Other People's Wars: A Review of Overseas Terrorism in ... - Edocr

Other Peoples’ Wars – Chapter One
rank and file (as well as the leadership) of many terrorist groups. It is hard to imagine
any Police Force or Fire Department seeking to hire such people, although a few armies
have done so over the centuries.
It might be an over-simplification, but the sheep dogs (firefighters, police, soldiers and
such) might be individuals who seek authority and validation, but they also have an ethic
of service, and an impulse to protect. This is something that seldom can be said about
coyotes or terrorists.
The attraction towards a strong ideology also lies with internal characteristics. The
world of terrorism is rife with “histories of childhood deprivation and narcissistic
wounds … with a deficient sense of self-esteem, and inadequately integrated personalities
… loners, alienated individuals who did not fit … extreme extroverts – the self centered
individual with little regard for the feelings of others … neurotic hostility … projecting
the person’s own hostility onto the social environment.” 15
The one sure lesson to draw from this is that the cause a terrorist espouses has little to
do with the need to commit violence, but the cause they adopt will certainly shape the
violence that they undertake. A terrorist is someone already predisposed to violence and
the cause is secondary to its use as a justification. For example, among those who have
attacked Israelis with terrorism, a full spectrum of ideologies from nationalist, Marxist,
leftist, radical right and religious sources have been pressed into service to shape and
justify their attacks.
Admittedly, some terrorists do have causes that might justify violence, although they
usually first eliminated or suppressed all those who recommended a non-violent approach
to the cause. Others have had to create a cause or adapt an existing ideology to excuse
their intended behavior. It is not so much that the ends justify the means for a terrorist, it
is rather that the means are attractive enough to require the invention of an end.
Hoffer discusses the mutability of belief in his book on ideologues and pointed out – for
example – that in the early 1930s, German Nazis and Communists regarded each other as
an excellent source of recruits. 16 The ability of Al-Qaeda to recruit Hoffer’s “misfits” in
Western Society should not go unmentioned either, as they have recruited criminals and
aimless youths from non-Muslim backgrounds in Britain, France and the United States,
as can be evinced from John Walker Lindh (aka Abdul Hamid), the Courtailler brothers,
Jose Padilla (aka Abdullah al-Muhajir) and Richard Reid.
In the aftermath of the World Trade Centre bombing, Western attitudes and responses to
it have largely gelled into the traditional camps that endlessly debated strategy and
approaches to previous ideological enemies in the 1930s and the Cold War. Those who
14. Dr Jerrold Post, as cited in Invisible Armies (pg. 82) Dr Post is a psychologist whose papers on
individual and group dynamics in terrorism between 1985 and 1990 have attracted much attention. Also
see his paper “Individual and Group Dynamics of Terrorist Behavior” In World Congress of Psychiatry,
Psychiatry: The State of the Art, 6, New York, Plenum, 1985; or “Terrorist Psycho-Logic: Terrorist
Behavior as a Product of Psychological Forces”, Walter Re ich, ed., Origins of Terrorism; Psychologies,
Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990.
16 This relationship is also well illustrated by contemporary accounts from SA members – see Kurt
Massmann’s anecdote “A meeting hall brawl” in George Mossel’s Nazi Culture; Grosset & Dunlap, New
York, 1966.
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