Whenever a new political phenomenon appears in the media, a variety of interpretations follow; some close to reality, some far-fetched or even totally wrong. It was relatively easy to understand the European terrorist groups of the late twentieth century; some were nationalists or separatists, while others belonged to the far left or extreme right. It has been far more difficult to understand the new terrorism—Islamic State and similar groups. They belong to another world, and their inspiration comes from other sources.
This refers specifically to IS and similar groups, which have appeared in recent years. Western students of Islam and the Arab world have been, on the whole, reluctant to deal with the subject. Why has this been the case? Why, among the many hundreds of books on the subject, are there very few written by Middle Eastern experts and students of Islam? This is a fascinating subject that deserves to be further investigated.
Parallels can be drawn to how people studied older political movements. When fascism first appeared on the European political scene, it was widely believed that it was in the old right-wing tradition even though Mussolini had been a socialist. The differences between German Nazism and Italian Fascism are considerable. Some European fascist movements were strongly religious, such as the Romanian Iron Guard; others were essentially anti-religious. They tolerated the churches because they had a considerable following, which the Nazi leadership would not want to antagonize. Others were convinced that fascism was populist in character. But populism can, with equal ease, turn to the left and to the right. The discussions about the essence of fascism continue to the present day. It will probably never end, because there is not one but a variety of fascisms. In a similar way, definitions of terrorism are difficult (probably impossible) because there is not one terrorism but a variety of terrorisms. They have certain things in common but are different in many ways.
It is this variety in terrorism that makes it difficult to try to forge a specific pronouncement to explain all terrorism. There has been a strong urge among political scientists to find a law, or laws, concerning jihadist terrorism. This would make it possible not only to interpret the phenomenon but also to predict to a certain extent its likely future. It could well be that the Laqueur law of the ecology of terrorism, dealing with the relationship between climate and the occurrence of terrorist operations, offers some certainty, but of how much use is it? It says that no terrorist actions have occurred in the Arctic, in Spitsbergen, the northern Siberian taiga, Alaska, Greenland, or, generally speaking, north of approximately 60-degree latitude. Whether this is a result of the fact that few people live in these regions or whether the cold weather acts as a depressant on suicide terrorists or militants in general is not certain; perhaps both these factors are involved. By and large, terrorist operations occur in temperate zones and occasionally in very hot regions. If Noël Coward, in his famous song “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” had been dealing with terrorism, he would have said that terrorists seldom go out in very hot climates of, say, forty-five degrees centigrade. But terrorist operations have also taken place in the hottest areas of the globe. These findings are undisputed, but their value for the understanding of terrorism is limited, as earlier stated, and contributes to the misinterpretation of the phenomenon.
The situation is further complicated by the tendency in the academic world to look for explanations by way of current fashionable theories in the fields of sociology and political science. These theories are not really meant to explain the terrorist phenomenon, but there is a temptation to try them out on any newly appearing phenomenon. Not all these theories are entirely wrong, but usually they are of only limited value. They often focus on the situation in one country but not in others or deal with one specific situation, ignoring many other similar situations.
One issue that has provoked a considerable amount of debate is the relationship between poverty and terrorism. Whether such disputes should have taken place is not entirely obvious, because the facts and figures seem to be self-evident. The poorest countries in the world, according to the World Bank and most other institutions, are the following:
Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Liberia, Niger, Malawi, Mozambique, Guinea, Eritrea, Madagascar, Togo, Guinea-Bissau, Comoros, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Kiribati, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan.
Most of these countries have witnessed a great deal of violence, but terrorist operations as generally understood have not taken place in these countries (with the sole exception of Afghanistan), and yet there have been more than a few political commentators arguing that poverty is an important, if not the decisive, factor in the occurrence of terrorism. Jake Harriman writes in The New York Times, “Extreme poverty is the greatest humanitarian crisis of all time and a fundamental contributing factor to 21st century terrorism and insurgency [extreme poverty is defined by the World Bank as consuming $1.25 per day].” No one will dispute the first part of this statement, but the stress on poverty as the “fundamental contributing factor to … terrorism” seems to be not just dubious but plainly wrong in view of the facts just quoted. Mr. Harriman continues by saying, “I discovered that it is controversial to make this claim, so don’t take my word for it.” He brings as witness in support of his views Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who said, “You can never win a war against terror as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate.” Archbishop Tutu’s service to humanity may be immense, but he is not a student of terrorism. According to all the known facts, the terrorists who were involved in 9/11 (or in most of the attacks in the Middle East and Muslim world) were angry, radicalized young people. They were not, however, desperate people motivated by the dismal social and economic conditions in the third world.
Contemporary Marxists have tried to contribute to current thinking about terrorism as well. David Maher and Andrew Thomson, in “Applying Marxism to Critical Terrorism Studies,” tried to find a better understanding of terrorism through a historical materialism framework, bringing social relations and class into typical terrorism studies. But what does the insertion of the class factor explain? Almost all the leading figures, and all their followers, in present-day terrorist groups were not working class but middle class or lower-middle class. In their approach, contemporary Marxists are linking terrorism to capitalist development. The capitalist development in Europe and Asia, as well as in the Americas, may have caused a great many inequalities and great social injustice, but it is impossible to show that it caused significant terrorism. Furthermore, noncapitalist development did generate terrorism in the former Soviet Union (the Caucasus and in Central Asia) as well as in Western China (Uighurs). The authors of the article mentioned above conclude their review as follows:
An HM [historical materialism] lens provides a way to understand and explain terrorism and counter-terrorism as embedded within a wider set of dynamic and changing social relations.
Importantly, such a framework acknowledges the marriage of the political and economic spheres, and how this can provide critical insights into terrorism.
As we have argued, HM can be used to unveil valuable insights into the links between terrorism and capitalist development.
Marx and Engels, on the whole, took a dim view of terrorism in their lifetimes. There were certain exceptions, including some sympathetic comments by Marx on the Irish Fenians and comments by Engels in his later years on terrorism in Russia. There is a world of difference between these theories and the realities of al-Qaeda and IS. They do not explain the emergence of contemporary terrorism, such as manifested by IS and similar Islamist groups. For this reason, virtually no attention has been paid to the Marxist approach.
We shall return to the issue of economic distress and terrorism when dealing with the “critical terrorism studies,” which enjoyed a certain amount of attention and notoriety in Britain in recent years. Before delving into that, though, it is worth noting that there has been a great deal of discussion about the relationship between terrorism and level of education. In this respect, there is much difference between the terrorist groups of the second half of the twentieth century and the movements motivated by religious fanaticism. Among the former, there were many university students who dropped out, but the question arises, what does a university education mean? Does it mean a deep immersion in the achievements of Western culture or a preoccupation with currently fashionable theories? In the great majority of cases, it meant the latter, with the half educated leading the quarter educated.
In the case of separatist terrorist movements, the lower classes in society are usually more broadly represented, but they still require some sort of leadership. Terrorism is not an easy business. Bomb manufacturing and organizing terrorist groups to operate successfully require some sort of intelligence, or else most terrorists would be failed lone wolves. This has always been the case with terrorist movements, as they have always depended on violent ideologues with certain worldviews to lead and to frame strategy. This seems to hold true for the members of IS, and it has proven advantageous to the group’s recruitment activities. Many of them may be graduates of technical colleges (no offense intended), but their knowledge of and belief in true culture is nonexistent. Even their knowledge of their own religion is superficial. They do not know culture, and they do not want to know it. Their interests lie in various group sports and jihadist pop music. Yet their leader has a doctorate in Islamic theology, and the organization from which it separated included among its ranks doctors and engineers. But does this automatically imply causality? The question whether a deeper immersion in higher culture would have acted as an antidote to terrorism is, of course, an open one. Those who committed the 9/11 attacks were educated in Western universities and had spent time abroad. There are, however, many millions of individuals with similar backgrounds who never felt a need to commit violence to advance their political causes. The neurological and psychological pathways leading to radicalization are many, and they require more investigation to give a proper accounting of how this process works, beyond noting the evident correlation.
Moving beyond radicalization, others have postulated new theories to explain why terrorism happens. One of the recent theories on the emergence of terrorism was pronounced by a political scientist, Robert Pape, head of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST) program dealing with, among other subjects, the explosion of global suicide terrorism. According to Professor Pape, his research through the years on suicide attacks shows that they almost always occur when a military invasion had taken place. “From 1980–2003, suicide terrorism was relatively rare,” but “from 2004–2009, there were 1,833 suicide strikes—92 percent aimed at American targets.” This approach is as unconvincing as many others of recent years. A look at the world map of terrorist operations shows that in some places, increases in terrorism were indeed caused by foreign invasion, but in most cases, they were not. Nor is it clear why invasion should have brought about a dramatic increase in suicide terrorism and not in other forms of resistance. Neither does he offer an explanation for instances where suicide terrorism does not occur during times of invasion. Most of his research is built off his earlier work from 2003, “The Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” where he also used a loose definition of the word invasion. In that piece, most of his examples came from Sri Lanka and the LTTE. It is a stretch to argue, though, that the Sinhalese and the Tamils were fighting each other because an invasion had occurred. The basic facts about the spread of terrorism, following military invasion, have been known at least since Napoleonic times (guerrillas and terrorism in Spain and Russia, the operations of Denis Davydov) and have never been in dispute. But in most historical instances, there has been an emergence of terrorist movements without any relationship with foreign military invasions and rarely with suicide terrorism.
Of the many interpretations of terrorism that emerge in recent years, one of the strangest and most wondrous is the critical theory of terrorism school, which found a home at the Aberystwyth University in Wales and had some supporters elsewhere in England. It draws its inspiration from the Frankfurt School, which came into being in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. Its founder and best-known proponents were Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno respectively; Herbert Marcuse and Franz Neumann also belonged to it. According to a recent article entitled “Why a Forgotten 1930s Critique of Capitalism Is Back in Fashion,” there is a revival in connection with contemporary terrorism. This formulation is quite inaccurate, for the “critique” goes back to the 1920s, and it had a strong revival in postwar Germany (as well as in America) in the 1960s and 1970s. The argument posits that since then, the fashion has largely faded. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Frankfurt School was also influenced by psychoanalysis, and during the Second World War, when most of its members were in the United States, it produced its major work, The Authoritarian. The Frankfurt School was embraced by members of the student revolt of the 1970s. Its main interest was in the impact of capitalism on contemporary culture; Adorno’s interest was predominantly in contemporary music. The members of the Frankfurt School were critical of capitalism and most “official” ideologies. The notion of “emancipation” and “liberation” (befreiung) played a dominant role in the thinking of the Frankfurt School. The leading thinker of the Germany-based critical theories was philosopher-sociologist Jürgen Habermas, whose main interest was in the field of sociology.
* * *
The Frankfurt School’s ideas were in no way concerned with terrorism, its motives and aims. The idea that it could in any way help to understand terrorism was far-fetched, to put it gently. Some of the members of this school commented on and analyzed Nazism and its rule. Best known was Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, which attempted to explain Hitler’s policy, mainly his deference to the economic interest of the ruling class in Germany. This was a profoundly mistaken approach, but Neumann’s book was widely accepted as authoritative for many years. Of extreme absurdity were Neumann’s views of Nazi anti-Semitism, which he again attempted to explain as motivated by economic interest. It is only fair to add that the views of Neumann (who died in a car accident in Switzerland in the 1950s) were not entirely accepted by other members of the school. In later years, the school split in connection with his attitude toward the students’ revolt. Marcuse became a hero of this movement, whereas Adorno was ridiculed, and his life was probably shortened by attacks against him. Horkheimer became deeply pessimistic toward the end of his life, moving far from his earlier beliefs.
It is a long, long way from Das Kapital to the Qur’an, from the Frankfurt School believing in the ideals of the Enlightenment, and the ideology of an Islamic State movement as pronounced by Caliph Ibrahim (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) and al-Zawahiri. Critical studies have undertaken to bridge the two camps. It is a quixotic enterprise and deserves to be ridiculed rather than analyzed and commented on in detail. According to a variety of statements, critical studies believe that the contemporary study of terrorism takes place in a particular kind of political context. It has generated a vast number of political activities, it uses powerful emotions, and it has become a cultural taboo, an object of pure hatred as well as admiration. Critical studies also argue that terrorism has often been overplayed and has become a negative ideograph of Western identity, making self-reflected probing research (such as practiced by the “critical students”) difficult.
