What makes an insurgent? Eliminate hype by using facts - the reasons why. Knowing why is essential to understanding why insurgents do what they do. From IEEE Spectrum of September 2006:
Quote:
"Terrorists are not pure evil." says Silverman, director of Penn's Ackoff Center for the Advancement of Systems Approach. "They have a value system, and within that value system they are very consistent. If you re-created their value system, their leader, what they consider to be sacred, what they consider to be violations, if you build up that worldwide view and that framework, it's not surprising or crazy that they do what they do." ...
A jihadist terrorist has a preferred state of the world: the whole world is fundamentalist, and no loose-valued Westerner should walk on the land that Muhammad felt was sacred." ... "Those are long-term preferences - control the land, control of who's allowed to do what. Then he's got standards. It's okay to kill. In fact, I'll go to heaven and be a martyr, and my family will get money."
"It's not a game theory," he adds. "It's people's values."
Silverman does not guess at these values. He works with real-world data provided by leading experts on jihadist terrorists, ... that [Sageman] has since profiled 300 more, including those in the cells responsible for the Madrid train bombing on 11 March 2004.
Sageman's profile of a typical jihadist terrorist is a male who grows up in a decent family, never gets into much trouble, and goes to a religious school. There he learns Islamic fundamentalist credos, and then in many cases he goes abroad to study - often engineering and often in Europe where he feels alienated and has trouble finding work. He gravitates to mosques to find comfort in the familiar, and there he meets men with similar feelings of isolation. Gradually, he is drawn towards a politicized existence and into a terrorist cell.
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Ironically, reasons why someone becomes a terrorist are partially found in hate embedded in TheMercenary's many posts. TheMercenary encourages many reasons (ie hate) that cause some to become disaffected and isolated from society. Ironic? People that TheMercenary so hate actually share a common characteristic - values that justify death of 'others'.
Somehow this is all part of some worldwide international terrorism network? Hardly. Little cells of angry people form anywhere once their myopic vision of the world must be imposed on all others. The ones that tend to be more dangerous and successful are products of a more secular world. Notice many small groups of American religious extremists so driven by their hate as to bomb women's clinics and shoot medical doctors for performing abortions. This too must be part of the world wide terrorist movement - according to the philosophy of TheMercenary.
Long before one can blindly believe Rush Limbaugh's, Fox News, and right wing extremist myths of an international terrorism network, one should first learn what inspires individuals active in an insurgency. These are often isolated and independent groups , disaffected people in a society, whose agenda is to save the world from itself even by violence. (Even god knows how both UG and TheMercenary cite violence as a routine to solution to such problems.) People whose values demand that their values be imposed on others who would otherwise trespass.
To understand an insurgency, look not at some international network of terrorists. Instead, grasp what inspires a small group to form an insurgency cell. Small groups that somehow get promoted as a worldwide terrorist organization. Somehow these actions by small groups get translated into an international coordinated network of terrorists - such as Kaos, Spectre, Thrush, and Al Qaeda.