The New York Review of Books recently published an excellent overview of Roy's thesis as well as those of three other thinkers. An interesting juxtaposition with Robert Pape's "Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism" (pdf).

Roy and Pape have both published articles in the Times. Certainly thought provoking. Tom Friedman has also explored this subject. It probably would be useful to distinguish terrorists like the IRA, Bader-Meinhof and Timothy McVie and the Islamists who as a tactic choose to commit suicide as well as their targets.

Are competing theories for the "roots" of suicidal terrorism necessarily, mutually exclusive? Must we choose one or the other to develop coherent, effective, sustainable counter strategies?



Pape, for example, as someone mentioned above, argues as he does in Al Qaeda's Smart Bombs, the motives of Al Qaeda today, and suicidal terrorism in general, are "less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries."



Olivier Roy, countering in The Ideology of Terror, insists "we should look deeper into the radicalization of young, Westernized Muslims."



Mutually exclusive? Incompatible? Not exactly, much as Roy tries. Roy, as recently as 2002, admitted in this segment on Islamicists:

I think most of the Islamicists were and are the heirs of the modern movements of liberation. They are anti-imperialists ... Still, I think that most of the concepts and slogans and mottoes brought up by Islamism are not a return to traditional Islamism, but a response to Western colonization and encroachment. It's a reactive identity.

Since 2002, the group has killed citizens from 18 of the 20 countries that Osama bin Laden has cited as supporting the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. There is good evidence that this shift in Al Qaeda's scheme was the product of deliberate choice... No matter who took the bombs onto those buses and subways in London, the attacks are clearly of a piece with Al Qaeda's post-9/11 strategy.

Let us presume that we don't care what happens in the Arab world. If we give Al Qaeda what it was withdrawal. Would they continue with the suicide bombings against Saudi Arabia to topple that regieme and possibly against Iran a Shite Islamic nation and Spain formally an Islamic caliphate?

I would also recommend George Perkovich's article "Giving Justice Its Due" in the July-August issue of Foreign Affairs (preview here). In a wide-ranging essay, he says advocates of democratization need to support a broader set of changes in how we approach the world and in our goals for it.

The Roy thesis, however, is a bit too one-sided. Saudi and Israeli studies indicate that our policies in Iraq have played a role in creating new terrorists. Perhaps we need to consider whether terrorists hate us for our values and our policies; while many are plotting to attack us no matter what we do, we should not risk aiding their recruitment efforts and radicalizing more Muslims unless the policy in question has truly compelling arguments in its favor.

I think we have to be very careful, and not assume that the immigrant experience in Europe is roughly similar to that which exists for immigrants in the US.  With few exceptions, European cultures do not absorb so easily -- the second and third generation is still the outsider in many profound ways.  We've had our Henry Kissingers and Madalyn Albrights -- and previous generations have had their quite public models of the immigrant who was plucky and lucky, and got to the top.  It is a powerful message even if one does not become Secretary of State or Governor of California. 

In most of Europe such mobility would be unimaginable for young people in immigrant communities.  This is a profound source of alienation for 2nd and 3rd generation immigrant youth who have little solid cultural connection with "old country" -- and little hope of mobility in the new society. 

Actually, let's presume we do "care what happens in the Arab world" given withdrawal may be an inevitability less because al Qaeda "wants" it but because Iraqis persistently want it while Iraq's government would eventually demand it.



Let's also presume Israel "cares what happens in the Arab world" since the Iraq war renewed alliances between state and stateless actors already hostile to Israel if not committed to its destruction.



Let's likewise presume other allies "care what happens in the Arab world" as their civilian constituencies pay the ulimate price for commitment without consent to unnecessary war.



Let's further presume economic concern about "what happens in the Arab world" since
global dependence on Arab oil was unhelped by the destabilising effects of an unnecessary war.



Let's hopefully presume moral concern by a civilised world about "what happens in the Arab world" since war itself must be a last resort waged only in self-defense against crimes in progress, where perpetual unneccessary war and its attendant costs in massive collateral loss of life no less compounded by incremental loss of humanity for every barbarous act committed threaten the very solvency of civilised society.



But let's not presume domino caliphacy nor waves of Talibanism simply because we drawdown or withdraw from Iraq else trouble similar presumptions of communist domination following withdrawal from Vietnam.



Any counter strategy against suicidal terrorism is necessarily a strategy of containment. In today's media climate where catastrophe assures attention, one can no more "eliminate" suicidal terrorism than one could eliminate murder. However, effective strategies include, as always, the twin goals of threat and risk reduction. We'll leave it sentient, rational, responsible leaders to prove they know best how to advance such ends.

Richard Pape wrote the text we'll be using this semester as we explore the various and poisonous misrepresentations that deflect and distract and deceive us.


In a recent interview (audio here) he described US policy as a "supertanker" headed in exactly the wrong direction (the delicious irony, you'll discover as you listen to the interview, is that the Pentagon helped fund his research!). 


We aren't going to turn it around, much less stop it dead in the water (those things run for miles!) with idle speculation such as this.


Put Occam's Razor to that hogwash.

Many of the young people drawn to ideas of revolution in the 1960s were drawn because of outrage at real injustice.  Purple State

Perhaps, as well, their "outrage" was born of a realization that they had been lied to by those they trusted (their "parents"), of their discovery (segregation, Vietnam, poverty) that American moral exceptionalism was a myth.  Sixties radicals attacked the progenitors of that myth (the "parents" who had "sold out") and sought to make the myth a reality.

Consider this generation of under-30's educated Muslims who have been told by their "parents" that Allah is Great and All Powerful and are confronted with the evidence of their eyes.

To lash out at those who lied to them and to seek to recover the Allah of their six year old emotional imaginations is behavior to be anticipated.

Roy's half-right. He notes the obvious fact that the jihadists have never cared a fig for Palestine, that their "grievances" are mainly to do with conflicts outside the arab world (Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bosnia, East Timor, etc) and are committed by those whose fundamentalism was shaped outside the arab world, most often in not Iraq or Palestine but in Europe.

OTOH, Roy can't help uttering the kind of mindless formulation about "globalization," ie, it's being both mirror and cause of Islamist frenzy, that has made French intellectuals such a joke over the last half century. In Roy's usage the term is meaningless. It obscures the crucial fact that the US has absorbed millions of muslims with nowhere near the level of hatred, radicalism or fundamentalism as has occurred in Europe.

What accounts for US success, and EU failure, in assimilating muslim immigrants? Ethnicity doesn't explain it. North African and Turkish muslims (who make up the majority of muslim immigrants to France and Spain, and Germany and Sweden, respectively) are not noticeably more radical or prone to fundamentalism than the Iraqi, Saudi, Iranian or Palestinian muslims who constitute most of those in the US.

Almost certainly the crux of the difference is economics. The EU today no longer attracts hardworking maghrebins and Turks looking for economic opportunity, as it did when it sought to fill its expanding industrial job base thirty and forty years ago. By and large, today's young muslim in the cites (projects) of suburban Paris and Amsterdam and Malmo and Berlin and Hamburg is a slacker more likely to be on the dole than employed. Theo Van Gogh's muslim killer in Amsterdam had been on welfare for three years. (His mom told the court that this time had nonetheless been productive: it allowed her son to carefully plan the killing.)

In the US, however, such slackers not only don't thrive; they starve. Try to get by in Dearborn or Jersey City for three years without a job. What attracts our muslim immigrants is precisely the same thing that has attracted every other religious immigrant sect to this country from the quakers through the mormons and hasidim to the sikhs: the promise of

a) tremendous economic opportunity for those willing to work hard (and network just as hard); and

b) a state and a political culture that gets out of the way, allowing religious minorities wide latitude in educating their children as they see fit, provided that they integrate themselves into the larger economy through hard work and capitalist endeavors.

The prognosis for Europe is grim. Only when, or rather if, they can get it through their heads that reforming the culture of welfare and heavy state intervention (cf Sarkozy's corporatist, ie neo-fascist, "muslim Parliament" idiocy) will they finally attract peaceful and productive strivers instead of murderous resenters.

. There is an ideology that has a real basis in political injustice

Dude, please do a little research. Nothing in these sickos' religious catechism or strategy or upbringing has anything to do with any rational conception of justice. 

These are overwhelmingly the privileged of the arab world. Not a single poor person among them. Not one Palestinian. Not a single Afghan. No Iraqis.

Think: No poor arab or Afghan studies at European universities or goes to engineering or flight school. Osama's daddy is the billionaire builder for the Sauds. Atta was the son of one of the wealthiest lawyers in Cairo. Al- Zawahiri is an eye surgeon.

I could go on, but the notion that these pampered yuppies are responding in any way to any sort of "injustice" -- other than grievances rooted in their medievalist fantasy world in which "infidels", women, modern life generally are all blights upon the pristine house of the faithful -- is as foolish as supposing that W is an authentic down-home man of the people.

"Theo Van Gogh's muslim killer in Amsterdam had been on welfare for three years. (His mom told the court that this time had nonetheless been productive: it allowed her son to carefully plan the killing.)"

With all respect, but that is utter nonsense and factually untrue. First, it is extremely difficult that the killers' mom said the things you claim she said, as she died some years ago (some say his mothers' death made the killer change drastically).

Secondly, there have been and there still are thousands of Muslims in the Netherlands who receive or have received welfare for a considerable time. Just one, van Gogh's killer (Mohammed B.) has turned to kill somebody over an ideological issue. Blaming welfare for creating and enhancing a culture in which muslim ideologists can thrive freelly, is yet another unhealthy and unjust generalization.

Theo van Gogh's murderer was a typical Second Generation, Middle Class Muslim. He received (much) better than average education in much the same way as (many) of the 9/11 terrorists did. The fact that he was on welfare is unimportant when taking into regard the fact that large numbers of the Dutch population are or have been on some sort of welfare. Even a CEO who gets sacked is on what you label as 'welfare'. If all Muslims on welfare in the Netherlands (or any other part of the world, for that matter) would have behaved the same way as van Gogh's killer did, their Jihad would have been won by now. We know that it not the case. The background of the London bombers only re-affirms this.

Stop blaming Europe's social systems for todays' terrorism. These systems can be blamed for many different issues, but they have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism!

Thibaud,

I think you missed my point. I was comparing these suicide terrorists to those 1960s radicals who took up violence. Many from both groups were quite priviledged. My point was that they justified their actions by believing they were fighting against "injustice," but their real motivation was more personal--a (warped) attempt to bring meaning into their lives.

As far as the injustice is concerned--it often really exists. In the 1960s there was real injustice in the way African Americans were treated, for instance. And there has been injustice in the way the West has treated the Muslim world (British colonial activity, the support the West has given to brutal Mideast dictators in order to protect our own interests at the expense of the local populations' interests, and the way Israel was created without taking into account the rights of the Arab indigenous population). 

Note that the fact that the injustice is real doesn't necessarily mean the extremists are victims of that injustice or that they are really helping end the injustice by their violence, or that their proposed "solutions" (Islamic state, Socialist utopia, etc.) make any sense. My point is the "injustice" is used to elevate their anger into something righteous and noble. But their real motivation is their anger and frustration arising from a sense of the insignifigance of their own lives.   

.  .  .  parents who are actually more secular and less religious than their children.

Purple State, I think we're pretty close on this.  "Selling out" in 60's radspeak translates to an inauthentic life, that is, acting contrary to the values of the myth you preach.

The relevant comparisons are not to America's small Muslim communities or to its Hasidic community, but to its black and Hispanic communities

Talk about absurdity: I compare two examples of muslim immigration, introduce an analogy to other religious minorities' experience, and you argue that the real analogy is not to other muslim immigrants but to ... the descendants of black slaves. Brilliant.

Again, the difference between US immigrant muslims in Detroit, Texas, New Jersey etc and European immigrant muslims in Amsterdam, St Denis, Kreuzberg, Finsbury Park etc could not be more stark.

The latter languish in bitter resentment and demand welfare payments, separate parliaments and other state institutions and official recognition by the state.

The former do as most Americans do, and get on with the business of building businesses, raising families and generally contributing to a larger society which has the good sense to give them real economic opportunity and then get out of their way.It's going to be a long time before the Europeans figure this out. Allah, er heaven, help them in the meantime.

Re: Huh?? Kashmir, Kosovo, Chechnya, E Timor?



"Huh?" indeed.



n.b.
In both the piece linked by Slaughter, Roy's "The Ideology of Terror", and the relevant article cited in our comment, Pape's "Al Qaeda Smart Bombs," the focus of each author is, hint, Al Qaeda, not that Sudan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, the Phillipines, Bali, Malaysia, Turkey, Egypt, x, y, z, penguins or pachyderms could ever escape your keen inattention.