Responses to (and roots of) Terrorism

Like the rest of the world, I'm reeling from the attacks in Paris last night. Innocent people were slaughtered as they went about their evening. And like many I notice the seemingly disproportionate response to these attacks when weighed up with other comparable attacks in other parts of the world. There's an interesting article on that here :

The simple fact is, Muslims are far more likely to die at the hands of other Muslims – or more to the point, Islamic extremists who bear no resemblance to average Muslims. They’re also more likely to be killed by Westerners, who are seeking to kill Islamic extremists. The difference is, they’re unlikely to see an outpouring of grief [from] the rest of the world.

Terrorism isn't something which only happens in the West, and it's not something unique to Muslim-minority countries. Yesterday in Lebanon 43 people were killed and 200 injured in a coordinated series of bombings by extremist terrorists . Interestingly I'm seeing more focus on this than we might ordinarily expect - people have had the idea of what it's like to live under threat "brought home" by the Paris attacks, it seems to me, and are therefore more interested in the murder and maiming of innocent people abroad.

But attacks like these are common, regular in our world, and few of us seem to have the capacity to hold them in our attention until they strike us in the West. After 9/11, the US launched its "War on Terror". Despite the immense cost in human life (not to mention the variously-estimated price for taxpayers ) the decade-long "war" entailed, the world does not seem a substantially safer place. Airports, transit systems and even schools are locked down in response to terror threats which seem to keep coming.

It seems to me that the war of attrition, the "eye for an eye" response kills innocent people on both sides. There is no greater recruiting tool for ISIS (or ISIL or whatever you want to call them) than a person's loved ones becoming "collateral damage", and it seems a real no-brainer that escalation is a factor too - putting people into a world where bombs go off and guns are fired makes it easier for them to set off bombs and fire guns.

Violence is a cycle. You kill my family? I kill yours. It's circular. Jedi understand cycles. We know that imbalance creates a return. We also know that extreme responses to either polar extremity of the cyclical is not helpful, and indeed likely only creates further imbalance. To put this in simple terms - fighting fire with fire does not put out the fire.

A little reading on non-violent responses to terrorism yielded this interesting three-step plan ( source ):

First, immediately stop sending funds and weapons to all involved parties. This is the easiest of the three. Ten years of terrorism-making and we still think our guns aren’t going to fall into the “wrong” hands? The hands they fall into are already “wrong.” If you need a good example, take a look at our darlings, the Free Syrian Army, and their blatant human rights violations, such as using child soldiers, documented by Human Rights Watch in 2012 and2014.

Second, fully invest in social and economic development initiatives in any region in which terrorist groups are engaged. In his 2004 book, “Nonviolent Response to Terrorism,” Tom Hastings, Ed.D., professor of conflict resolution at Portland State University, questions: “What if the terrorists – or the population base from which they draw – had enough of life’s necessities? What if they had secure jobs, decent living standards, drinkable water and healthy food for their children? Do we seriously think they would provide a recruiting base for terrorism?” Harvard lecturer Louise Richardson, author of the 2007 book “What Terrorists Want” makes the same argument, and Kim Cragin and Peter Chalk of the Rand Corporation drew the same conclusion from their 2003 study on social and economic development to inhibit terrorism. ISIS gained some of its current strength from economically providing for the families of fallen fighters, promising education to young boys (and then handing each a weapon), and capitalizing on grief and anger in Syrian communities. If we want to weaken ISIS and any other group engaging in terrorist activities, we have to start focusing on the needs they fill in those communities. Local communities in the region should be self-sustainable and civilians should feel empowered to provide for themselves and their families without taking up arms or using violence.

Third, fully support any and all nonviolent civil society resistance movements. Whoever is left – give them whatever support is needed the most. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephen, in their 2011 groundbreaking study on civil resistance, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” found that “between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts.” In addition, successful nonviolent resistance campaigns are less likely to descend into civil war and more likely to achieve democratic goals. We should have fully supported the nonviolent Syrian revolution when we had the chance. Instead, we gave legitimacy to the violent rebel factions – those same groups now fighting alongside Al Qaeda and ISIS. If we send our unconditional support to whatever nonviolent civil society actors are left on the ground in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, we might just find that the best remedy for terroritis has been right in front of us the entire time – civil society.

