Modern-day terrorism is a recruitment scheme. Any attack has the effect of increasing hostilities between groups. Imagine being a teenager with an identity crisis who happens to be part of a minority that the less intelligent half of your home country hates and despises. What group are you most likely to join? And what caused said hate and despise to grow? Right, terrorism.
More generally put: Virtually any organization has as its own survival as a high priority goal. Organizations on the extreme ends of ideology, any ideology anywhere, will benefit from increased hostilities in a population. It pushes more people to the fringes.
Terrorism is a time-honoured way to increase hostilities. The moderates lose, the the extreme ends on all sides win (whether you're Trump or ISIS).
Look at recent history and see how well it worked. American bombs on funerals, ISIS bombs on French crowds, it's all terrorism and it works wonders to keep the perpetrators powerful.
When Anders Breivik killed an island full of people, then-prime minister of Norway responded to like this:
"The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation"
This is the correct response to terrorism and we need a lot more of it. Once you see terrorism for what it is, a recruiting scheme, then it is obvious that "powerful language", "bias to action" and all that shit that politicians usually do, is very counter-effective.
Breivik was an isolated incident, deadly but isolated non less. There is no correct response to terrorism. All terrorists are different. The IRA isn't the FARC or this or that palestinian groups or Al Qaida or Daesh. Sometimes there is a political solution, sometimes there isn't. There is no political solution with Daesh, these people want to exterminate their enemies, the only solution is to exterminate them before they do.
Your "correct response" to terrorism has been tried now for 8 years and it doesn't work, instead everything got worse.
The only way is to try to insulate oneself from these radicals by not letting them immigrate, or if it doesn't help pick an area controlled by the most vicious of these radicals (ISIS territory comes to mind) and give them a taste of what armageddon could look like so they'll learn an important lesson.
This has worked very well in the Chechen wars. The Russians tried negotiating, then they tried having a series of smaller military operations in order to take out their leaders. Then the Russians even conceded and gave them defacto independence, but It all didn't work. They instead went on to attack neighbouring Russian states and then even killed hundreds of Russian children in the Beslan terror attacks.
What did help though was Putins response completely levelling the Chechen capital Grozny. And I mean that literally because that's what they did. After that 99.99% of them became cooperative, in fact today most Chechens in Chechnya consider themselves fierce Russian patriots. I wonder why!
Are you one of those paid Russian propaganda commenters people gossip about? Pretty cool to see this sort of stuff up close. I like how you slowly build up from some pretty widespread opinions to Chechens being "fierce Russian patriots".
Yes, Putin awards me with one loaf of bred per day for my patriotic deeds. Hillary is btw right, Putin and his evil empire even controls the FBI, the CIA, the US Air Force and Seaworld. (he just likes Orcas)
Edit: It is hilarious to me how the leftist are trembling about Putin, Trump, Le Pen and so on. What you guys don't get is that you are witnessing a massive, popular shift to the right throughout the West with a right wing ideology that is indeed partly influenced by Putin. Why? Because it is successful. This doesn't mean that they are controlled by Putin, they just share some ideas. You will by the way also experience this political shift in the Netherlands pretty soon.
He is somewhat correct Russia basically installed a puppet government and through pretty brutal use of both the carrot and the stick managed to convince the populous that they were in the wrong.
Yes they were in the wrong, they did ethnically cleanse 300k Russians from Chechnya before the Russian military even took steps against them.
And they proclaimed the Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus that was very similar to ISIS.
Also they didn't stop aggression after Russia lost the first Chechen war and they got their independence. They instead started attacking other non-Chechen territories in Russia that were peaceful until then.
The Russians were right to bomb the hell out of them. And we should do the same if these people don't stop attacking us.
I m not sure why you bring Trump into this, he has nothing to do with Terrorist organization, unless you are trying to say that American Govt is a form of terrorist groups, but in that case, Bush and Obama has been the head of that group for the past 16 years.
I'm not sure I explained my comment right in that case. I bring Trump into this because he represents an anti-Muslim voice in the global media and this i significant for the point I'm trying to me. He simply a nice and current example of my little theory here.
Notably I do not mean to get involved in the American election debate.
The more power and attention Trump gets, the more Muslim youths in the West feel repressed and despised. This helps ISIS and similar organizations. It's not a stretch to imagine that more radical Muslim terrorism in the West, should it occur soon, will benefit Trump, and thus the cycle is complete. This is the kind of dynamic that moves people to the fringes, away from tolerance and moderate political opinions.
The awful acts that you mention that Obama and Bush were responsible for were not accompanied with a similar anti-Muslim rhetoric and that breaks this cycle, somewhat at least. This is why I did not bring them up. Note that strictly seen, only one side needs to actually do violence for a cycle like this to spin out of control. It's most important both sides need to commit to a powerful anti-the-other-people rhetoric.
So if you run an extremist organization looking for more power, all you have to do is pick and then provoke an enemy whose leadership you know will make your target audience / electorate feel very uneasy. This is what ISIS is doing and Trump, more than other American politicians, is helping them do it. It's been done many times before, think Rwanda or how Hamas got into power in Gaza.
I don't completely care about the exact definition of terrorism in this case - it's more the observation that acts of indiscriminate violence against people from a certain group puts people from that group up against the group the violence doers are from. Terrorism is one such kind of indiscriminate violence and usually the easiest to apply unless you're a nation state.
no this wasnt a election debate, thats why i failed to see why brought Trump into the conversation. the Hatred between Christian and Muslims can go back all the way to Crusaders. Regardless of how much Anti-Muslims comment Trump made, Radicals wont hate him more. The more neutral and logical comment Obama made, wont make Radicals like him better.
911 happened during Bush administration, but i m sure Bin Laden spent years during Clinton administration to plan. Point here being, who leads the supposed free world doesnt matter, Radicals will hate you. Its in their blood, flow though their veins though generations of unfair treatments from western world.
Look back how western world treated them, ever wonder why there are so many countries in mid east, and wonder why there are so many conflicts happens there every year?
I guess my points are that at this point, your simple existence is enough to provoke the radicals, regardless who is head of govt. Bangazhi didnt happen cause whole world like Obama better and Bush less. Hands of Jesus Christ are just as bloody, he sent just as much people to meet their maker.
If we're talking about the success or failure of terrorism in the Middle East, it's maybe worth considering that while it's not worked out for the Palestinians, it worked out OK for Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irgun_attacks
Edit: Or if you prefer you can throw away any data that doesn't back up the hypothesis and you can believe whatever you want.
Nelson Mandela cofounded and chaired the ANC's paramilitary wing. He might have proved to be a superb statesman and the ANC might have had no practical alternative to violent action, but he definitely belongs more in that company than Gandhi's. If anything it's Adams, who has always denied direct involvement with the IRA even if those claims aren't widely believed, that might have cause for complaint at not being considered merely a politician.
Because Gandhi was a pacifist and Mandela advocated armed struggle, and led an organisation that bombed civilians. Mandela's reputation as a man of peace is based on the fact he pivoted from a violent strategy to a political one, not on his being a pacifist.
Edit: The fact that you and others are outraged by the idea Mandela was a terrorist sort of proves the point. The path to respect, statesmanship, Nobel Peace Prizes and sainthood often starts with violence.
> while it's not worked out for the Palestinians, it worked out OK for Israel
Why do you say it hasn't worked out for the Palestinians? If it wasn't for the PLO there would be no Palestinian state [1] and the PLO became prominent through terrorist acts [2].
There's a good number of organizations in history that have started with terrorist acts (i.e. atacks against civilians) and ended up in control of a relatively stable territorial state. They include the FLN in Algeria [3], Hezbollah in South Lebanon [4] and the armed wing of the ANC in South Africa [5]. Sure, most if not all have now renounced their terrorist beginnings - so maybe terrorism is not a strategy for the long run. But it's repeatedly provided the initial stepping stone to forming a government.
> Why do you say it hasn't worked out for the Palestinians?
I suppose because I am comparing post-Oslo Palestinian terrorism to early 20th Century Zionist terrorism. Fair point. I'm not sure I agree that Palestine kinda sorta having statehood counts as much a victory, compared to the concrete losses suffered by Palestinians. It's not like Palestinians actually have much control over the territory their state claims.
Palestinian terroristm increased drastically with every concession Israel made.
Suicide bombings after Oslo (they weren't really any before), and the 2nd intifada after Camp David when they were offered 98% of thier claimed territory with land swaps and East Jerusalem, and after Israel pulled out of Gaza it got 10,000's of rockets.
Terrorism can work when it's a means to an end, not the goal itself.
The PLO's goals were originally the dissolution of the state of Israel, right of return for Palestinian refugees and restoration of Arab control to Palestine (including Israel). They never got very close to those goals.
Well I should have stated a realistic goal, the the dissolution of the state of Israel is still the long term goal for many within the PLO, not to mention Hamas and their marry bunch.
You can't fail unless you have a goal, and this article doesn't describe the goals terrorism fails at, or whether those are actually the goals of terrorists.
Supplementary comment: Also ironic that this article is posted today, on the historic day when the balfour declaration was executed and probably put in motion one of the greatest catastrophes in modern time. No single colonial imposition can be seen to have such a direct link to so many modern terrorist activities.
He seems to have completely missed the reason for 9/11, which is not strange since it was not until the 2004 speech (http://worldpress.org/Americas/1964.cfm) that bin Laden explained the reason for the attacks, namely "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy".
In this light it must be regarded as a great success, not a failure, especially since the self bleeding politics continued without much opposition long after 2004.
No, he only started saying that after the US occupied Iraq. Before the invasion his justification against America had strong religious basis. It's especially clear from his earlier writings.
The thesis "Bin Laden destroyed the 9/11 towers to bankrupt America" makes very little sense when you dig into it. It would mean Bin Laden planned to:
- destroy the twin towers so
- the U.S. would justify an invasion of Iraq and
- actually invade Iraq
- and occupy Iraq for a prolonged period of time (and not quickly pull out)
- so America would devote resources here
- thus bankrupting itself
Steps 2 and 3 (and possible 4) are huge leaps of faith. It's absurd to believe he planned all that out. It clearly fails Occam's Razor. Plus, it doesn't fit with the historical context of what he said and wrote at the time.
I'm not sure why you're clinging to this? The motivations behind the September 11 attacks have been widely discussed, see here for a summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_a.... You'll see bankruptcy or causing economic damage is not mentioned anywhere. Bankruptcy came into the picture after 9/11, when then US was prepping invasion of Iraq.
If you really believe "Bin Laden destroyed the 9/11 towers to bankrupt America", do find some pre-9/11 evidence of this and update the Wiki page so others can know.
How do you know this isn't post-fact rationalization from him?
I'll agree that 9/11 was successful. Bin Laden clearly wanted to damage the US in some way, and got deeper damages than he could dream about. But I doubt he had any intention of "bleeding them at the point of bankruptcy" at the planning stage.
Of course, it's difficult to know for sure if that was the original plan or not. However the actions seem to be quite consistent with that strategy: Choosing Afghanistan (the grave of empires) as the base of operations, and the selection of targets in the attack looks like an attempt to enrage, not just to cause fear.
Whatever the actual plan was, I do think it involved provoking US to attack Afghanistan.
> the intentional use of, or threat to use violence against civilians or against civilian targets, in order to attain political aims
Yes. So tired of this word being used to describe attacks on soldiers. It might be bad (depending on what side you're on), but it's certainly not terrorism.
Modern warfare makes the distinction tricky. Suppose you have a person sitting in a computer center in California controlling drones dropping bombs in Afghanistan. Is he a civilian or soldier? If not, does he become one when he goes home from his shift for the day? What about all the computer programmers writing drone software making his job possible?
Writing drone software = workers in a munitions factory? Valid military targets, at least to me. Same with the drone operator, which afaik is usually in the military, with military training.
This assumes that these groups believe their actions will lead to a direct outcome. What if these groups are acting in order to force their adversary to change via dealing with less violent but equally reactionary forces.
For instance would the Irish people have their independence from the UK if there was no IRA? If there was no violence why would the UK give them something they;re not willing to take, especially when states typically only respond to violence.
> For instance would the Irish people have their independence from the UK if there was no IRA?
Depends which movement called the IRA we're talking about and (more generally) what's meant by "terrorism". There's a degree of a difference between the tactical approach of IRA that won the independence of the Irish Free State in the early twentieth century through classic guerrilla warfare tactics aimed at weakening British security forces and making Ireland ungovernable and and some of the more stereotypical terrorist activities carried out by the Provisional IRA in the late twentieth century involving the high profile bombing of city centres with the (wholly unsuccessful) aim of weakening the British public's resolve to continue to support the Union in Northern Ireland.
Didn't the provisional IRA force the government's hand in the Good Friday Agreement? There's a fairly good chance the Catholic portion of Northern Ireland, which generally favors independence, will overtake the Protestant population which generally favors union with Great Britain. The GFA allows a popular vote on the matter. So by securing a vote, NI will likely go back to Ireland in a generation or two.
There were also immediate wins, particularly dismantling the RUC which performed attacks against civilians and colluded with unionist terror groups.
(disclaimer: I believe attacking civilians is awful and god isn't real)
The basic principle of self-determination by popular vote was supported by the UK Government and opposed by the paramilitaries and hardline politicians (both the IRA and hardline loyalists) throughout the 1980s.
They could have had something similar to the Good Friday Agreement much earlier had they been willing to pursue that type of settlement by political means earlier.
Another possible goal of terrorists could be to bring about an atmosphere or force a narrative. For example, by attacking a country, it might make it easier to recruit when the inevitable cultural backlash results in increased hate-crimes and racism toward the minority.
I imagine that this wasn't one of the goals of the IRA, but it looks to be a major motivator for ISIS, which is trying to recruit from the vast majority of peaceful Muslims in the world with a narrative of West-vs-Islam. If even a very small number of Muslims are radicalised because their mosque was burned down or their mother assaulted, for example, that's still a win for the terrorists.
Due to the asymmetric nature of terrorism, which after all is the whole motivation behind using terrorism in the first place, I think it's useful to apply some of the same thinking we do when considering the payout for spam email - if one in 100,000 buys the product / falls for the scam, it's a success.
> This assumes that these groups believe their actions will lead to a direct outcome.
Daesh believes the ends of times are coming and the final battle against "evil" is near so they are just doing Allah's bidding, they believe nothing has changed since the 8th century and they are fighting "the armies of Rome". Do you really think it is rational thinking ? do you really think their can be some kind of political solution in that case ? Daesh is forcing no change upon the enemy, they want to exterminate them like Nazis wanted to exterminate the Jews.
Which IRA? Because there was the old IRA in the run-up to the formation of Ireland, then there was the anti-treaty IRA from '20s to early '70s that didn't recognise Ireland or Northern Ireland either. Or the Official IRA, mainly marxist, from the '70s? Or the Provisionals who were the IRA of the peace process.
I came to make a similar comment, but more focussed on the diversity of Northern Ireland's current political landscape, as a direct result of the Troubles.
> The international community may not pay much attention to a conflict unless there is media focus on the issue, and the news media are unlikely to pay attention unless there is violence and havoc. [...] The problem of the entertainment-centered media strategies is thus rooted not in ethical flaws of individual editors, but in the fundamental economic structure of the media industry. It is therefore necessary to establish alternative non-profit news organizations to focus on dangerous conflicts and to offset the imbalance caused by the unequal access of the two parts to international news media and to remedy the problem that biased reporting is more profitable than balanced reporting.
I think too much is pinned on the door of the media when reporting on stories when:
(a) they are very far away and of little interest to people
(b) have very difficult solutions and enough nuances to make peoples eyes glaze over
(c) there is alternative coverage of other news that is more interesting
I take something like climate change which has had plenty of media attention, but until the first city sinks underwater there isn't going to be enough impetus for people to take the truly difficult actions. That moves it into the national spotlight and makes it a priority, similar to how terrorism on US soil changes "standard problems in the Middle East" into an important US issue.
> Another reason why the use of terrorism turns out to be counterproductive is that it weakens the ideological standing of the weak part. The ideological condemnation of terrorism for harming innocents is hard to argue against. The use of terrorism thus ruins the only truly efficient weapon that the weak part has: ideological warfare.
