Ethics and Policy in Criminal Justice - Class Notes - Section Three of the course

The Criminology of Terrorism

What is terrorism?  The definition is controversial since "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter."  All military action can be terrifying, yet we distinguish between terrorism and legitimate military action.  This gets back to the ethics of war which we looked at earlier.  This can be viewed from the perspective of intentions (deontological) or consequences, eg., in the Arab/Israeli conflict the Israelis kill more Palestinians than vice versa, but they do not intentionally target civilians.  Suicide bombers do. Which is more ethical?

Or is the key question whether a campaign is conducted by a government or by irregular forces?  Whether the forces wear uniforms or not?  This is a legal issue with regard to the prisoners the U.S. is holding in Guantanamo, are they entitled to be treated as prisoners of war or are they terrorists?

Can we use the justice of the cause as a criterion for deciding which behavior is terrorist?

In The Lessons of Terror, Caleb Carr defines terrorism as "warfare deliberately waged against civilians with the purpose of destroying their will to support either leaders or policies that the agents of such violence find objectinable."  This applies to Al Qaeda but also to the Allied bombing of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

There are many other definitions.

Why do people commit terrorist acts?

A good summary is psychiatrist Jerrold Post's testimony to Congress on Terrorist Organizations and Motivations. This document should be considered as part of the lecture notes for this course.   Also see my paper Terrorist Beliefs and Terrorist Lives which is on our WEBCT site (click on Documents) because it is in the process of publication.  The material in this paper, also, will be included in the lectures for this course.

March 27

Key points in White's book for discussion:

Chapter 1:  Page 3 gives goals for the chapter.  It focuses on contexts, definitions, typologies and tactics.  Much of this is muddled because the word "terrorism" is used in different ways by different people in different historical circumstances.  People on the left such as Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky tend to define "terrorism" as repression by the state, based on the fact that this causes more misery for people.  They argue that the U.S. is a terrorist state.  Governments tend to define terror as action by non-governmental, clandestine groups.   There is no need to memorize all the different people's definitions.  You should know the U.S. government's official definition (p. 12 in the book) and understand the basic ethical issues that are implicit in the definitions (intent vs consequences;  good cause vs. fighting by the rules;  government vs. independent actor).

There are also issues separating criminal and political terrorism.  The scale of terrorism also varies, from single individuals to very large groups.  The responses vary according to the scale.  this is summarized in the typology on page 15.

Terrorists use different tactics:  bombing, hijacking, arson, assault, kidnapping, taking hostages.  Factors that amplify their power are use of technology, transnational support, media coverage and religious fanaticism.  The author refers to these as a "typology" but I can't find a real typology here, just a list of tactics without any logical organization.

Chapter 2 - This chapter raises the important issue of how "terrorists" differ from "ciminals" - the difference is motivation, terrorists have a political, religious or ideological motivation.  This can become fuzzy, and groups may shift, becoming pure criminals after starting as terrorists (the FARC in Colombia is an example, they are now without political support but powerful because of drug money).  Some organized criminal groups, e.g., in Sicily, began historically as part of a resistance against foreign occupation.  Terrorists are likely to be well organized and to plan their actions carefully;  they are more similar to organized crime than to oppportunistic crime and investigation of terrorism has much in common with investigation of organized crime.  Terrorists are more difficult to apprehend than organized criminals because they have no ongoing relationship with their victims.

Terrorists believe in their own moral righteousness, support from a wider community is likely to be important to them.  Often they have a legal "front" group, groups that propagate their ideology without taking responsibility for the armed actions.  Links to these support groups can provide information to investigators.

Profiles of terrorists:  Psychologically, they are people with an absolutist ideology, who cannot accept an imperfect world (says H.H.A. Cooper).  In specific situations, they may be of certain ethnic or religious groups, although these may be difficult to identify physically, e.g, Palestinians and Israeli Jews look the same physically.   There tends to be a charismatic leader in a terrorist group, catching this person can greatly weaken the group.  He can't carry out his role entirely underground.  Sender Luminoso pretty much died when Guzman was apprehended.

Chapter 3:  Group Structures.  Terrorists need to organize to be effective, and often this is difficult.  They tend to find it difficult to obtain adequate support.  Most are small and short-lived.  This presents a paradox for law enforcement.  If they work too  hard at repressing groups, this may elevate their martyr or victim status among their potential supporters.  Many groups may just fade away if ignored.  On the other hand, some may be well enough managed to grow without getting a lot of publicity.  This tactical issue is a major debate among terrorism specialists, as discussed in the article What Terrorists Want by Nicholas Lemann.  The difference between a "narrow" and a "wide" approach - retail or wholesale.  Do we zero in on the organizations themselves, or do we go after the countries or populations that support them.  How can we discourage the passive supporters?

