Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Where do terrorist murderers come from?

According to the Haredi authorities quoted today in the J-Post the recipe for creating a terrorist murderer is something like this.

(1) Take young people who have been brought up with traditional religious values, values that unfortunately often include the idea that "we" are better, more human, more real, more vibrant, and more beloved by God than other people.

(2) Disconnect them from the religious mainstream, so they end up bored and on the margins of society.

(3) Ensure that they don't have educations or jobs skills so that their sense of hopelessness is profound. You want them to feel trapped, and that their lives have reached an impossible dead end.

(4) Toss in some mental illness, and innate aggressive tendencies. If the IQ is lower than normal that helps, too.

(5) The terrorist act of violence must then be triggered by some kind of trauma, like an act of serious injustice, the untimely death of a loved one, or a mood of national mourning or despair.

This, roughly, is how the sages quoted in the paper say our six OTD Haredi terrorists were created, and you know what - I think the reasoning is sound. And I think its likely that Palestinian terrorists are created according to a similar formula.

L:ET ME STATE THE OBVIOUS: Yes, Israeli society is denouncing the murder in ways that Palestinian society does not denounce murder. Yes, mainstream Palestenin authorities call for murders in a way that has no cognate on the Israeli side. But imagine there was no IDF, and imagine that three Israeli kids were kidnapped and murdered every few weeks....

No comments: