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"But the terrorists are followers of an insane Islamist Cult, and it would be culturally insensitive to mention that"

Nope I am fully in agreement with you there. Muslims and xtians are equally insane. Women can't drive in Saudi Arabia; that is stupid. Jesus and Mohamed can go fuck each other.

The reason they are reacting to us is because they are fucked, their way of life is dying and we are forced to interact because the world is small and their is a resource issue.

We unfortunately attacked Iraq, the most secular state in the middle east. If you really wanted to stomp on Muslims, there were other countries to attack. Let's free the women of Saudi Arabia. How kool would that b?
8)

That would be very cool.

Overpopulation and Greed is the root of this problem. It started many centuries ago back when the Muslims overpopulated an area that could no longer sustain them so they waged a war against the Byzantine Empire to obtain more land and resources, so they thought. They finally came to the realization that the wealth of the Byzantine Empire was from the pilgrims and not the land but the damage was already done. Then the Crusades began to fight back and it's history ever since. Terrorists are stuck in medieval times still fighting the Crusades to this day.

The only long term way to combat terrorism and extremist religious groups is education.

Educated people tend to be less religious, educated people tend to have better jobs. Better jobs create more stable societies and families. People that grow up in nice towns wit a decent family and a job don't become terrorists.

Religion doesn't create extreme terrorists, but it does nurture the mindset and help fuel the movement. When people have nothing to lose, they become dangerous. People who have no money, or people who have watched half their family die from war or some other disaster will be prone to becoming terrorists. Which is why I think in the long run, the iraq war will create more terrorists than it kills. The iraq economy is a mess, and we've accidentally killed lots of civilians who will have family members left living...family members that will hate the US forever.

Shamis wrote:The only long term way to combat terrorism and extremist religious groups is education.

Educated people tend to be less religious, educated people tend to have better jobs. Better jobs create more stable societies and families. People that grow up in nice towns wit a decent family and a job don't become terrorists.

The number two for AQ is a doctor. Laden is well educated. They are also well financed.

There are a lot of poor people (both religious and not) in the world, most of them don't try to blow themselves up with the intent to maim and kill innocent civilians. Conversely, rich people aren't necessarily saints. It's has more to do with values than money.

However, stability and education would help.

from: Perfect Soldiers

"there was little in their early lives to suggest that they would become what they did. The pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, Atta, came from "an ambitious, not overtly religious middle-class household in Egypt" and had led "a sheltered life" until he arrived in Hamburg, Germany, in 1992 to do graduate study in architecture. The pilot of the second plane, Marwan al-Shehhi, was an amiable, "laid-back" fellow from the United Arab Emirates who had joined the UAE army, "not the world's most effective fighting force but one of its most generous, paying [its scholarship] students monthly stipends of about $2,000," which may have been his primary reason for enlisting; this enabled him to go to Hamburg, though there is little evidence that he "had any serious scholarly ambitions."

Hani Hanjour, the Saudi pilot who flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon, "had lived in the United States off and on throughout the 1990s, mostly in Arizona, intermittently taking flying lessons at several different flying schools." He was, in the view of one of his flight instructors, "intelligent, friendly, and 'very courteous, very formal,' a nice enough fellow but a terrible pilot." He finally got a commercial license from the FAA but was unable to find work here or in the Middle East. As for Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, he was "the handsome middle child and only son of an industrious, middle-class family in Beirut," a "secular Muslim" family that "was easygoing -- the men drank whiskey and the women wore short skirts about town and bikinis at the beach." At university in Germany he met Aysel Sengün, "the daughter of conservative, working-class Turkish immigrants"; eventually they got married, but he disappeared for long periods, usually without explanation, leaving her frantic.

His disappearances, like changes in the other men's lives, were traceable to his discovery of radical Islam and jihad -- not jihad as "the individual's daily struggle for his own soul," but jihad as a Muslim's " obligation to fight on behalf of his beliefs, against nonbelievers and corrupters of belief." Eventually he too found his way to Hamburg, where he joined many other young Muslims in prayer and discussion, sometimes at a mosque called al Quds (the Arabic name for Jerusalem), sometimes in one of the various group houses where the men lived austerely and piously: "The Hamburg men who joined their plights to that of fundamentalist Islam chose not simply a new mosque or religious doctrine but an entry to a new way of life, the acquisition of a new world view, in fact, of a new world." To Atta and a friend who called himself Omar (ultimately he became the backstage coordinator of the 2001 attacks under his real name, Ramzi Binalshibh), "no matter where they fought, their real enemies were the Jews, and ultimately the Americans. 'One has to do something about America,' Omar said."

For all of them, radical Islam and jihad soon became obsessions, eclipsing everything else. Studies were abandoned, families ignored, the outer world denied as they plunged themselves into their fanatical version of faith. As a German investigator put it: "They are not talking about daily life stuff,..., they talk about religion most of the time . . . these people are just living for their religion, meaning for them that they just live now for their life after death, the paradise. They want to live obeying their God, so they can enter paradise. Everything else doesn't matter." Talking one week of Kosovo, the next of Chechnya or Afghanistan, the "men were agreed: they wanted to fight -- they just didn't know which war."

It was, of course, Osama bin Laden who gave them their war. A preview of it had been staged in early 1993, when an ad hoc jihadist group under the leadership of the "master terrorist," Abdul Basit Abdul Karim, a.k.a. Ramzi Yousef, planted a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center's North Tower, "killing six people, injuring 1,000, and causing $300 million in damage." The United States was shocked, but clueless:

"To a considerable extent, America did not recognize the advent of a new age but whether anyone knew it or not, an era of religious terror had arrived. Intermingling religious and political goals had been the norm for most of human history. Islam itself came into the world with secular as well as sacred aims. What had changed in this latest incarnation had more to do with the world it was in than Islam itself. By the latter half of the twentieth century, the movement toward secular government had triumphed almost everywhere except in the Islamic world. The advocates of political Islam became aberrant simply by outlasting the political ambitions and empires of other religions. They might have been mere curious anachronisms had not the modern world provided them the means to wed their old beliefs to new, readily accessible technologies. The outcome of that union is terror on a scale not previously known."

Al Qaeda, McDermott argues, was almost ideally suited to waging this new war. Insisting that "all states in the Muslim world . . . be returned to Muslim doctrine" as they saw it and preaching "violent revolt against insufficiently Islamist regimes in the Middle East," al Qaeda came up with a doctrine perfectly suited to young, pious, single-minded men, and it had the organizational apparatus to mobilize them. It "was never the huge organization its opponents sometimes portrayed," having a core of "at most a couple hundred men," and its operations often were "crude," but its small size was one of its great strengths: "If Al Qaeda were a nation with all of the infrastructure that implies, it would have been more vulnerable to penetration by American intelligence. . . . The September 11 attacks were by far the biggest thing it had ever attempted, but even at that, the number of people involved in the plot could be counted by the handful. The scale helped keep it hidden."

Among that handful were the 15 hijackers who joined the pilots aboard the four airplanes. All but one were from Saudi Arabia, most "were from families headed by tradesmen and civil servants, well-off, but not wealthy," mostly "unexceptionable men," none of whom "stood out for their religious or political activism." As McDermott writes, "that young men from good backgrounds would leave homes and families without fanfare or discouragement was evidence of the broad support within Saudi Arabia for jihad." Contrary to rumor, McDermott says they knew they would die and welcomed martyrdom: "The men were trained in hand-to-hand combat in the Al Qaeda camps [in Afghanistan], taught the physical skills they would need for the sole task given them -- to physically overpower flight crews. The pilots were the leaders. The new men would be the muscle."


Shamis, TradMike - It doesn't look like these guys fit your "root causes" explanation very well at all. They were educated men of privilege from good, often secular families, who had been sold on the idea of a trip to paradise by the extremist religous leaders that they'd come under the influence of.

Just like there are a lot of well educated republicans and fundamentalist Christians. It can be hard to go against your parents beliefs.

Sorry that post was so long. The hijackers were not from extremely religious families. These were young men who, out on their own, discovered radical Islam. And despite what you may think, Republicans and fundamentalist Christians aren't generally wandering around looking to martyr themselves in some grand Jihad.

They would if their parents told them to. Actually, all arguing aside, the need to fit in can cause some people to do some pretty stupid shit. I think that is a large part of most cults and fanatical types, basically just wanting to belong to a group, or just finding a group that makes them feel welcome. I am sorry to get all "lets sit in a circle and discuss our feeling" on ya, but sometimes it helps to try to figure out why someone, some human that is truly no different than you or I could decide that blowing themselves up in a crowded room is a good idea.

Well maybe its not "hahaha" funny but I did notice that even in Dahuk the civilian casualties outnumbered the authority casualties by 3 to 1.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/7036331.stm

Its a slow process, that would take a couple generations.

But I stand by my statement that educated people are much less likely to become radical extremists for any religion, or to believe at all.

Not sure if there is any data on the topic, but I'm pretty sure if you sampled high school graduates vs college graduates in the US you'd see a dramatic difference between the number of firm believers vs agnostics/atheists.

The only thing that separates christian fundamentalists from islamic fundamentalists is the christian beliefs against suicide, and the overall value they put on life. But ultimately they both place a higher value on the afterlife than the 'real' life, which is dangerous.