Against this background, critical studies intended to present a truly detached objective alternative. The editors of critical studies believe in such an approach; in their view, all research on terrorism is in need of greater self-reflection as both a general attitude toward terrorism-related research and a strategic attempt to provoke debate. These are high-minded principles, but what do they mean in practice, when shorn of the academic phraseology? They wish to articulate a new approach based on the left-wing negation of official government policies and the traditional approach toward terrorism’s motives and aims. However, all serious research in the past has been “critical,” and that one group would have a monopoly of criticism seems far-fetched and impertinent. Take one of the obvious issues: whether terrorism has ever been justified. The obvious answer is clear: no one ever denied that the assassination of someone like Hitler before the Second World War would have saved the lives of millions of people and prevented an enormous amount of suffering and damage. World literature is replete with praises for the murder of tyrants. In the Middle Ages, elaborate ideological defenses of tyrannicides were published, such as by the Spaniard Juan de Mariana and John of Salisbury. The former, a Jesuit theologian, wrote a book called On the King and the Royal Institution, where he described the relationship between a monarch and his or her subjects, using scholastic logic to explain how and when a monarch could claim power and what was the position’s authority. In a controversial chapter toward the end, Mariana argued that the seizure of power by force of arms justified the removal of that person from power, either legally or through violence. This argument was still quite controversial more than a decade later, when King Henry IV of France was assassinated by the Catholic fanatic François Ravaillac in 1610. John of Salisbury, for his part, was a twelfth-century English scholar who wrote extensively on the prerogatives of a king. Describing how a king was a head of state that acted with moderation, restraint, and through the rule of law, he contrasted this figure with a tyrant, who abused power. Much like Mariana, John of Salisbury thought that such abuse provided sufficient justification for tyrannicide. No one has ever claimed that all terrorism was unjustified. The idea and the claims of the critical theorists are therefore ahistorical.
As many see it, Noam Chomsky is the godfather of this school of critical theorists. He is a very distinguished linguist, but his knowledge of history and politics is limited (as his past views have usually been utterly wrong). Chomsky is an anarchist; he believes that what a state is doing must be a priori wrong, for a state is based on compulsion and on imposing certain laws on the citizens, thus limiting their freedom. But in our age, a world without government is unthinkable; normal activities would come to a standstill in no time. Most of the believers in the critical theories probably do not go as far as Chomsky, but as far as terrorism is concerned, their opposition to “orthodox” or “traditional” views on terrorism seems to rest on the belief that terrorists are more often right than wrong, as opposed to governments in their attitudes and actions toward terrorism. Critical theorists have been criticized by other academics for overemphasizing the discourse, but the meaning is not made entirely clear. However, it is not necessary to devote much thought and space to the views of a school, in which most of its tenets are clearly foolish. Some of their views may be correct but, as has been pointed out earlier on, they are obvious and undisputed.
The criticisms of the critical studies school are far more aimed at counterterrorism than the terrorist movements. It is perfectly true that some of the practitioners of counterterrorism have come up with dubious ideas. This speaks, for instance, to the French theorists following their experiences in Vietnam and Algeria. However (inasmuch as terrorist movements are concerned today), the belief that the operations of Baader-Meinhof or the Italian Red Brigades were justified is difficult to maintain. But once we come to deal with the cutthroats of IS and al-Qaeda, justification becomes impossible for even the staunchest followers of critical studies. Their beliefs are deeply reactionary, their bestial activities (such as the deliberately cool killing) are impossible to justify from any point of view, let alone from believers in humanist ideals. Critical theory faces obstacles that cannot be ignored, and it comes therefore as no surprise that their influence has markedly declined in recent years.
The critical studies of terrorism have many complaints concerning the traditional school of thinking. They claim, for instance, that “objective social science” is a hegemonic project that is far from being objective and operates in the service of existing power structures. The research of these “objective” scholars is frequently used to legitimize coercive interventions in the developing world. Another complaint concerns the focusing of the traditional school on terrorism on nonstate actors. They argue that “state terrorism” is far more dangerous and has created many more victims. Perhaps this is true, but it fails to acknowledge the point that there are international laws that exist to negate this behavior in the first place. State terrorism is considered a war crime or a crime against humanity that may warrant international intervention. Many terrorists, of course, act with impunity. This attempt to eradicate the differences between these two kinds of terrorism goes back a long way, and it was the main tenet of Chomsky and his followers.
Yet another complaint concerns the alleged ethnocentrism of the traditional school. This complaint is largely imaginary. Far from singling out one specific ethnic group, there have been frequent attempts in recent years to ignore or to quantify the true origin of terrorist fighters; in one recent case, one such individual was described as Norwegian, because he was holding the nationality of that country. As far as the current terrorism is concerned, the issue at stake is not the nationality of terrorist groups or individuals. There is no denying that Chinese are among them, as well as Nigerians and a great number of other nationalities. The issue, of course, happens to be Islamism, and the general picture in this context is absolutely clear. It was by no means clear thirty or sixty years ago. But in the attempt to deny the fact that, in the contemporary world, Islamism has a virtual monopoly on violence of this kind is deliberately misleading for political reasons. For these reasons the critical studies are facing (at the present time) not just a great struggle but an impossible one. For the critical student of terrorism, the traditional school is based on a series of virulent myths, half truths, and contested claims, all biased toward Western state priorities. Returning to the above discussion about poverty, critical theorists argue that many of the contemporary terrorists are poor, starving, and exploited people, the product of the evil capitalist system. This theory has the advantage of leading to the belief that once the system has been changed, terrorism is bound to disappear. However, all other considerations (apart from the prospects that the countries in which terrorism is most violent will reach a per capita income similar to that of Kuwait or Qatar or Luxembourg or Liechtenstein) are unfortunately unreal. Thus, to summarize, the school of critical studies is nothing but a heavily politicized enterprise, whereas the traditional school includes or included elements that are indeed the product of political prejudice. These are infinitely less frequent and less pronounced than the former; in brief, they deserve to be ridiculed rather than be taken seriously and be the subject of lengthy reputation. What should be subject to further investigation is how a school spreading manifest absurdities could gain a certain amount of influence in the academic world, at least for some time.
TERRORISM AND THE PSYCHIATRISTS
Psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociopsychologists observe and sometimes study the terrorists. There is no unanimity and there are lots of kinds of terrorists, and the same goes for psychiatrists. Some of their contributions are valuable; others are far-fetched or even nonsensical. They come to different conclusions; often research is influenced by the political views of the author. The “radical” left maintain that the roots of jihadist terrorism lie in the historical crimes and injustices of the West. They consider that terror is a logical reaction fueled by Muslim anger and vengeance. Westernized jihadists, far from rejecting the civilized norms and ideals proclaimed by the West, are in fact alienated from a West that excludes, demeans, and harasses Muslims. Instead of using the rhetoric of Marxism from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, terrorists justify their violence with the language of Islam. In contrast to this view, even when jihadists use the Qur’an to define their struggle, their justifications for violence are primary secular and grievance-based. Half of the human bombs in Lebanon were perpetrated by secular organizations.
Traditional psychologists agree that there are three types of terrorists: criminals, crazies, and crusaders. Further, terrorists can be divided into three basic groups: leaders, volunteers, and forcible recruits. Leaders exhibit a sense of grandiosity, infallibility, and mission. Religion is not necessarily a factor. For example, bin Laden was preoccupied with doctrinal purity, while al-Zawahiri is more interested in power itself. With volunteers, a sociopath is welcome, but psychopathy is not necessary; most are not crazy in the sense of having psychotic disorders but rather are intensely loyal to their leader and the collective group. Borderline mental illness may contribute to violent extremism when combined with emotional trauma, substance abuse, and an extremist narrative. Volunteers, being the largest group of jihadists, share many common characteristics: the need for a leader (father figure); the desire to belong to a group; feelings of anger, alienation, and disenchantment; empathy with perceived victims of social injustice. They often have friends or family sympathetic to the cause and experience no ethical barriers against engaging in violence. Also important is the feeling, shared with gang members and dissidents or other nonviolent opposition groups, that joining a movement offers social and psychological rewards such as adventure, camaraderie, and a heightened sense of identity.
Forcible recruits are trained in discipline and cruelty. They often undergo training similar to that of army recruits or prisoners: dehumanization, subjugation, and resocialization in the new environment. Wahhabi jihadists stress the separation from family and original group allegiance, to be replaced by the allegiance to a higher goal—Allah or the caliphate. Often, allegiance must be proved by killing a family member. Recent data shows that suicide attackers are not often the criminal, illiterate, or poor but from largely secular and educated middle classes.