These are three easy paths any rational politician could advocate that will decrease hostilities, prevent the emergence of new terrorism recruiting environments and empower local communities to engage in nonviolent conflict resolution strategies. We’ve had centuries to discover that violence doesn’t work, hasn’t worked and won’t work. It’s time to try something different. Global leaders need to get on board the logic train and put some serious and sustained effort into nonviolent counterterrorism strategies. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before ISIS starts criticizing the next group for wanton violence and human rights abuses.

I wanted to post this here for some deeper discussion of the horrors we face as a civilisation from extremist terrorists who target civilian populations. What can our response be? Can we "bomb" terrorism away? Can we "support" groups on the ground in the hope they won't some day turn their weapons on us? Or is there another approach to the situation which stops the cycle of violence? Is it practical to imagine a world in which diplomacy and international aid have a substantial effect on the radicalisation of people, the world over? Could greater engagement, greater familiarity and fellowship between races and religions be the answer to this cycle of hate?

Turning it over to you guys for your thoughts, either way. Our sympathy for the dead and wounded in Paris is a given, of course - but my question is, can a return of violence ever yield the peaceful world most of us wish to live in?

Thank you for posting this. It is so easy for people, myself included, to believe that the only logical course of action against violence is violence.

Now I'm not suggesting that if violence is brought upon me that I will let it happen. That's not at all what I'm saying. Sitting there and "dying in the name of peace" doesn't really help anything. What I do mean is thinking about how we respond to the root of terrorism rather than our responses to the individual acts themselves.

It seems to me that they want an even playing field. They want the world to be even and since their part of the world isn't getting better they're going to make our part worse. Maybe we should try to find a way to make theirs better. How should we best stabilize those areas of the world? Clearly armed conflict isn't working. It's very hard to scare a group of people who's main tactic is suicide. They won't give up because they realize we'll kill them all if they don't, they all plan to die anyway.

Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, we've been trying the same thing for an awfully long time expecting that it will turn out differently.

The article is great, but it lacks knowledge of what is already going on...which is exactly these same things.

We DO try to help build these groups up. But the crisis is more complex than that.

We DO try to fund the groups against the ones we don't want in power. Guess what, it ends up creating some of the new groups that end up hurting people later (such as Al Qaeda).

We DO try to go after people that fund and send weapons to the enemy, you can't find them all. There IS a black market.

The problem is far more complex than what the author of this article knows or understands. Which isn't a testament against him/her but more to the fact it's a testimony as to how ineffective these approaches have been and how complex the problem really is.

As to what Goken mentioned about resisting violence brought upon the person, the Shaolin come to mind. A sect of buddhists that may use violence if and only if another threatens their life, up to and including killing the attacker. It's interesting how this is very applicable to the individual, but entirely void when we start talking in terms of groups.

Robert Pirsig said, and I quote very loosely here because I don't want to track down the actual quote at this minute, that if a factory is destroyed, but the underlying thought that created the factory remains, a new factory will simply be built. This is what is happening in the middle east. Al Queda is brought down, and ISIS rises. We need to find a way to change the way of thinking that brings about extremism, for sure, and our current methods are surely not working.

I'm not one to pretend to have the solutions on these complex matters, but giving something new a try seems the only rational response at this point.

Alethea, I don't think anyone disputes we do those things. What is in dispute is whether we do enough, and what that can mean alongside things like bombing campaign which leave the people these things are trying to help dead or bereaved.

Also your second "We DO" is something the article suggests we shouldn't be doing.

Alethea Thompson wrote: We DO try to fund the groups against the ones we don't want in power. Guess what, it ends up creating some of the new groups that end up hurting people later (such as Al Qaeda).

I feel like funding one side against the other is perhaps one of the big issues at play here.. once it appears to a group that 'the enemy' has the backing of another country, it is no wonder that country then becomes a target, for they too become 'the enemy'.

We are at war, whether we like it or not. We have /are losing/lost our humanity towards each other.

Yet another action that needs to be done by the U.S., and the West: Completely, and immediately, pull ALL military personnel out of the counties in the Middle East. Our troops should not be there. Immediately STOP extrajudicial drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, etc.

The extremists want America to die because America is killing their people, largely innocents, with Imperialism.

It needs to stop.

There is a way to decrease the likelihood of terrorism. It's not in bombing hospitals where weapons are supposedly stored. It's not in removing the freedom enjoyed by the citizens of free countries through extremely strict security regulations and guidelines. It's not found in blind hatred of a religion, and while it is a necessary evil at times to send people to solve these issues with weapons, that is only a piece of the solution and will never solve the issue entirely.
People who join these groups may be steeped in religious extremism, but people don't just grab onto religion like that for no reason. They seek out religion for identity when they feel they have none. They go to religion for hope, when they see the world around them in a state that they can't support and look to something higher. The best way to combat terrorism is to find ways to improve the lives of people in general worldwide, while at the same time providing them with bodily autonomy and religious freedom. By finding ways to provide the general population of the planet with a good standard of living without imposing ourselves on others, by making people satisfied with their daily lives, we solve the issue. Those already aligned with terrorist organizations must be found and put to justice, hopefully through rehabilitation. But a happy man or woman will not go out of his or her way to cause mass destruction and panic, and that is what we should aim for as a global community.

You cannot make everyone happy, and you cannot negotiate, placate, or solve, extremism.

Happiness, contentment, etc, is not a constant, and if it were, it would not be the normal course of being.

People are complex, and yes, if your somehow could remove that complexity, perhaps you would have "peace" but at the cost of out humanity just as much as war seems to.

Perhaps, instead of going to religion or hope, we could address the fact that you could also be the change you want to see in the world, as opposed to running to this, that, or the other, to solve it for you.

Happiness, one way or another, is self motivated, which is why everyone will not achieve it, work for it, or do it.

Some people only feel something at the expense of others, in some cases, many others.

Perhaps, it would be best if people as a whole could acknowledge that there are groups of people in this world, that cannot be rehabilitated, or reasoned with.

This is not the fault of the US, as extremism has existed well before the US was even a country, especially in the places it is still rampant most.

Rose colored glasses are no more the answer than "Just bomb them".

"For some things in the universe, there are no answers. Nothing, nothing can be done."-Paul Muad'Dib.

We try, and we will continue to try, and that makes all the difference, but in the end, I doubt we will ever find a definitive answer to this, anymore than we will find the answer to the beginning of it all.

I completely agree with tzb's article and its three suggestions - these are all things we can and should do. I also agree with his suggestion that greater positive engagement, familiarity, fellowship and respect would do a great deal to help. This can't realistically be imposed from the top down, it has to come from the bottom-up in how we conduct ourselves day-to-day and interact with different cultures around us. On a similarly small scale I also firmly believe we should not let fear of attack disrupt our lives - or encourage us to 'respond without mercy', as some politicians have said today. This will hinder the process of positive engagement and our own freedoms, as well as causing more bloodshed and violence.

I (like, probably 1 million other people) missed getting blown-up in the London July 2005 tube / bus bombs by about 30 minutes. When the tube re-opened two days later I did feel some trepidation but the sight of hundreds of other Londoners "getting on with their lives" was inspiring.

Whatever we do - we must try to respond with love, not fear.

*spots typo in thread title* yikes

Please could a kindly mod rectify my mangling of the word "Terrorism"?

tzb wrote: *spots typo in thread title* yikes

Please could a kindly mod rectify my mangling of the word "Terrorism"?

Gotcha, no worries.

KageKeeper wrote: Yet another action that needs to be done by the U.S., and the West: Completely, and immediately, pull ALL military personnel out of the counties in the Middle East. Our troops should not be there. Immediately STOP extrajudicial drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, etc.

The extremists want America to die because America is killing their people, largely innocents, with Imperialism.

It needs to stop.

It's complex. That is certainly one of the reasons purported by groups like Al Qaeda, despite Bin Laden's family profiting hugely from modern development within the Mid East countries themselves, often as a result of western investment. Not so much though the Islamic State.

As the west retracted from colonialism during the 20th century, it learnt that disengagement from oppressive groups leaves a vacuum for them to grow... through their application of violence and intimidation etc. So it became an accepted view that disengagement is not really a valid option in terms of security and human rights on the ground. It is a convenient solution for those western world powers to wipe their hand and walk away from problems.... but as globalization became a reality a requirement emerged for an embryonic concept of global governance, partnerships and development. So having business or troops in foreign countries is often seen as an simplified excuse to justify hatred and blame shifting by disenfranchised groups who are trying to change the status-quo for some reason. If that is non-violent then its a non-issue, but if its violent then it starts to cause problems for local, regional and global relationships. Depending on the nature of the relationships and the nature of the violence being exerted to force change, the reactions differ - but the reactions are not to maintain the status-quo, they are to minimize and cease violence. The violent groups though know that any breakdown of the status-quo supports their cause, so disputes and disruptions of any sort are beneficial for them - all they need to do is tell everyone its the other person fault ie, get out and there would be no problem. Unfortunately many have developed an informed view that its not that simple, and its not genuine, hence why its rarely considered a realistic option..... until policy imperatives shift back at home.

In short, during peace most everyone wants peace and stability and growth, ie peaceful engagement, but often disenfranchised groups fracture this to make the engagement shift to security or worse... and during war everyone wants wants to be disengaged - but at what cost. It's messy, but fault should be laid carefully IMO, and actions need to be measured to the full picture as much as possible.

In many peoples opinions, the blame for terrorism is with the terrorists. Especially with something like the Islamic State, who have repeatedly talked about their purpose being to grow the Islamic Caliphate outwards until the entire world is one Islamic Caliphate.

So western disengagement from something like the IS is actually just leaving the region to suffer under the onslaught of the IS, and hoping if it reaches us we can then turn around and handle it - despite it running the risk of growing during that period of expansion while the west might remain disengaged. But, given the technology of today, the IS already is confronting the West in two distinct ways; 1 recruiting foreigners to the cause, and 2. building groups in foreign countries.

So if we were to accept that the IS is operating with the intent to expand and make the world an Islamic Caliphate, where you either fall in line, be a slave or die - what would the preferred solutions be for the West, in that scenario? Because that is how many people are interpreting the situation, based on what is coming out of the IS itself.

everyone has made good points in the discussion so far - i dont know what i can add but i want to say that "whatever we do, we must try to respond with love, not fear" is absolutely the number one idea i stand behind

i remember 911 and nobody wanted to hear that message

our president came out the first day and said "we have seen evil and these terrorists hate americas freedom and prosperity but we will bring them to justice"

i willpost a link to his speech on monday so everyone can see the way he prepped us for what was to come

my country showed extremely poor sense of judgement and this benefited only those who always benefit from war

the terrorists obviously benefited, they are even more sophisticated now

and of course there are those special types who can be generically identifiied as "profiteers" - myriad entities in the armsand infrustructure industries especially

who imo were the ones really calling the plays

average peoplewere the losers

my heart goesout to all of france right now

Follow the money on this one. Who stands to gain money by dragging France into a war with ISIS? Controlling the oil resources in the region is very profitable. Someone(can you guess which 3 letter gov't agency?) has been providing the weapons and training to ISIS. Think about the professional-quality propaganda beheadings... Dressed in an orange attire reminiscent of Guantanamo Bay, a helpless Western journalist is executed by a barbaric fanatic dressed in black, dramatically waving a tiny knife as weapon. No propagandist could think of a better way of swaying public opinion for war. As a “bonus” effect, the video stirs up anti-Muslim hysteria across the world, a sentiment that is constantly exploited by the world elite.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/25/middleeast/isis-kids-propaganda/

"We're seeing young women from across Western countries both expressing their support for and migrating to Syria now in totally unprecedented numbers," said Sasha Havlicek, chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. "And I would say this is the result really of an extremely sophisticated propaganda recruitment machinery that's targeting young women very specifically."

"ISIS provides a utopian political project, the so-called caliphate, the centralized Islamic rule," Gerges said. "ISIS provides these deluded young men and women with an adventurous trip."

As a reward for allegiance, ISIS loyalists receive gifts from Allah including "a house with free electricity and water provided to you due to the Khilafah (the caliphate or state) and no rent included," according to Aqsa Mahmood, a British teenager who left Scotland to join ISIS in 2013.

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a 20 yr old raised by IS (and believes that when he is killed he will go directly to heaven) compared a 20 yr old raised by megan in davenport

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Although the number of British Muslims who have travelled to northern Syria and Iraq is substantial (700, according to the most recent official estimate), it isn’t disproportionate. They get noticed because their facility with English makes them effective propagandists – terrifyingly so, in the case of the murderous “Jihadi John” – but Muslims from several other countries have actually been more likely to go there. Norwegians have been twice as enthusiastic, and rates are even higher in Belgium, Ireland, Denmark and (at the top) Finland.

As that unlikely list implies, forces other than faith are at play. One of them is the dynamic that draws young men elsewhere towards gangs: some reports indicate that foreigners fighting with Isis often come from families where fathers were abusive or absent. Growing up in isolated immigrant communities, they might be more likely to view the group’s macho hierarchy as a force for stability.

The group’s appeal to women – thought to comprise more than one in six of all foreign recruits – reflects similarly contingent factors. Finland hasn’t earned its place in the vanguard because its small Muslim population consists of psychopaths, but because an unusually high number of female Finnish converts have pledged allegiance to Isis – and though their motives can’t be known, they’re probably not entirely pious. Isis blogs and Twitter accounts (which are numerous) are filled with questions from women curious to meet and marry fighters – because an eagerness among good Muslim girls to hook up with bad jihadi boys is a strong part of the group’s appeal."

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/18/appeal-isis-muslim-outsider-recruits

A 26-year-old Malaysian doctor who posts under the name Bird of Paradise happily tells female readers that they’ll live rent-free in a room of their own, pay no bills or taxes, and receive a monthly stipend.

Londoner calling himself Paladin of Jihad is even more effusive. Ordinarily inclined to post doggerel, slangy hashtags or jokes about rape, his descriptions of Isis-land are lyrical. On arriving, he recalls, a stranger with a smile in his eyes hugged him in the light of a full moon, making him feel that “at long last, I ‘belonged’ to something, to a project, to a cause”.

Whatever precisely turns out to have spurred the most recent departures from Dewsbury and Bradford, the organisation offers a way of escaping stifling familial expectations, the low-level racism of wider society, and communal customs that many British Muslims themselves don’t value.

In exchange, it promises a godly cause – the defence of victimised co-religionists – that draws similarly passionate people from all over the world. Troubled young men thereby imagine a land where they can start anew, commanding respect as upholders of God’s law. Unhappy women dream of attaining happiness for the first time – or the second or third, if husbands they take are lucky enough to achieve martyrdom. The fantasies ignore a very vicious reality, of course – Isis punishes a lot more behaviour than it permits, and the happiness it apparently brings some people has been paid for by thousands of refugees, rape victims and corpses."

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http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/08/how-isis-seduces-new-recruits.html#


"Science of Us spoke with John Horgan, a psychologist at UMass-Lowell who specializes in terrorism and who has interviewed members of a wide variety of terrorist groups, about IS’s appeal, the group's slick media efforts, and what, if anything, can be done to slow its rising influence and accompanying territorial gains:

- So who is the sort of person who joins a group like ISIS?

"... there’s no one single pathway to terrorism, even within specific groups, let alone across them.

The psychological literature has started to turn more and more away from the idea of trying to find a general model of involvement. We can definitely find broad risk factors for understanding how and why someone might become involved, though.

People who join these groups are trying to find a path, to answer a call to something, which would basically mean that they’re doing something meaningful with their lives. That is a common denominator across the board. There’s typically a very, very strong moral pull. You often see recruits are driven by this passionate need to right some perceived wrong, to address some sort of injustice, to restore honor to those from whom it’s been taken."

- Why is their appeal so much more effective than past appeals? What sets them over the top to make them so successful?