The resistance/terrorist/freedom fighter organisation's reputation is pretty worthless to begin with. Even if they're saints, no one is going to know about them or care. On the other hand, the powerful country/organization/political has an incredibly important reputation. It is absolutely worth it for the terrorist organisation to let their own reputation sink into the mud, if in doing so they can draw a response from the target that will tarnish its own reputation. It's like the relationship between politican and heckler; the heckler can say all kinds of things and people barely care, but if the politican really lets loose and responds in kind that can damage their image.
> ETA in Spain only disbanded when the government stopped banning political parties linked to ETA.
The Basque country is not independent. This was the goal of ETA in the first place, and it was not accomplished. After the success of the parlamentary catalan independence movement, the violent ways of the ETA had just no justification anymore.
> IRA in Ireland managed to give the Irish people their independence.
The 1920s IRA was a complete different organisation than the 1970ies provisional IRA. You can hardly call them terrorist by todays standards.
> FARC in Colombia pushed the government to allow a vote on a truce, a truce so bad the people voted against it.
The FARC did not accomplish to install a communist regime in Columbia, so their goal was also not accomplished.
> IRA in Ireland managed to give the Irish people their independence
That is a vast, vast oversimplification of the journey to Ireland's independence, which is actually only a small part of the history of the various IRA's.
It is not daily fear of AQ that has Muslims wearing their religiously proscribed clothes.... it is honoring their religion. Specifically, the strain of hard-line Islam which Saudi Arabia has been pushing. That's the underlying theme which encouraged both the rise of AQ and more conservative Islamic attire.
> It is not daily fear of AQ that has Muslims wearing their religiously proscribed clothes.... it is honoring their religion.
You misunderstood my message which was quite clear. There is a strong us VS them mentality among Muslims in the west today which wasn't the case 20 years ago. It doesn't have anything to do with KSA pushing for Salafi, it has everything to do with 9/11.
"The most workable definition of terrorism
that has been published is 'the intentional use of, or threat to use violence against civilians or against civilian targets, in order to attain political aims'"
So, the US bombing of TV stations in Yugoslavia or Al Jazeera in Baghdad would definitely qualify.
As far as Yugoslavia is concerned, it was NATO, not the US directly. The ECHR judged that the bombing was justified, going so far as to imprison the head of the TV station for deliberately exposing civilian employees.
Well I disagree, it did work amazingly well for almost a thousand years when Muslim pirates and raiders constantly attacked ships and cities in the Mediterranean sea which effectively suppressed most sea based trade and economic development in Europe for a very long time.
There were even cases where English and Irish cities were plundered and all inhabitants forcefully taken as slaves.
People from this culture always used these kind of guerrilla tactics to slowly bring their enemies down.
As far as I see it still works today just as well as it did back in the old days.
There was not only Muslim pirates, there was a lot of people from different too. Should we continue to blame Vikings? fore these action? Or can we just live the present? I agree that figthing terrorism only increase more violance. We need to find a way to teach only present and not past, for stopping the wheel of deadlock.
What does this even mean? Should we just roll over and let them kill us whenever they feel like we hurt their feelings in some way?
Anytime someone disrespects their religious teachings in a public way many of them feel the urge to slaughter dozens of people just to show how upset they are about us.
And it just never stops, there's just too many radical people in these countries.
As I see it the only way to stop this is to show them militarily who's boss until they learn the lesson to back off and mind their own business.
The mere fact that they can't resist killing people when they hear some Westener say something bad about them shows that they really just want to submit us to follow their ways.
If that wasn't the case they'd just stop listening like any normal person would do.
More generally put: Virtually any organization has as its own survival as a high priority goal. Organizations on the extreme ends of ideology, any ideology anywhere, will benefit from increased hostilities in a population. It pushes more people to the fringes.
Terrorism is a time-honoured way to increase hostilities. The moderates lose, the the extreme ends on all sides win (whether you're Trump or ISIS).
Look at recent history and see how well it worked. American bombs on funerals, ISIS bombs on French crowds, it's all terrorism and it works wonders to keep the perpetrators powerful.
When Anders Breivik killed an island full of people, then-prime minister of Norway responded to like this:
"The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation"
This is the correct response to terrorism and we need a lot more of it. Once you see terrorism for what it is, a recruiting scheme, then it is obvious that "powerful language", "bias to action" and all that shit that politicians usually do, is very counter-effective.