Organizationally, terrorists need hierarchal structures similar to other groups, but they also need survivability under state suppression.  This leads to cell structures, decentralized command.  Support and training are needed.  Anti-terrorist efforts can go after these supports.  They also require financing, and can be approached through the financial networks.  This raises questions of civil rights, how can we cut off funding to terrorists without compromising the rights of legitimate groups?
If there is a lot of oppression, terrorists may evolve a "leaderless resistance" strategy, e.g., Carlos Marighella's ideas in Brazil, propaganda didn't work, so dramatic actions might.  As it turned out, these failed also and the police broke the groups through torture.  Some movements depend on "lone wolf" terrorists who act on their own, following rhetoric from leaders.  He calls them "beserkers".  The man at the beginning of the video, Faces of the Enemy, is an example.

Chapter Four:  Religion and Terror.  Marvin Harris says there are two types of religions:  those based on killing and those expusing nonkilling.  Sacrifices are made to get the Gods to do things.  Religious or spiritual language is taken literally.  Religion can also reflect ethnic differences, e.g., the Jews are both a religion and an ethnic group, as are the Sikhs and most religions in tribal groups.  Or they may reflect social class differences, e.g, Protestant and Catholic in Ireland.

Huntington's Class of Civilizations Thesis.  Eight primary cultural paradigms or civilizations:  Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, African.  Some of these are more coherent than others, e.g., Latin American doesn't work well, but Islamic may.  This is the primary theme of Osama bin Laden's movement.

A difference between political and "holy" terror is that for the religious terrorist the killing may be an end in itself, not a means to an end.  Holy terrorism relies on beliefs about the end of the world, eschatology.  This leads to irrational acts since the world is going to end anyway.  Death doesn't matter since it is a sure route to heaven.  How much does this differ from political terrorism, Marxist terrorism?  Was Marxism a form of "secular religion"?

Is religion simply a veneer or justification for hostility rooted in deeper psychological forces, or does the religious ideology itself make a difference?  Hinduism and Christianity are pacifist in doctrine, yet there have been highly violent Hindu and Christian movements.

Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 of the White book give Historical Background to Terrorism in five areas:  European history, Ireland, the Middle East and Latin America.  I don't expect you to remember all the details, but you should get the main points and give some thought to the "lessons" we can draw from this history.  As a guide to doing this, we will do an in-class exercise on these chapters.  Those missing class have until April 1 at 13:20 to submit it to WEBCT.

April 1 - International Terrorism other than the Middle East, chapters 11 and 12.

Chapter 11 begins with a review of Western European left-wing terrorism.  This was part of the generational culture of the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War era, and the Europeans were inspired by movements in the United States - SDS and the Weathermen - discussed briefly in Chapter 13.  These groups began as non-violent protests, but the non-violent protests failed to achieve the desired results, at least as quickly as desired.  Small factions turned to violence, including the Weathermen in the United States, the Red Brigades in Italy and the  Red Army Faction or Bader-Meinhof Gang in West Germany.  What do all these movements have in common?  They see themselves as part of a left-wing, socialist, anti-capitalist tradition dating back to Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and others.  Characteristics of this ideology:


 

But why did it become popular among youth in the United States and West Germany, countries that were doing well under capitalism?  Many people argue that there is a deeper, psychological cause.  This can be seen as an example of Nihilism.
Nihilism is defined on the Nihilism Home Page as follows:
           A common unofficial description of nihilism is the 'belief in nothing'. But
                   a far more useful one would substitute 'faith' for 'belief' where faith is
                   defined as the "firm belief in something for which there is no proof." A
                   universal definition of nihilism could then well be the rejection of that
                   which requires faith for salvation or actualization and would span to
                   include anything from theology to secular ideology. Within nihilism faith
                   and similar values are discarded because they've no absolute,
                   objective substance, they are invalid serving only as yet another
                   exploitable lie never producing any strategically beneficial outcome.
                   Faith is an imperative hazard to group and individual because it
                   compels suspension of reason, critical analysis and common sense.
                   Faith is "don't let those pesky facts get in the way of our political plan or
                   our mystically ordained path to heaven"; faith is "do what I tell you
                   because I said so". All things that can't be disproved need faith, utopia
                   needs faith, idealism needs faith, spiritual salvation needs faith. F**k
                   faith.
Nihilism:

The psychology of people whgo support extremist movements can be judged from autobiographical accounts, as well as from studies using psychological tests.  An excerpt from my paper on our WEBCT site:

Rothman and Lichter (1982) used projective tests to probe the unconscious minds of  New Left activists in the United States.  They found them to be characterized by weakened self-esteem, injured narcissism and paranoid tendencies.  The tests showed that many activists were motivated by a preoccupation with power which attracted them to ideologies that answered their doubts and offered clear and unambiguous answers to their problems.  Similar traits were found in studies of West German terrorists (Kellen, 1998), Italian radical youth (Ferracuti and Bruno, 1981), and members of the Shining Path movement in Peru (Cáceres, 1989).  The findings of these and similar studies are summarized well by Post (2001):
 terrorists as individuals for the most part do not demonstrate serious psychopathology.  While there is no one personality type, it is the impression that there is a disproportionate representation among terrorists of individuals who are aggressive and action-oriented and place greater than normal reliance on the psychological mechanisms of externalization and splitting.  There is suggestive data indicating that many terrorists come from the margins of society and have not been particularly successful in their personal, educational and vocational lives. The combination of the personal feelings of inadequacy with the reliance on the psychological mechanisms of externalization and splitting make especially attractive a group of like-minded individuals whose credo is "Its not us; its them. They are the cause of our problems."
Bommi Bauman wrote an interesting auto-biographical account of his involvement in the RAF.  Here is a summary:

Bommi Baumann.  Not all terrorists are shy, reclusive young men who have trouble meeting women.  West German terrorist Michael "Bommi" Baumann was a fun loving, long haired young man who (Baumann, 1979, p. 23) "preferred running after a girl over running after work, naturally, you get more out of it and she does too!"  He found working as an apprentice construction worker tedious, and gravitated to Berlin's counterculture where he enjoyed rock music, drugs and plenty of liberated sex.  He and his friends looked down on the conventional working class neighborhoods where "cars are more important than places for children to play."  In his autobiography, he recalls that one day he was visiting just such a neighborhood, where a lot of policemen lived, and (Baumann, 1979, p. 31) "my whole disgust toward these object relationships just went through me, and I started slashing tires.  I did them to the tune of about a hundred.  In other words, I slashed the tires of about a hundred cars with a knife, a kind of stiletto."  He kept doing this until he was caught and served jail time.
 Baumann says that he came from a working class environment where fighting was common and that for him (Baumann, 1979, p. 27) "violence was a perfectly adequate means, I've never had any hang-ups about it."  Indeed, he was fascinated by it.  He and his friends took pleasure in the actions of Charles Manson and his "family" in California, who tortured and
murdered the actress Sharon Tate and her friends.  He remembers (Baumann, 1979, p. 65) "at that time we didn't think Charles Manson was so bad.  Somehow we found him quite funny."  Baumann's fascination with Manson was shared by Bernardine Dohrn, one of the leaders of the Weathermen in the United States, who remarked (Sprinzak, 1998, p. 70): "Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork in the victim's stomach!  Wild!"
 Baumann rose above petty hooliganism by reading radical literature - Robert Williams, Regis Debray, Eldridge Cleaver - and dedicated himself to the struggle against the Vietnam war.  Was this a rational decision?  Certainly more so than McVeigh's or Kaczynski's.  Baumann had no illusions that the left would win the struggle against capitalism in Germany.  Focusing on Vietnam allied him with a cause that had a chance of succeeding, and in fact did succeed.  The only problem is that, when the war ended, the rationale for his terrorist career ended.  So he and his friends looked around for another cause they could identify with and settled on Palestine.  This provided a sufficient rationalization for continuing his terrorist bombings.
 Eventually Baumann tired of terrorism as a life style, although he did not completely abandon the belief system.  He simply became bored with living in safe houses and being isolated from the fun loving counterculture community.  Life underground made it difficult to sustain meaningful relationships with women, and he came to feel that a stable relationship was more important to him than the cause.  He concluded that (Baumann, 1977, p. 115) "making a decision for terrorism is something already psychologically programmed.  Today, I can see that - for myself - it was only the fear of love, from which one flees into absolute violence.  If I had checked out the dimension of love for myself  before hand, I wouldn't have done it."
 Baumann is an example of the militant activist for whom the excitement of violent struggle was the chief motivator.  He saw the parallel between his life and that of Stalin, observing that (Baumann, 1977, p. 116) "Stalin was actually a type like us: he made it, one of the few who made it.  But then it got heavy."

The Italian government developed a "penitente" program to appeal to terrorists who repented of their views.  They get reduced prison terms in exchange for publicly renouncing violence and providing information to the police.  Other countries have copied this program.

Often they renounce the methods of terrorism but not the ideology itself.  An interesting example is the book Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.  Hart spoke at our Law School last semester and was well received.  Negri doesn't do speaking tours because, as the back cover of the book says, he "an independent researcher and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome."  This is an example of the phenomenon of "radical chic" - the espousal of radical ideas by priviliged, intellectual people who use them to assert their cultural superiority to crass, commercial capitalism.

What happened to these movements?  They always fail in their supposed political objectives, because their theory as expressed in the Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerilla "was fatally flawed -- it assumed that the "oppressed" populace would rise up in joy after seeing terrorist acts against the state"   They didn't, in West Germany or in Brazil or anywhere else.  The police eventually track down the activists and arrest or killed them. Meinhoff committed suicide by hanging herself, Baader shot himself in 1977.   Marighella was killed in a police ambush.  The RAF formally ceased operations on May 28, 1998 (p. 178).

However, they can be hard to find because they become highly skilled in underground tactics, and new cells may emerge to replace the ones that failed.  There are always new generations of Nihilists because it seems to speak to a deep psychological need in some people, particularly young people who have difficulty adjusting to adult life.  They can find
a cause to espouse, sometimes a left-wing cause, sometimes a right-wing one.  Today, the "skin heads" and other right-wing, anti-immigrant extremists are more powerful in Germany.

Nationalistic and Ethnic Terrorism (chapter 12) has a stronger base of support.  Many people support their goals, if not their methods.  The more moderate, reformist political forces may feel that the extremists help them by making their opponents negotiate with them as an alternative to terrorist actions by the extremists.  Yassir Arafat is often thought to play this game.

An example is the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.  They are active in Sri Lanka, a an island nation off the southeast coast of Indian.  The population of Sri Lanka is composed mainly (about 75%) of Sinhalese, who are Theravada Buddhists; Hindu Tamils make up a  large minority (some 18%).  [Your book refers to Hindus and Muslims, but it is actually Hindus and Buddhists].  Here is a summary of the history of the conflict, from encyclopedia.com:

Full independence was finally granted to the island on Feb. 4, 1948, with dominion status in the Commonwealth of Nations. In
  1950 delegates of eight countries of the Commonwealth met in Colombo and adopted the Colombo Plan for economic aid to S
  and SE Asia. Riots in 1958 between Sinhalese and the Tamil minority over demands by the Tamils for official recognition of
  their language and the establishment of a separate Tamil state under a federal system resulted in severe loss of life. In Sept.,
  1959, Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike was assassinated, and in 1960 his widow, Sirimavo Bandaranaike , became
  prime minister. The Federal party of the Tamils was outlawed in 1961, following new disorders.Certain Western business
  facilities were nationalized (1962), and the country became involved in disputes with the United States and Great Britain over
  compensation. The radical policies of Mrs. Bandaranaike aroused opposition, and the elections in 1965 gave a parliamentary
  plurality once more to the moderate socialist United National party (UNP) of Dudley Senanayake, who became prime minister
  with a multiparty coalition. Under Senanayake, closer relations with the West were established and compromise arrangements
  were made for recompensing nationalized companies. However, economic problems and severe inflation continued,
  aggravated by a burgeoning population (between 1946 and 1970 the population almost doubled).In 1970, Mrs. Bandaranaike
  and her three-party anticapitalist coalition won a landslide victory, following considerable preelection violence. She launched
  social welfare programs, including rice subsidies and free hospitalization, but failed to satisfy the extreme left, which, under
  the Marxist People's Liberation Front, attempted to overthrow the government in an armed rebellion in 1971. With Soviet,
  British, and Indian aid, the rebellion was quelled after heavy fighting. In 1972 the country adopted a new constitution,
  declared itself a republic while retaining membership in the Commonwealth of Nations, and changed its name to Sri Lanka. In
  the early 1970s the government was confronted with a severe economic crisis as the country's food supplies and foreign
  exchange reserves dwindled in the face of rising inflation, high unemployment, a huge trade deficit, and the traditional policy
  of extensive social-welfare programs.
  Civil War

  Repression of the Tamil language fueled demands by the Tamil minority for an independent state. Election of a new UNP
  government under J. R. Jayawardene in 1977 and the implementation of economic reforms geared toward growth did little to
  restrain an upsurge of terrorist violence. In the 1980s the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam initiated a full-scale guerrilla war
  against the army in the north and east; at the same time, radical Sinhalese students assassinated government officials whom
  they believed were too soft on the Tamils. In response to a request from Jayawardene's government, India sent (1987)
  42,000 troops to NE Sri Lanka. The Indian troops fought an inconclusive war with the Tigers and were asked to withdraw by
  Jayawardene's successor, Ramasinghe Premadasa, who was elected in 1988.The Indian troops withdrew in late 1989, and
  fighting resumed in 1990. In 1993, Premadasa was assassinated in a suicide bombing; he was succeeded as president by
  prime minister and UNP leader Dingiri Banda Wijetunga. A year later, the opposition People's Alliance party (PA) came to
  power, and Chandrika Kumaratunga , the daughter of Sirimavo Bandaranaike, became prime minister and then president.
  Her government negotiated a cease-fire with the Tamil Tigers, but it collapsed after three months as violence resumed. In late
  1995 the government, in a large-scale offensive, captured the Tamil stronghold of Jaffna ; heavy casualties were reported
  there, while terrorist bombs caused civilian deaths in the capital city of Colombo. The war continued throughout the 1990s, as
  government troops attacked rebel bases and terrorists carried out political assassinations (including those of several
  moderate Tamil politicians) and suicide bombings. By end of the century, more than 60,000 people had been killed in the
  ethnic conflict.President Kumaratunga was injured when a suicide bomber detonated explosives at an election rally in Dec.,
  1999; a few days later, she narrowly won reelection. Subsequent attempts by Kumaratunga to negotiate a new constitution
  that would grant Tamils some autonomy proved unsuccessful, and fighting continued. In Oct., 2000, the PA remained the
  largest party after parliamentary elections, but it was six seats shy of an absolute majority, leading it form a coalition with a
  Muslim party. When that party withdrew, Kumaratunga suspended parliament (July-Sept., 2001) until she could form a
  coalition with the leftist People's Liberation Front. Defections by members of her own party, however, ultimately forced her to
  dissolve parliament and call for new elections in December. Following an opposition victory at the polls, the UNP's Ranil
  Wickremesinghe became prime minister, creating a politically divided government. He pledged to work with the president, and
  agreed to a truce and mediated negotiations with the Tamil guerrillas.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam grew up after the failure of a nonviolent, Gandhian reformist movement, largely in protest of the government's efforts to ban the use of the Tamil language in government positions.  The English gave some priority to Tamil intellectuals.  The Tamil population also includes many low paid laborers in plantations.

Their leader is Velupillai Prabhakaran.  Here is a summary of his life (from my paper on our WEBCT site):
Baumann's love of violence pales in comparison to that of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the founder of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.  Prabhakaran's mother was (Swamy, 1994, p. 49) "deeply religious and very fond of him," but "his thin-lipped father was a strict and upright man who demanded absolute discipline."  His father is also described as "doting" and as a man who took very close interest in his children's education.  But the young Velupillai found his father's attentions stifling.  He was bored with school, and was inspired by exciting tales of Indian struggles against the British.
 He also had a taste for killing animals.  Swamy (1994, p. 51) reports that "his love for the catapult, while the other boys were more interested in sports, was legendary and took him to the world of marksmanship.  His earliest victims were chameleons, squirrels and birds which he felled or killed with pebbles."  His early associates remember him as "a shy and quiet young man with big piercing eyes who always appeared to be itching for action."
 He quickly became famous by murdering Alfred Duriappah, the Tamil mayor of Jaffna and the leader of a moderate Tamil political party.  After this killing, he lived underground with a group of young men who were inspired by his daring.  One of these young men recalled that (Swamy, 1994, p. 59) "Prabhakaran would take slow steps with a revolver tucked into his shirt, take a sudden u-turn, whip out the revolver in a flash and fire at the imaginary enemy.  He never got tired of it.  He thought it was fascinating."  He was particularly proud of a pistol he took from a police official he murdered.
 Prabhakaran had a (Swamy, 1994, p. 69) "near total disinterest in Marxist politics and ideology."  When an interviewer suggested that it was important to politicize people before beginning armed struggle, he responded "What people, people, you talk about?  We have to do some actions first.  People will follow us.  You arm chair intellectuals are afraid of blood.  No struggle will take place without killings."  He conceded, however, that every movement needs ideological manifestos, so he recruited a journalist, Anton Balasingham, to write them (Balasingham, 1983).

The Liberation Tigers are still active, under Prabhakaran's leadership.

The Kurdish Workers' Party is a long standing movement, reflecting the desire of the Kurdish people to have their own nation, or at least recognition within Turkey (and Iraq and Syria).  In Turkey, their existence as a people was denied by the government, they were called "Mountain Turks" and not allowed to have schools or publications in their own language.  This is similar to this history of the Basques under Franco in Spain.  More enlightened governments recognize the rights of linguistic minorities to their own institutions, as the spanish government does now.  Abdullah Ocalan was recently captured by the Turkish security forces while under the protection of  Greek security forces in Kenya in 1999.  He was executed, although he volunteered to call off the armed struggle if he was freed.   The Kurds have many more legitimate complaints than the Basques, who are treated well in modern spain.