"The one thing that this movement has done far more effectively than any other terrorist movement is that they’re masters at packaging the fantasy deal. ISIS has a reality distortion field that only Steve Jobs would have dreamt of. In the past, in the other movements I’ve studied, like the IRA, would-be terrorists have had to work very hard, psychologically speaking, to justify to themselves, their families, and others the path that they’re on. ISIS has made that journey of navigating the self-doubt much, much easier. The only real obstacle is actually getting there, geographically, and that certainly doesn’t seem to be slowing people down at all.

Al Hayat, ISIS’s media department, are nothing if not effective amateur psychologists (shinobi note - ive seen some videos and AMATEUR is a poor word to use to describe them). They’re also adept marketers. These are great “Jihadi infomercials” — they’re presenting a limited-time offer, and encouraging potential recruits to act now. The Al Hayat media messages capture the “call of duty” to would-be foreign fighters. In fact, some of these videos rival cut scenes from the actual video-game series “Call of Duty” — they are carefully composed, well-edited videos that capture both the nobility and urgency of joining the fight, juxtaposed with pulse-pounding images and slo-mo video of adventure in battle. The language walks a fine line between trite and noble, but the overall message pulls it off quite well."

and

"They’ve demonstrated results. They’re capturing cities, they’re flaunting weaponry. They’re creating a safe haven, or refuge, where they can live."

- Does that create something of a snowball effect where the more weapons that they have, the more territory they have, the more their appeal grows, which brings in more people?

"Absolutely, and it will also likely attract people from other movements. It allows ISIS to say, “Look, we’re the real deal.” For the most part, people have to be involved in terrorist groups for many years before they feel like they’ve achieved anything significant. ISIS is different."

- And once someone joins and that process takes hold, how do individual members go from, say, wanting to fight Bashar al-
Assad’s army or the Iraqi army to being willing to commit atrocities against civilians?

"We don’t know a lot about it. We certainly know that the engagement in atrocities typically comes from a series of small steps. Look at the socialization of children into ISIS right now. We’re seeing children who are made to engage in group rituals, like marches, displays of strength, and things like that. Then they are made to witness punishment, then they are made to witness torture, then they are made to actually engage in torture. It’s really just a series of small incremental steps. That process of individual dehumanization is the same now as it was 70 years ago when the Nazis brought young children increasingly into their fold.

Individual recruits will struggle with that. They take refuge in ideology when faced with the reality of doing something horrific. This is where the power of the group becomes very significant."

- You could see some of that stuff play out in the segment of Vice’s ISIS documentary about the organization’s indoctrination of children.

"These children aren’t willing participants. They’re being groomed, they’re being very carefully staged in front of the camera. You can see that the children are constantly glancing up at the cameraman, or someone off-camera who is saying, "This is the answer you need to give." This is all very carefully choreographed."

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EDIT

sorry for the length of this post

i want to end by saying that ive seen some of the recruitment videos and its frightening how well done they are

also to emphasize this last question in the above article

- Does your research into why people leave terrorist groups offer any hope?

"One of the things ISIS is going to have to be sensitive to internally is not allowing accounts of disillusioned fighters to emerge from their ranks. Disillusionment is very, very common in every single terrorist and extremist group you can think of. That’s something that can be very toxic if those accounts get out and gather momentum."

i have mentioned before that we are the media

if you have a facebook or a twitter or some other social media page it wouldnt hurt the "isis sux" campaing to share some of the info on the actual crimes they commit

especially emphasize how they treat women and the brutality they use against other muslims

i will post more later

"how the USA created ISIS"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU2avVIHde8

many of you are well informed about IS already - for myself i have been in my own little bubble world for a while and have have almost totally avoided media and current events

i have come to highly regard this community and was disturbed at the attack on france and the thought of our french jedi being hurt

this has driven the point to me that there is a lot i am unaware of, which i should be aware of

so i am educating myself on the issue and am sharing the results of this self education for those who are interested

this one has got more specific details in terms of individuals and events

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJPOtPl-0NI

to be honest, as i an unfamiliar with the material i have no way of knowing for certain that the information i am finding and sharing is not biased or flawed or even deliberately misleading in some instances

im open to suggested reading

sadly, bad foreign policy on the u.s's side has forged numerous terror groups....this is common knowledge to most military members and government employees...