© Reuters / StringerISIS fighters stand guard at a checkpoint in Mosul, Iraq
Despite the existence of a good deal of research about terrorism, there's a gap between the common understanding of what leads terrorists to kill and what many experts believe to be true.
Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.
He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents. "Very often, suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to overcome," and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show,
Politics and Reality Radio, last week. But, Pape adds, there have been "many hundreds of secular suicide attackers," which suggests that radical theology alone doesn't explain terrorist attacks. From 1980 until about 2003, the "world leader" in suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist group of Hindu nationalists in Sri Lanka.
Comment: This is an interesting study on the motivations of suicide bombers, but it does not take into account the fact that suicide bombings are inherently illogical from the point of view of Muslim jihadists wanting to hurt Western governments. As Joe Quinn
points out, "Islamic terrorism" does not benefit anyone but Western governments:
This campaign of 'Islamic terrorism' in Europe seems, therefore, to be massively counter-productive to any agenda of liberation of the Middle East from NATO aggression. In fact, it directly facilitates further Western military meddling in the Middle East on the basis of 'dealing with the terror threat' and, as noted, justifies the implementation of police state measures in European society and 'lock downs' on the movement of ordinary people.
What we're getting at here, if you haven't noticed, is that 'Islamic terror attacks' are most likely a form of proxy war waged by the US (and other Western government agents) aimed at maintaining control over their 'interests'. Those interests are (and have always been) control over the political destiny of as much of the rest of the world as possible and, of course, ever finer control over the most valuable resource on this planet: its human population.
Comment: This is an interesting study on the motivations of suicide bombers, but it does not take into account the fact that suicide bombings are inherently illogical from the point of view of Muslim jihadists wanting to hurt Western governments. As Joe Quinn points out, "Islamic terrorism" does not benefit anyone but Western governments: