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Motivations for Terrorism
Acts of terrorism and suicide operations have now entered into the Western
vocabulary of Muslim actions in the context of war. The United States had, of
course, encountered Japanese kamikaze missions in World War II against its
battleships. But it is a truism that terrorism is the weapon of the weak; as Shaykh
Ahmad Yassin of Hamas once commented, if the Palestinians had had fighter
aircraft and high-altitude bombers, those would be the weapons of choice.
British troops in North America during the Revolutionary War accused
American irregular forces of illegal actions when they engaged in guerrilla
operations rather than frontally face crack British military formations. And so
the United States today seeks to confine war to standard military operations in
which it obviously enjoys the overwhelming advantage; it simultaneously
condemns those irregular operations that play to Muslim strength as being
immoral or cowardly. (And although one may accuse suicide bombers of many
sins, cowardice hardly seems one.)
Does the problem reside primarily with Islam? Or are there political and
social origins of these issues that require more complex policy analysis and
treatment? Clearly this book argues that the problem is not basically “Islam,” but
the legacy of geopolitical and social issues that affect Muslims, who are indeed
adopting weapons of the weak. Terrorist operations have a long and venerable
history in different places and times, but in the last century, some of the more
dramatic cases of such operations have included the Vietcong, the Basque ETA,
Shining Path in Peru, PKK (a Kurdish organization in Turkey), MJK (an Iranian
group operating against the Islamic Republic), Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Sikhs
in India, the Communist Party in India, Naxalites in India, the IRA in Ireland,
Kach in Israel, Red Brigades, Aum Shinrikyo, FARC in Columbia, and so on. In
recent decades, however, the number of Muslim organizations on the list has
increased dramatically with the new confrontations with the West.
WHAT DO WE DIE FOR? Do the particular circumstances of death lend it
greater meaning? To die for others—for the family, the clan, the tribe, the nation
—or to die for one’s own God: these are events that over history are treated with
the utmost sanctity, honor, and communal solidarity. Death, especially violent
death, demands meaning. Survivors and those left behind crave solace and
explanation, some meaning or purpose from the phenomenon of unnatural and

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premature death. And what of the act of killing itself? Under what circumstances
is killing justified? Answers to these profound ethical and moral issues are
generated anew in each era in new situations on both sides of conflicts. They are
often framed in the highest and most exalted moral terms available—the
religious beliefs of the culture.
Motivations will be argued for a long time. There is no doubt that Middle
East societies are less developed in many respects. Education levels, living
standards, and job opportunities are often low for the great majority of its
citizens, aside from a few oil elites and the tiny rich Gulf State populations.
Prospects for the future are perceived as limited. There is a higher proportion of
bad governance compared to most of the world, except Africa. The major fact,
however, is that nearly all of these conditions have existed in the Middle East for
a long time, and Islam has been around for fifteen hundred years. Yet the
massive increase in violence, terrorism, and suicide bombings is very recent and
directly linked with a period of highly invasive European and US policies in the
Middle East. Even if, as some argue, the very culture of the Muslim world itself
is somehow predisposed to violence more than other societies—a questionable
proposition—we are still left with the need to explain the huge surge in violence
in the Middle East under recent conditions.
Sadly, we have all become so accustomed, in the last decade or so, to a world
of violence, terrorism, and suicide bombing that we have come to feel that this is
the routine method of Muslim warfare. But, quite to the contrary, they represent
new factors on the strategic scene. It is now hard to recall that some two and a
half decades ago such events were highly unusual. Suicide bombing was almost
unheard of in the Muslim world in the 1950s to the 1970s, even at the height of
the revolutionary fervor of Arab nationalism and the disastrous defeat of the
Arabs in the 1967 war with Israel. Palestinians committed terrorist acts against
Israel, but they were not suicide missions. It was the Shi’a of Lebanon who first
began to successfully employ suicide bombings in Lebanon, with devastating
effect against American targets—the US embassy and the US Marine barracks in
the early 1980s. But it was the Hindu Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka who were the
first to operationalize regular use of the suicide vest in the 1980s, with one of the
highest rates of suicide operations in that era. Since that time, the frequency of
suicide bombing in the Middle East has grown dramatically, peaking since the
US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2007, the year with the highest rate to date, there were 658 suicide attacks,
including 542 in US-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, according to US
government figures. This is more than double the number of attacks in any of the
past twenty-five years. Furthermore, more than four-fifths of all those suicide

