PSY-Psychology of Terrorism class

11/30/2014

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Final Thoughts and Conclusions

Dr. Jonathan Appel

Psychology of Terrorism

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

• When people in the West dismiss violence as a backward byproduct of religion, they’re being lazy and self-serving (Armstrong, 2014).

• Blaming religion, Armstrong argues, allows Westerners to ignore the essential role that violence has played in the formation of our own societies — and the essential role that our societies have played in seeding violence abroad.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

• “Terrorism is fundamentally and inherently political, even when other motives, religious, economic, and social, are involved. Terrorism is always about power.” (Armstrong, 2014).

11/30/2014

2

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

• Religion was part of state-building, and a lot of the violence of our world is the violence of the state.

• We’re haunted by terrible fears and paranoias. We’re frightened beings. When people are afraid, fear takes over and brings out all kind of irrationality. So, yes, we’re constantly striving to be rational, but we’re not wholly rational beings.

• A concentration camp can exist within the same vicinity as a university.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

• Forensic psychiatrists who have interviewed about 500 people involved in the 9/11 atrocity, and those lone-wolves like the Boston Marathon, has found that one of the principal causes for their turning to these actions was a sense of lack of meaning; a sense of meaningless and purposelessness and hopelessness in their lives. A lack of meaning is a dangerous thing in society

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

• The suicide bomber has been analyzed by Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, who has made a study of every single suicide bombing from 1980 to 2004. He has found that it’s always a response to the invasion of the homeland by a militarily superior power. People feel their space is invaded, and they resort to this kind of action because they can’t compete with the invaders. [Suicide bombing] was a ploy [first] used by the Tamil Tigers, who had no time for religion.

• Every fundamentalist movement from Judaism, Christianity

and Islam, is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation

11/30/2014

3

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

• Fundamentalism represents a rebellion against modernity, and one of the hallmarks of modernity has been the liberation of women. There’s nothing in the Quran to justify either the veiling or the seclusion of women. The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce, legal rights we didn’t have in the West until the 19th century.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

• Nationalism was completely alien to the middle east; they had no understanding of it. The borders were cobbled together with astonishing indifference and self-interest on the part of the West.

• A major cause of unrest and alienation has always been humiliation. Islam was, before the colonial period, the great world power, rather like the United States today. It was reduced overnight to a dependent bloc and treated by the colonialists with frank disdain.