Hi Joe,
If you could see your way to including the links to the stories you post, I
for one would be very grateful.
Kind regards
Jonathan
----- Original Message -----
From: <joedees@bellsouth.net>
To: <virus@lucifer.com>
Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2002 10:45 PM
Subject: virus: The Nature and Nurture Of a Fanatical Believer by Ken Ringle
>
>
> The Nature and Nurture Of a Fanatical Believer
> A Void Filled to the Brim With Hatred
>
> By Ken Ringle
> Washington Post Staff Writer
> Tuesday, September 25, 2001; Page C01
>
>
> What Jerrold Post wants you to understand is that, as new and
> frightening as the war against terrorism may appear, the psychological
> dynamics of the terrorist himself are essentially the same as those
> America battled in World War II and other conflicts of the 20th century.
>
> The suicidal terrorist, he says, is simply an extreme example of "the true
> believer" described by social philosopher Eric Hoffer in a landmark
> book of that name half a century ago -- the individual whose inner
> sense of worthlessness, confusion or rage seeks refuge and validating
> rebirth within a charismatic mass movement.
>
> Once the true believer marched to national martyrdom for Hitler. How
> much more exalting is martyrdom today in the name of God.
>
> Post, a George Washington University psychiatry professor and co-
> author of 1997's "Political Paranoia -- The Psychopolitics of Hatred,"
> has spent his whole career probing the terrorist psyche. He says the
> key to unlocking it lies in understanding the degree to which today's
> terrorist feels a need to subordinate his own weak personality to the
> demonizing charisma of someone like Osama bin Laden.
>
> The subordination is, Post says, "a form of mental one-stop shopping"
> for excuses as to why the terrorist's life is less than he feels it should
> be.
>
> Once inside that comforting mental box, the terrorist can be aimed like a
> missile, Post says.
>
> Underlying this hunger to belong, the psychiatrist says, is a "fragmented
> identity" that may be rooted in a broken or troubled family; in economic,
> cultural or geographic dislocation, or in the spiritual emptiness of a
> modern world seen as amorphous and alienating.
>
> As Hoffer pointed out in "The True Believer," Post notes, the same
> psychological needs have lured many to zeal in such diverse mass
> movements as communism, fascism, Zionism, militant Christianity and
> even pacifism.
>
> "Faith in a holy cause," Hoffer wrote, "is to a considerable extent a
> substitute for the lost faith in ourselves."
>
> Post, a career political psychologist who served 21 years in the CIA,
> testified as an expert witness in the trial of Khalfan Mohammed,
> convicted in the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and
> Tanzania. He has compiled detailed psychological profiles of dozens of
> jailed terrorists in the Middle East and says the most disturbing aspect
> about them is how normal they appear.
>
> Though rarely the hot-eyed fanatics of popular imagination, he says,
> they almost all see the world in absolutist terms -- all black or white,
no
> gray -- whether from the ranks of the poor and undereducated or from
> the college-schooled middle class.
>
> For example, several of those involved in last week's hijackings appear
> to have come from middle-class or wealthy families in Egypt and Saudi
> Arabia and had college degrees.
>
> Although some may have been living under stolen identities, Post says,
> "the remarkable thing is that they were able to live for extended periods
> in the West without detection, exposed to Western culture, sustaining
> within them the commitment to destroy both others and themselves."
>
> Post compares them to the terrorists of the Weather Underground who
> bombed the U.S. Capitol and other sites in the 1960s and '70s. Virtually
> all were college-educated children of the American middle class.
>
> "At times of social stress," he says, "family dynamics often get played
> out politically. If the father is identified with a culture or regime
viewed
> as corrupt or valueless, the youth who feels alienated or rejected can
> fight back by adopting a revolutionary mind-set."
>
> If the parents are moderate Muslims, the reaction against them can be
> acted out in the Islamic fundamentalism espoused by bin Laden,
> himself the son of a wealthy Saudi family.
>
> For more than 30 years, such Muslim fundamentalists have blamed
> every setback in the Islamic world -- from economic recession to Israeli
> victories -- on what they see as the corruption of classical Islam by
> Western culture, most of which they see rooted in the United States.
>
> What is needed to counter those corrupting forces, they believe, is a
> purification of the faith (returning it to its non-Westernized
> fundamentals) and a revival of the religious practices and militancy they
> are taught characterized the "Golden Age of Islam" in the Middle Ages.
