Is it true- are most terrorists not brainwashed and from broken homes?

[andrewdt85]

In a previous thread of mine, here, I heard that in actuality, most terrorists are not what we think of as the social outcast/brainwashed at a young age/from a broken home types, that most actually are mid to upper class, from good homes and good backgrounds who choose to live lives of terror. The person in that thread cites http://www.fpri.org/enotes/20041101.middleeast.sageman.understandingterrornetworks.html , which says

Most people think that terrorism comes from poverty, broken families, ignorance, immaturity, lack of family or occupational responsibilities, weak minds susceptible to brainwashing - the sociopath, the criminals, the religious fanatic, or, in this country, some believe they’re just plain evil.

Taking these perceived root causes in turn, three quarters of my sample came from the upper or middle class. 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.

Al Qaeda’s members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.

Far from having no family or job responsibilities, 73 percent were married and the vast majority had children. Those who were not married were usually too young to be married. Only 13 percent were madrassa-trained and most of them come from what I call the Southeast Asian sample, the Jemaah Islamiyya (JI). They had gone to schools headed by Sungkar and Bashir. Sungkar was the head of JI; he died in 1999. His successor, Bashir, is the cleric who is being tried for the Jakarta Marriott bombing of August 2003; he is also suspected of planning the October 2002 Bali bombing.

As a psychiatrist, originally I was looking for any characteristic common to these men. But only four of the 400 men had any hint of a disorder. This is below the worldwide base rate for thought disorders. So they are as healthy as the general population. I didn’t find many personality disorders, which makes sense in that people who are antisocial usually don’t cooperate well enough with others to join groups.

Certainly Osama Bin Laden fits this description; his dad was a self-made billionaire in carpentry, Osama got an engineering degree and himself made a fortune in the business. So then I guess he chose to go off and live in caves and blow people up, and when the time comes to pop a cap in his ass, no tears are needed b/c he was no victim of circumstance :wally.

But is it true about most terrorists? Brainwashed Palestinians like these kids, and Iranian propaganda cartoons like these certainly don’t support that argument, but is it true?

[Loopydude]

Well, your cite says it is so what’s the debate, the veracity of your cite?

FWIW, I’ve read similar reports, and I think there’s something to be said for the common stereotype of the suicide bomber being a gross oversimplification, and not at all fully representative of the reality. I think the caricature is most likely a function of Western sensibilities, and the perfectly reasonable assumption, from the Western perspective, that someone with a life worth living wouldn’t voluntarily blow themselves to bits. Even the Western soldier fights to survive. The behavior of the suicide bomber seems terribly paradoxical, unless as an act of utter desperation. To learn that sometimes, perhaps often, people with much more than nothing to lose choose willingly to slaughter themselves in the prime of their lives, even if they hold a burning hatred for those they target, is certainly confounding.

[andrewdt85]

@Loopydude

Well, your cite says it is so what’s the debate, the veracity of your cite?

Pretty much. It’s always good to question expert sources, especially about something as emotionally-investing as whether to cry about most of the terrorists getting killed in the world (b/c they’re victims of circumstance).

Not literally, but you know.

[Loopydude]

I don’t think many people are suggesting suicide bombers be absoved because of their circumstances. It’s a rather moot point at any rate, as the perpetrator always winds up dead. As I make no definite assumptions about the afterlife (or if there is one), I don’t do any crying for dead people I never knew, who chose to die whilst killing lots of innocent people along with themselves. I don’t know anyone who does.

But certainly you must agree that it’s important to understand what motivates the suicide bomber. At the very least, you’ll recognize what a deadly and nearly unstoppable threat that manner of attack can be. Callous ignorance of the driving force behind such madness is a surefire way to prolong the threat; and as violent retaliation is obviously not much of a deterrent (how could it be, they want to blow themselves up if they can take somebody else out with them), it’s certainly in everyone’s best interests to get to the bottom of the root causes and see if those can be dealt with constructively. If the Israeli/Palestinian example is any guide, violent retribution just isn’t enough.

[Marley23]

It shouldn’t surprise anybody that many ‘ranking’ terrorists - the Mohammad Attas of the world, not to mention Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri - are educated men. You’d expect the ringleader type to be educated, they’re in charge of planning things. The so-called ‘footsoldiers’ are another story. If you read the Wikipedia profiles of the September 11th hijackers, you’ll see many of the “muscle” hijackers were from poor, backward regions of Saudi Arabia. They would seem to fit parts of the “brainwashed” stereotype, while the pilots were better educated (again, not surprising). Note this important comment in the report:

The 400 terrorists on whom I’ve collected data were the ones who actually targeted the “far enemy,” the U.S., as opposed to their own governments. I wanted to limit myself for analytical purity to that group, to see if I could identify anything different from other terrorist movements, which were far more nationalistic.

So “most terrorists are not brainwashed and from broken homes” would not be a good way to interpret what this article says. The piece focuses on terrorists attacking the United States, and since those terrorists need to infiltrate the US, or arrange for others to get into the country, or do things of that nature, you’d expect them to be better educated. That’s a more complicated task than strapping on a vest full of dynamite and wandering into a shopping mall, or driving a car full of explosives to the front of a hotel.

