliner and crashing it into a building seems reasonable to someone like that. And in a way justifiable if the people on it are in some significant way, complicit in the evil government.