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bombings occurred only in the last seven years, and the practice is now
spreading around the globe. The Washington Post notes that “Since 1983
bombers in more than 50 groups from Argentina to Algeria, Croatia to China,
and India to Indonesia have adapted car bombs to make explosive belts, vests,
toys, motorcycles, bikes, boats, backpacks and false-pregnancy stomachs…. Of
1,840 incidents in the past 25 years, more than 86 percent have occurred since
2001, and the highest annual numbers have occurred in the past four years.”
Theories abound about the reasons for the huge increase in suicide bombing;
most theories advance one or another ideological view of the nature of the
struggle. Some analysts believe that religious motivations are paramount: the
desire to defend the umma and the Muslim world, to sacrifice oneself for Islam,
and to achieve paradise. Others suggest various personal pathologies as lying
behind a willingness to commit suicide, suggesting that the actor is irrational.
Yet others suggest that economic and social desperation triggers such an
abnormal act. Robert A. Pape at the University of Chicago argues that most such
actions come in direct response to foreign occupation and the desire to rid the
country of the invader. Yet others, such as Marc Sageman in a variation on that
idea, agree that nationalist and cultural outrage is a driver, but that the actual
commitment to undertake an operation at the personal level is also driven by the
powerful impact of group-think—a group of friends or members of a
neighborhood community who jointly decide to volunteer together to fight and
die for the cause.
Motivations matter because they suggest the antidote. The United States has
tried to get into the business of interpreting the Qur’an to “prove” to insurgents
that their actions are wrong in religious terms, indeed are “anti-Islamic.”
Washington has convened numerous Muslim clerics to denounce terrorism in the
name of Islam. And large numbers do. Regrettably, however, a solution to the
problem does not lie simply in exposing radicals to the “correct interpretation”
of Islam. It is, furthermore, unlikely that any Islamic authority can readily be
invoked capable of stilling violent guerrilla action against detested policies, or
invading American armies and occupation forces. Saudi or Egyptian senior
‘ulama have issued repeated statements and fatwas denouncing the violence of
al-Qa’ida and other groups. And there are some jail cell “conversions” by
prisoners who have been “led to see the error of their ways” and to renounce
their previous violent affiliations.
It is possible that over time some radicals have been persuaded by clerics to
see the error of their radicalism. But prisons also represent more persuasive
venues for such conversions, raising doubt about the ultimate seriousness of

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prisoners’ change of heart. In the case of Saudi Arabia or Egypt, most senior
‘ulama are perceived as being in the pocket of the regime, serving the regime’s
understandable anxiety about radical ideologies. Thus, the number of truly
credible moderate clerics who can actually change minds among radical youth is
limited.
Most youth are radicalized by the situation on the ground: foreign
occupation; killings of large numbers of civilians by American, Western, or
Israeli military forces; a sense of humiliation and defeat; a thirst for revenge,
sometimes for people killed within their own family. These are very concrete and
practical issues, quite unrelated to Islamic theology. If a horrific experience is
not lived firsthand, it is witnessed on television. A radicalized individual will not
likely be deterred from taking up violence simply because he heard a sermon
that says Islam does not support suicide bombing or the killing of civilians. An
individual bent on revenge and retribution for the real or imagined assault
against family, community, and religion will seek the blood of the enemy. He
will likely shop around among theological opinions until he finds the one that
gives license and authority to his murderous anger. The rage comes first, the
theological justification is an afterthought, a moral reinforcement to support an
act already determined upon. In this sense, it is very hard to simply find some
persuasive phrase in the Qur’an that will suddenly clarify minds, melt the anger,
and quell resentment. The gut precedes the mind. Furthermore, texts in most
religions contain intemperate phrases that can be drawn out of context to support
violent action, regardless of what the overall thrust of the religion is.
Brainwashing by Muslim authorities does not necessarily change views
either. Shi’ites in Saudi Arabia are forced in schools to use textbooks that
demean Shi’ism. Yet Shi’ites from the area say that their children know to laugh
off these messages in school. Similarly, in totalitarian societies like the Soviet
Union, large numbers of the population knew that the propaganda distributed by
government media was false, and fairly systematically discounted these ideas in
their own minds, even while paying lip service to them in public. In short, just
because school texts or the information systems make certain claims does not
mean that the messages are accepted in skeptical societies.
Many moderate Muslims do not accept the theological interpretations and
justifications offered by al-Qa’ida for many of their bloody acts. But they do
accept that times are perilous for the Muslim world and that mere surrender to
the West is not an option either. They may abhor the action, but also find it the
only available response, the “weapon of the weak.” Muslim societies may deeply
regret such actions and fear involvement by their sons and daughters in it, but
also find it “understandable” that these things should be happening under current

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conditions, and hence hard to personally condemn those who take violent action
in response to events. Societal acquiescence to such violent response is at least
as important a factor in the perpetuation of terrorist acts as the existence of
violent individuals themselves.
Societies defend themselves. At one level, it’s that simple. The Bush
administration claimed it was just trying to defend itself, to “kill the terrorists in
Iraq before they get to the US.” But the scene of almost all the battles, wars, and
power games is taking place on Muslim soil under assault from outside forces,
and has been for a very long time; the argument about defense is really more
relevant to Muslims than to the United States, whose forces project global reach.
Religion will always be invoked wherever it can to galvanize the public and
to justify major campaigns, battles, and wars, especially in monotheistic cultures.
But the causes, campaigns, battles, and wars are not about religion. Take away
the religion, and there are still causes, campaigns, battles, and wars.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN