Terrorism may be more difficult to weed out than many people realize, George Washington University professor Jerrold M. Post said yesterday at Northeastern University.
While psychological interpretations of political events can help shed light on this issue, Post said the fight against terrorism will be a long one regardless of what methods are used.
“Islam has been hijacked by radical Islam,” he said. “When hatred is bred in the bone, it’s not something that goes away rapidly.”
In order to fight terrorism, Post recommended a four-pronged program that addresses the “us-versus-them” mentality of many terrorist organizations.
The first step is to inhibit potential terrorists from joining terrorist groups. Dissension must be encouraged, and it must be easy to exit the group, he said. The last recommendation, which Post said is the most important, is to reduce support for the group and the leader, creating a marginalized organization that will not appeal to the mainstream.
This will be difficult within al-Qaida, Post said, because Osama bin Laden is an efficient and charismatic leader.
“He encountered adoring followers in Afghanistan,” Post said. “He was living in these caves alongside of them, using of his fortune generously to provide for clinics, hospitals, purchasing weapons and ammunition and was preaching regularly from the Koran about this being God’s will.”
Post, who created a psychological portrait of Saddam Hussein for the governmental hearings after Iraq bombed Kuwait, is experienced in examining the rhetoric of what he calls “destructive charismatic leaders.”
“Bin Laden, in all his language, has attempted to construct a war between Commander in Chief Osama bin Laden of radical Islam against the corrupt West with its Commander in Chief George W. Bush,” he said. “There has developed an almost romantic heroism for bin Laden.”
Post praised the flat organization of bin Laden’s al-Qaida, which he compared to a business complete with mergers and acquisitions.
“After bin Laden leaves, there will be someone there to take the leadership reins,” Post said.
Post demonstrated the degree to which radical fundamentalists distort the Koran to justify violence in the name of religion. He compared quotations from the Koran that forbid acts of violence to quotations from suicide bombing campaign commanders currently incarcerated in Israel.
“Suicide is, as you know, quite strictly and unambiguously proscribed in the Koran,” Post said.
But most radical activists to whom Post spoke made a distinction between suicide and suicide bombings. Post described a conversation with one commander who described suicide as “selfish, weak and mentally unstable.”
According to this commander, suicide bombings are “self-sacrifice or martyrdom in the service of Allah.”
Post said radical Muslims have also misrepresented the concept of jihad and have distorted the Koran’s teachings on beating hostages to fit their needs.
According to Post, this religious fervor creates a “vicious species of psychological warfare.” Too much violence, Post explained, is counterproductive to many terrorist causes. Terrorist groups that are trying to gain attention from the West will limit the degree of violence in their campaigns. Religious fundamentalists, however, are unconcerned with the reaction of the West.
“They are not trying to influence the West; they’re trying to expel the West,” he said. “Moreover, they’re not seeking an audience here on Earth for their cause. They don’t need that CNN story or the New York Times headline. Their audience is up above.”
While the terrorists involved in Israeli-Palestinian violence and the terrorists involved in al-Qaida both claim to be acting in the name of God, Post said the different fundamentalists have different motivations.
“The suicide bombers in Israel are between 17-22, uneducated, unmarried, unemployed — really unformed youths who are facing bleak futures,” he said.
“What a vivid contrast with those suicide terrorists of Sept. 11, who in some cases had higher education and came from middle class families,” Post added.
In trying to explain the incentive for people of this background to get involved in terrorist camps, Post focused on the story of one man who was strongly influenced by what Post called a “radical mosque.”
At this mosque, the man was shown videos of mass graves in Bosnia and Chechnya and was led to believe he had a responsibility to become a “soldier for Allah” and help those being victimized, Post said.
According to Post, the man was then placed in an Afghan training camp, where he received four hours of military training and four hours of ideological training every day. After being placed on reserve — Post called it the “al-Qaida rolodex” — the young man finally participated in the embassy bombing in Tanzania in 1998.
The speech is a President’s Day tradition in the Political Science department at Northeastern, which has been hosting these lectures for five years.
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