The Root of the Matter
Tonight I watched a very good BBC documentary on the Discovery Channel about the profile of terrorists and, more specifically, suicide bombers. It was as revealing an hour of television as I have seen in some time.
Basically, the bottom line was this – the profile for a suicide bomber is not what most people might think. The profile is not that of a radical, overly-religious sociopath. It is rather, an apparently normal, somewhat displaced person who fits into society in a scarily comfortable fashion. The average suicide bomber is more like your next-door neighbor than like Osama Bin Laden.
The true suicide bombers grow out of small groups and are not necessarily connected to a larger organization. That means that finding a true terrorist is not as easy as many of us think. It is not just about picking out some groups of extremists that hang out on the periphery of culture. It is about destroying the root of terrorism by attacking the seed and not the weed.
This made me think about what we are doing right now in the world to combat terror. The strategy used today is one of military and financial war to inflict as much damage as possible on known terror organizations. While that may be somewhat effective in taking down rather large networks like Al Qaeda or Hezbollah, it will ultimately not work against the true nature of suicide bombers and the profile they fit. In fact, in my opinion, all we are truly accomplishing by disabling the larger terror groups is creating innumerous smaller ones. I would liken it to trying to put out a large fire by hitting it with a broom – you may succeed in eliminating the larger fire initially, but you are spreading the sparks and embers so that you will soon face 10 fires in 10 different places that are as bad as the first one you tried to put out.
I would argue that we just making things worse right now, and that this war on terror is ironically facilitating the very thing it has set out to eradicate.
As soon as we start to look at the true nature of WHY these people are doing these horrible things to other people, we will start to understand how to eliminate these acts of extremism.
Until we really sit down and think this out and consider what the long-term effects of our current policy will be, we will just be pissing in the wind.
Basically, the bottom line was this – the profile for a suicide bomber is not what most people might think. The profile is not that of a radical, overly-religious sociopath. It is rather, an apparently normal, somewhat displaced person who fits into society in a scarily comfortable fashion. The average suicide bomber is more like your next-door neighbor than like Osama Bin Laden.
The true suicide bombers grow out of small groups and are not necessarily connected to a larger organization. That means that finding a true terrorist is not as easy as many of us think. It is not just about picking out some groups of extremists that hang out on the periphery of culture. It is about destroying the root of terrorism by attacking the seed and not the weed.
This made me think about what we are doing right now in the world to combat terror. The strategy used today is one of military and financial war to inflict as much damage as possible on known terror organizations. While that may be somewhat effective in taking down rather large networks like Al Qaeda or Hezbollah, it will ultimately not work against the true nature of suicide bombers and the profile they fit. In fact, in my opinion, all we are truly accomplishing by disabling the larger terror groups is creating innumerous smaller ones. I would liken it to trying to put out a large fire by hitting it with a broom – you may succeed in eliminating the larger fire initially, but you are spreading the sparks and embers so that you will soon face 10 fires in 10 different places that are as bad as the first one you tried to put out.
I would argue that we just making things worse right now, and that this war on terror is ironically facilitating the very thing it has set out to eradicate.
As soon as we start to look at the true nature of WHY these people are doing these horrible things to other people, we will start to understand how to eliminate these acts of extremism.
Until we really sit down and think this out and consider what the long-term effects of our current policy will be, we will just be pissing in the wind.
posted by Neil Dallas | 10:14 PM
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