Al Qaeda, as he says, is not a national terrorist movement. It’s stateless and has some goals that go beyond, say, “payback for Israel,” or “get the Israelis off our land.” There are Al Qaeda operatives who are attacking their own governments, but they’re not doing anything nearly as complicated as the September 11th plot.

Also, I find this comment interesting:

Indeed, there are not that many terrorists in America. There have never been any sleeper cells. All the terrorists are fairly obvious. The FBI cases we see in the press tend to unravel. The Detroit group has been exonerated, and the prosecutor is now being prosecuted for malfeasance on the planted evidence. He allegedly knew exculpatory facts that he did not present to the defense.

[Revtim]

New Scientist had a recent article about this:
From issue 2447 of New Scientist magazine, 15 May 2004, page 34

One popular assumption is that they are homicidal or suicidal maniacs; another that they are poor and ignorant with little prospect of a decent future; another that they are driven to act by unbearable political oppression; a fourth that they are religious fanatics, usually Islamic. These notions are widely affirmed by analysts and politicians. They are also wrong on almost every count.

While suicide terrorists invariably come from oppressed communities, recent research by psychologists, anthropologists and others suggests that they fit none of the other common profiles. They are no less rational or sane, no worse educated, no poorer and no more religious than anyone else. “They are like you and me,” says Rohan Gunaratna, head of terrorism research at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. What this amounts to is in many ways more alarming than the ubiquitous misperception of the suicide bomber as fanatical. It means that, in the right circumstances, anyone could be one.

Other researchers, however, think it has less to do with culture than with strategy: groups resort to suicide terrorism when conventional terrorist methods are doing little to further their cause, or when their enemy’s military strength becomes overwhelming. Atran says that the frequency with which Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have used suicide bombers against Israel correlates directly with the increased use of force by the Israeli army. “It is a classic vicious cycle,” he says.

Hoffman has another explanation. The overriding reason for the emergence of suicide terrorism, he says, is almost always rivalry between terrorist groups. He points out that in the Palestinian territories, resistance groups have tended to adopt it only when they are losing political ground to rival groups and feel the need to mark themselves out. Hence Hamas’s decision to start using it against Israel in 1993, when the peace process engineered by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization threatened its central ideology of the obliteration of Israel; and the decision by Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the Tamil Tigers, to start using it against the Sri Lankan government in 1987 to establish his group as the pre-eminent force in Tamil separatism. This is also, says Hoffman, the major reason some of the groups have started using women: it is a way of escalating their campaigns.

Often the decisive part is a written or videoed testimony in which the recruit declares his or her commitment to what they are about to do. At this point they become, as Merari puts it, a “living martyr” and it is then almost impossible for them to back out without losing the respect of their peers and their community.

This sense of duty to the community but especially to a brotherhood of peers is, many psychologists agree, the single most important reason why rational people are persuaded to become suicide bombers. “If you are in a small cell of suicide terrorists and they are all dying one by one, and you have made this commitment on a videotape saying goodbye to your family and everyone else, the psychological investment is such that it would be almost impossibly humiliating to pull back,” says Atran.

Here’s a link to the full article, but I think one can only read the whole thing if one has an account, which you get with a normal subscription.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18224475.900

[David_Simmons]

It seems to me there is a faulty assumption in the OP. That is the tacit assumption that the terrorists are pissed at something that happened to them personally. It seems to me that the operable assumption is that the basis of terrorists action is that they their holy places like Saudi Arabia and Iraq occupied by outsiders.

If you go back to the American Revolution, the rebels weren’t the poor of the colonies, but the elite. Their agenda wasn’t to protest their own plight, but rather the politics of the mother country in denying colonists the rights that were available to all in Britain.

[andrewdt85]

@David Simmons

It seems to me there is a faulty assumption in the OP. That is the tacit assumption that the terrorists are pissed at something that happened to them personally. It seems to me that the operable assumption is that the basis of terrorists action is that they their holy places like Saudi Arabia and Iraq occupied by outsiders.

If you go back to the American Revolution, the rebels weren’t the poor of the colonies, but the elite. Their agenda wasn’t to protest their own plight, but rather the politics of the mother country in denying colonists the rights that were available to all in Britain.

Oh no, I understand that- are you assuming I think that b/c of what happens in the cartoons I link to? No, I know that most suicide bombers do it w/o having anything happen to them personally- and certainly not Big Evil Jewish Soldiers killing their family in Big Stupid Cliched Scenes like in the cartoon.

[andrewdt85]

Oh, you mean the bit about circumstances like broken homes and brainwashing. Well, honestly, those kinds of things are the things that are thought to be an environment that creates them in some people’s minds, as we know. I’m not assuming it, I’m asking if it’s false or not, and besides, these things themselves don’t cause the bombings, I know- did you think I thought they blew themselves up b/c their home lives were crappy and they had no economic futures? No, those are just the kind of things that some people believe can lead to the mentality which would be willing to blow himself up for causes like a war on occupiers, for instance. His fellow citizens would be willing to fight, too, but not suicidally.