The Irish Republican Army is another example of a nationalist movement, the basic dispute being whether the Catholics should be a minority in Ulster or the Protestants a minority in Ireland.  The British have alternated between being highly repressive and making more concessions.  Certainly the Catholics have equal rights under British law, but in practice they are often not treated equally by the Royal Ulster Contabulary or other government institutions.  An article by Pockgrass, cited in the text p 198, argues that "Irish violence is a kind of antional expression..glorified in poetry,  literature and song..."
 

April 3 - Middle Eastern Terrorism- "Rainbow over Jerusalem " by Robert Heppard of our class:

Chapter 7 covers the origins of Middle Eastern Terrorism.  The Moslem religion, Islam, is based on the principle of submission to the will of God, and most Moslems emphasize love and compassion.  However, Mohammed also declared holy war, jihad, on all nonbelievers.  Sometimes the word jihad is translated simply as struggle, implying nothing mroe than a recruitment drive.  Others describe it as a war.  Extremists like Osama bin Laden argue that Moslems should kill all non-Moslems because of the awful things they have done to Moslems.

The Moslem world has been in a general state of decline for centuries, relative to the west, as discussed in the book What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis.  Some Moslems believe that this is because of a failure to modernize, to accept science, to be open to the modern world.  Others argue that it is due to a failure to stick to the true word of God.  This is a major split, between modernists and fundamentalists, in the Arab world, with "moderates" trying to steer a course between them.  A major issue is whether to apply Islamic religious law as national law.  Turkey, under Ataturk, became a modern secular state, Saudi Arabia is much more traditional.   The Shah of Iran was a modernizer, although also an authoritarian, whereas Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution against him, is a fundamentalist.  The current leader is trying to modernize but without alienating the Ayatollahs.

There is a similar split within Israel, between the Orthodox religious Jews and the Zionists who tend to be secular.  There is also a left/right political division.  The Israel/Palestine conflict is only one of the issues in the Middle East that generates terrorism.

Israel:  In 1947, the UN General Assembly voted the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.  In 1948, the armies of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq invaded Israel, and many or most Palestinian Arabs fled from Jewish territory.  Some of them were drive out by Jewish terrorists, many left at the suggestion of the invading Arab armies.  The Israeli army was small and inexperienced, but it succeeded in holding off the Arabs.  Israel has won a series of wars since then.  In 1956 it invaded Egypt, after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and conquered the Gaza Strip and the Sinai, but it removed its troops from the Sinai and UN border guards were sent.  In 1967, Nasser closed the port of Elat, and had the Un troops pulled out and in 6 days Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the Sinai peninsula of Egypt, the Golan Heights of Syria, and the West
 Bank and Arab sector of E Jerusalem (both under Jordanian rule), thereby giving the conflict the name of the Six-Day War.  In 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked on Yom Kippur, and were initially successful, but the Israelis mobilized and drove them out, crossing the Suez canal and encircling the Egyptian Third Army, clearing a path to Cairo.  The Soviets threatened to intervene and Israel pulled back.  I think the account on page 103 of our book gives too much credit to the Egyptian army, in fact it was defeated.  After that Sadat made peace with Israel and Israel gave back the Sinai.

Since this time, Israel has occupied all of Palestine, and the Palestinians have turned to demonstrations, stonings and terrorism - the Intifada - making the struggle one of Israel vs. the Palestinians rather than Israel vs the Arab Nations.  The US had consistently tried to mediate.  There are moderates or doves on both sides who try to find a peaceful solution and extremists on both sides who want to drive the other side out by force.  The Israeli extremists keep building settlements throughout the West Bank and Gaza in an effort to "establish facts on the ground."   Maps of settlements in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights  in 1993 show why Palestinians believe the Israelis are trying to take over the whole country.  New settlements continue to be built. See UN Site on the Question of Palestine.  Many Israelis argue that Israel should have all the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean, Palestinian extremists seek it all for themselves.  Moderates seek a compromise, a division.  The Israeli government under Barak last year offered unmprecedented concessoins, but the Palestinians felt they were not enough and mobilized for more.  The Israelis had occupied the south of Lebanon, but they pulled out, giving the Arabs their first "victory" over Israel.  Hizbollah claims responsibility for this.  The PLO under Yasir Arafat claims not to condone terrorist acts, at least against civilians within Israel, but the Israelis accuse it of tolerating them in fact.