>
> Once these fundamentalists are caught up in such a group rationale,
> Post says, it becomes to them not only morally permissible to strike out
> against this enemy, but morally imperative. Yet most religious zealots
> who strike out at external devils do so with rhetoric or political action
or
> some other means short of spilling blood. What sets apart religious
> terrorists, Post says, is the way they rationalize the taking of innocent
> life in the face of their faith's laws against both suicide and murder.
>
> In the case of Islam, the many tenets of the Koran that call for mercy,
> tolerance, patience and charity are simply overridden by those who see
> their faith in eternal holy war against infidels.
>
> David Ronfeldt, a senior social scientist at the Rand Corp., speaks of
> the "time war" in the Islamic terrorist mind: an effort to challenge the
> 21st century with medieval ideals.
>
> The peculiar genius of terrorists like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini or
> Osama bin Laden has been to persuade their followers that almost all
> aspects of modern culture -- from scientific rationalism to Hollywood
> movies and unveiled women -- are assaults on Islam for which the only
> antidote is violence.
>
> In bin Laden's scenario, the death of a bomb-bearing terrorist is not
> suicide: It is istishad, an Arabic word meaning martyrdom in the service
> of Allah. And to such extremists, even the incineration of children can
> be rationalized in the jihad aimed at expelling the United States from
> the Middle East and thus purifying the faith.
>
> Obviously, most Muslims don't agree. The Arabic word"jihad" literally
> means to struggle for the cause of religion. For a Muslim, the struggle
> involves striving to be a better person, donating money to the poor,
> fulfilling obligations toward the faith and, in extreme cases, fighting in
> defense of Islam.
>
> Abdul-Moti Bayoumi of the Islamic Research Center at Cairo's al-Azhar
> University, mainstream Islam's top seat of learning, says for this last
> aspect of jihad to be legal, it must fulfill several conditions. Among
> them: A Muslim should not provoke the aggression; a Muslim should
> fight only the one who fights him; and children, women and the elderly
> should be spared.
>
> "There is no terrorism in jihad or a threat to civilians," Bayoumi told
the
> Associated Press after the hijacking.
>
> Bayoumi is inclined to justify suicide attacks against Israel as the only
> available weapons in an unequal war, but the grand mufti of Saudi
> Arabia, Sheik Abdulaziz al-Sheik, sharply disagrees. The country's
> chief interpreter of Islamic doctrine declared in April that suicide of
any
> kind is "strictly forbidden in Islam."
>
> Post says those terrorists imprisoned in Israel for arranging suicide
> bombings, far from regretting their actions, evidence great pride in
> them, even when the self-disintegrated bomber in question was a loved
> one.
>
> They and other extremist Muslims interpret literally -- and frequently --
a
> passage in the Koran that promises martyrs of a jihad the choicest spot
> in Paradise -- a tranquil garden where streams flow with honey and
> decanters with non-inebriating wine, and each warrior is attended by
> scores of doe-eyed houris whose virginity is perpetually renewed.
>
> Who wouldn't want that, they ask. For most such terrorists, it's their
> highest ambition.
>
> "These are not people, for the most part, looking for their 15 minutes of
> fame," Post says. "Some 40 percent of terrorist attacks are never
> claimed by any group. They don't need to be, because to these people
> they have sacred significance. Allah has seen them and He's the only
> one who counts."
>
> The most disturbing thing about today's world, Post says, is that so
> many faced with spiritual confusion, economic uncertainty and political
> upheaval in the Middle East find more comfort in the messianic
> militancy and lock-step obedience of terrorism than in the
> entrepreneurial opportunities of democracy.
>
> Somehow, he says, America and its allies must find a way to reach out
> to alienated young Muslims and meet the psychological needs
> answered by membership in terrorist organizations. It cannot be simply
> a matter of killing them, he says.
>
> He says there is a brainwashing component in the organizational
> psyche of terrorist groups that can usually be countered by education
> together with measures that demythologize successful terrorists, sow
> dissension within the organizations and facilitate the exit of recruits
> through rewards and other means.
>
> But he says Americans need to understand that terrorism can't be
> eliminated in the United States without the government adopting the
> repressive measures of a totalitarian state. The best Americans can
> hope for, he says, is to reduce it to the occasional small incident they
> can live with -- another predictable risk of our all-too-unpredictable
age.
>
>
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