In the last year or so suicide bombings have become the most effective tactic used by the Palestinians to terrorize the Israeli population.  This has destroyed tourism to Israel and cut back on immigration.  The Israelis have no way to stop all these people and usually respond with retaliatory strikes against Palestinian institutions, often against the Palestinian security forces.  These stir up more resentment and hostility and we have an escalation of "tit for tat" violence.  Each side can give an extensive litany of the abuses of the other, justifying its behavior by the abuses it has suffered.

Psychology, suicide bombing involves a love/hate relationship, similar to murder/suicides in marital or workplace conflicts.  It is rooted in feelings of powerlessness, when people feel they have no way to get what they desperately want.  The Arabs both hate and admire the Israelis, want to be more like them.  This is sometimes revealed in remarks that slip out.  For example, Gen. Rashid Qureshi, the public relations chief for President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan told Newsweek (April 1, 2002, p. 26) that the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were so well coordinated, so brilliantly executed, that it was inconceivable an Arab organization could have carried them out.  "Who else [but Israel] coudl have done it?" he asked.  He since moderated his views, but in September he repeated a rumor that has been heard repeatedly throughout the Pakistan, and reported in newspapers there, that the Jewish employees in the World Trade Center had all mysteriously called in sick on the 11th.  One Palestinian legislator said "If you don't choose your type of death yourself, Sharon will do it for you.  All of Tulkarm is proud [of Abdel-Basset Odeh, a local suicide bomber].  None of us wants to kill civilians, but we are obliged to defend ourselves.  We have nothing else with which to fight this huge machine of israel's.  They have everything;  they have all the power.  We have nothing but our bodies."  His older brother said "Everyone's proud of him.  this is a war.  Yes, he's the one who changed everything."

American Muslims Intent on Learning and Activism say:
                    Many Muslims both here and abroad have chosen to deal with feelings of powerlessness and
              inferiority by indulging in violent rhetoric or actual violence against noncombatants, stretching
              Islamic justifications to cover up any moral misgivings. This can only be possible when emotions
              rule over common sense, when the world is cleanly and artificially divided into good and evil, and
              when non-Muslims are so dehumanized as to make even the most innocent among them guilty of
              the death penalty.
                   Unfortunately, many Muslims in America take the simplistic "West is always bad, Muslims are
              always good" line to heart and begin acting like the stereotypes that we hate so much. Many
              Muslims are strangely schizophrenic; on one hand they condemn the portrayal of Islam in the
              media as a violent religion, but at the same time they engage in inflammatory violent rhetoric
              against real or perceived enemies. We rightfully decry the terrorism of sanctions against Iraq or the
              Israeli bombing of Lebanon, but we are studiously silent about - or worse, supportive of - Muslim
              terrorist bombings of Western targets

In an impromptu statement in 1991 to students at Cairo University, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is reported (by Ephraim Dowek, an Egyptian Jew serving as Israel's ambassador to Egypt;  Commentary, April 2002, p. 26):

Against us stood the most intelligent people on earth--a people that controls the international press, the world economy, and world finances.  We succeeded in compelling the Jews to do what we wanted;  we received all our land back, up to the last grain of sand!  We have outwitted them, and what have we given them in return?  A piece of paper!...We were shrewder than the shrewdest people on earth!  We managed to hamper their steps in every direction.  We have established sophisticated machinery to control and limit to the minimum contacts with the Jews.  We have proven that making peace with Israel does not entail Jewish domination and that there is no obligation to develop relations with Israel beyond those we desire.
Of course, Mubarak is a politician, and his remarks were intended to persuade the students, so they may not reflect his own most careful thinking.  If this is so, they are all the more important, as reflecting his understanding of Egyptian mass psychology.

Israel has a percapita GDP of $18,900 - the Palestinians have a per capita GDP of $1680.  The Israelis have an infant mortality rate of .08%;  for the Palestinians it is 2.6%.  Of all Arab populations, the best off in terms of objective social and economic indicators are the Arab citizens of Israel (with the possible exception of citizens of some small oil rich enclaves on the Persian gulf, if one looks only at statistics for citizens).

Solutions.  To many the final solution is obvious:  a partition along approximately the 1967 border lines, with some adjustments and generous financial compensation for Palestinians not able to return to their ancestral lands in Israel proper.  Barak offered much of this in 1999, but it was either not enough (he offered 90% of the land in the occupied territories, but kept 70% of the settlements) or the Arabs were not ready to accept it.  Right now, Israel is attempting to root terrorism out with military action against the whole population of the occupied territories.  This seems unlikely to succeed, unless it goes so far as ethnic cleansing, which is probably impossible in the international conflict.  As Prof Ariel Merari of Tel Aviv University says, "What Israel is doing now is not helpful,  it is not enough to deter the Palestinians but it is more than enough to provoke them.   And that is quite a serious mistake."

Osama bin Laden is a Saudi, and was never focused on the Israel/Palestine dispute.  His major goal was to rid Saudi Arabia of all non-Moslems.  Biographical informan on bin Laden:
In his exultation about the World Trade Center bombing (bin Laden, 2001) identified himself and his agents with "God Almighty," and proclaimed that "what the United States tastes today  is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of  years.  Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years.  Its sons are being killed, its blood is  being shed, its holy places are being attacked, and it is not being ruled  according to what God has decreed.  Despite this, nobody cares."
 Bin Laden's rhetoric follows the terrorist ideological script, as described above by Post (2001) perfectly.  It is polarizing and absolutist, a rhetoric of us versus them, with no shades of grey.  Most revealing, however, is his plaint that "nobody cares."  The terrorist attacks forced the whole world to pay attention to his complaints.  Bin Laden and his organization are quite sophisticated in their use of mass media, so it is impossible to know how sincere he is in his rhetoric.   But many of his followers are sincere enough to sacrifice their lives to make sure their agonies are heard.
 Biographical information (Robinson, 2002; Frontline, 2001) about bin Laden is limited and open to different interpretations.  His father was dedicated to his family, but as one of 54 children, Osama's time with his father was unavoidably limited.  His father, a wealthy construction entrepreneur, had three "permanent" wives and filled the fourth slot permitted under Moslem law with rotating incumbents.  Discarded wives were kept in the family compound and continued to be supported financially.  Osama's mother was one of these, an attractive young Syrian woman who quickly lost favor with Osama's father.  Osama was not close to his mother, but was raised mostly by servants.
 This kind of family life is not abnormal in Saudi Arabia, however, and most of Osama's brothers have had conventional lives.  He seems always to have been an outsider within the family.  He swung from one lifestyle to another, at times being a bookworm, then experimenting with hedonistic pleasures abroad, then getting heavily involved in religion and radical politics.   Robinson (2002, p. 78) reports that "he was shy – a characteristic some interpreted as weakness.  He isolated himself and was reluctant to participate in family life. Because of this he was both unpopular and shunned as a playmate by his brothers. Confused and hurt, he sought attention through silly childish antics and mischief. But, when his  father was nearby, Osama was clever enough to transform himself into a dutiful, well- behaved son."  His father, however, died when he was ten years old, leaving him adrift in the world.
 At first, Osama was focused primarily on Saudi politics.  He strongly opposed the Saudi government's alliance with the United States against Saddam Hussein, believing that it should rely instead of radical Muslim Mujahideen.  The Saudi government correctly saw this as a losing strategy, and sent Osama into exile.  He sought to become a leader of Muslim civilization against the west, and found that focusing on Palestine, rather than on internal Saudi politics, was much more effective in motivating followers.
 From his point of view, Osama's attack on the World Trade Center cannot be viewed as an irrational act.  It brought him the fame and recognition he craved, and there was certainly a chance that it might have succeeded in uniting much of the Moslem world under his leadership.  Indeed, he and his advisors might well have been guided by the work of Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington who posited the clash of civilizations as the emerging trend in world history.  Osama clearly sought to be the leader of the Muslim civilization against the Christian civilization of the west.  If the western leaders had not read the same books and carefully avoided casting the conflict as one between Muslims and the west, he might have succeeded.  Many of the young men who have sacrificed their lives to his holy war are unquestionably driven by personal frustrations, a lust for adventure and sincere religious beliefs.  Osama shares some of these motivations, but he is most important for his skill in organizing and manipulating the emotions of others.

Online audio from Newsweek, Roots of Rage.

CNN Video of Bin Laden (requires subscription):

Bin Laden is against the West, yet he is deeply involved with Western technology, particularly the media.  As an article by Mark Danner said:

The 19 men who changed the world on Sept. 11 used as their primary weapon not box cutters or jet airliners but
something more American and much more powerful: the television set. The box cutters and the planes were tools in
constructing the great master image, the Spectacular; the television set was their delivery vehicle. In an instant, the
Spectacular altered the terms of debate, creating a sense of pervasive and unprecedented vulnerability among
Americans, a sense revivified by each new report of anthrax, each fresh incident of a deranged assailant on a plane or
a Greyhound bus. And the Spectacular thereby transformed American foreign policy, heretofore a matter of
disregard among most Americans, into a vital question of their own security, a matter of their own life and death.