Rethinking Islamist Terrorism
Dan Yankelovich

Participant
Farhad: I agree that it will be difficult to accomplish our desires for a peaceful world as long as there is utter poverty. But (perhaps my prejudice) tells me that poverty cannot be mitigated to any extent as long as the poor continue to increase their population several times the rate of the developed world. I would be interested in your comment on this.

Also, and this may be another misconception of mine, I understand that most of the suicide terrorists come from the upper strata of the Muslim world in terms of education and economics. If this is true, don't they have more to lose than the majority of Muslims?

Participant
Donald: The reason less educated people have more children is an economic necessity from their point of view. Most poor people look at their children as an insurance policy -- the only one they can afford. I know it does not make any sense, but we are talking about people who are basically illiterate, and need children to work for them on the farm or weave rugs (e.g. in the case of Iran), or work in their stores. It is the only labor force they can afford, since they don’t pay them anything!. The most expensive rugs in the world are weaved by 6 to 10 year old kids, mainly girls. Once they are 15 or older they are dismissed because their fingers are too large.

Suicide bombers who attack Israel are from refugee camps in Palestine. You have seen the pictures of such camps on television. They can hardly be described as "upper strata." Criticism, however, should be levied on-oil rich Arab states, Arafat and his gang, and other "leaders" in upper strata of Arab countries that have kept these camps alive in the past 35 years or so for purely political reasons. The poor kids who throw stones at Israeli soldiers and strap bombs to themselves and blow themselves up are pawns used by the Arab rulers. They just have not realized this. One day they will. We have to help them understand their situation. Osama bin Laden, who is from upper strata has never strapped a bomb to himself! It would be a one time proposition, but I am sure you have heard the jokes about that.

Participant
Fred, you point about the importance of recognizing that Islamists reject modernism completely is quite challenging. It is not, however, entirely unlike the anti-corporate, anti-technology, stance taken by many environmentalists who believe we should take our lessons from nature itself.

Sometimes I take that view of modern life myself!!

Participant
Fred: I recognize the incentive to have more children for poor people in third world nations. But for leaders of the developed world to ignore the inevitable jeopardy of stressed demands on water, living and farming space, and educational demands on those same poor people seems to me to be inexcusable.

I don't believe that the low priority of contraceptive aid is based on the difficulty of persuading them to accept contraception nor on finding other solutions for their dependence on big families. Do you?

Participant
Regarding Fred's view that we must address the behavior of Israel if we are to connect with the Islamists, it is interesting to learn that Bush, in response to the recent suicide bombing, has moved to freeze the assets of supporters of Hamas, and had no response either to the assassination of the Hamas leader yesterday, or of the assassination of three other Hamas leaders today. More anger surely coming our way.

Participant
Excerpts from a Jessica Stern interview with Ismail Abu Shanab, the Hamas leader who was killed in Israel this week, quoted him as saying that suicide bombers had usually seen what they viewed as "something terrible, some kind of atrocity," going on to say "Islam says, 'an eye for an eye.' The article also included a statement by Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert with Rand. He states, "I think we all agree, and it's not just a Western view, that suicide bombing is abnormal. The fact that abnormal behavior is applauded reflects abnormal conditions. If normal conditions are restored, then normal behavior should return--at least they'd be less tolerant of abnormal behavior." He doesn't go on to say what he would identify as the "abnormal" conditions which apply in this case. Although this would seem to be a crucial factor in addressing Islamic terrorism, some would say that we have placed relatively little emphasis on a careful and concerted analysis of etiology. What are your thoughts?

Participant
In most societies there is usually some kind of reasonable alignment between the major institutions such as government, religion, academia (or the intelligentsia) and the general population such that in treating with a country in the international arena one is treating with a relative whole. Of course there are many degrees of gradation in the real world, but it seems that by and large there is generally a significant cohesion. In the mid east countries (and others) this seems not to be the case. The leaders seem to have one agenda, the clergy another, the intelligentsia yet another and they all appear to be competing to recruit members to their own agenda.

With which group would it be most productive for the USA to establish a meaningful dialogue? Entering into dialogue with any one group causes an extreme reaction from the other groups. It seems unlikely that a meaningful dialogue is possible with all of the groups because they are each so opposed to the others (or if not opposed then certainly bent on controlling them).

Fred, you made a couple of statements that strike me as being a little difficult.

we have to be ready to respond to their criticism of how the state of Israel - as a religious state - is behaving, and how some churches are reacting to their recent moral crises. Why should the government of a secular state have to respond to criticism of the moral crisis engulfing a church? Churches, as most institutions, are comprised of people - some of whom are corrupt. That's been the case for millennia.

A dialog with Islam ought to include the formulation of a post-modern paradigm in which man would not be the final arbiter, and God would be brought back into the world-view and be given a proper role. There are, quite literally, millions of people in the USA who don't believe God exists, has a place in the world view or has a role. Such a demand almost guarantees failure. At a time in history when the West and mid East both hewed to such beliefs there was considerable friction over who had the 'right' God, so I see no reason to think that such a paradigm would, today, guarantee much of anything.

Participant
The religious fundamentalism in this country that is illustrated by the current flap over the movement of the Ten Commandments monument, as fanatical as it is, probably pales in comparison to the strength of commitment shared by Islamic fundamentalists.

Participant
It seems to me that any belief system which requires suicide from its members and which promotes the murder of non-believers is, over the long term, simply doomed to failure for 2 very basic reasons.

1. Every suicide bomber is reducing the reproduction of his genes thus, in Darwinian fashion, naturally deselecting the behavior.

2. The drive to survive and reproduce is such a strong drive in humans, that the more effective the suicide bombers are, the more their victims will become aroused to fight back by any means, much as Israel is doing. The need to survive and reproduce won't be held in check by any rules, philosophies, beliefs or other contrivances.

Participant
Kip, your Darwinian case assumes the disposition to be a suicide bomber is genetic, which is a stretch. And the birthrate for the culture producing such bombers is twice what it is among Jews in Israel, for example. We will run out of suicide bombers when the hopelessness and desperation is ended, and not before, I'm afraid.

Your second argument flows more from an animal model than a human one, where the reproduction drive is often curbed by social forces, taboos, etc. and by thoughtful planning, something animals don't do all that well. The birth rate in the US has fallen, and is in negative territory even in Catholic countries such as Italy.

Vengeance through violence has not proven to be an effective means of propagating the race, certainly not for Israel in the Palestinian situation. Jews have accomplished more through higher education, power politics, and patient diplomacy. Usually violent confrontations, such as war, involve the massive deaths of the healthiest and smartest young men--hardly a way to improve the gene pool.

Participant
Dan and other friends: Sorry to enter so interesting a conversation so late. But there's a temporary lull in tests and consultation about my "Triple-A" (medical shorthand for abdominal aortic aneurysm), so I can get back to my computer.

Slipping into this rich multilogue so late, I'd like to start with comments directly on Dan Yakelovich's opening proposition -- which, considering its author, I naturally find constructive and hardheaded. But I'm inclined to tweak it more than a little.

First, I think the political vocabulary needs some work. In the current general parlance, "Muslim" includes all who profess that faith, and by extension countries that have overwhelming majorities of Muslim adherents. "Islamist" has been mostly used to mean people or groups that organize for political and/or violent action in the name of Islam.

Dan starts out with a much wider concept of "Islamist," which seems to include "moderates" as well as fire-eaters, and thus slides toward the Huntington-style "clash of civilizations" in analyzing the larger picture.

In 1998 the World Academy of Art and Science worked closely with the European Commission, which was trying to think hard about how the European Union would fashion a European foreign policy in a world of diverse religions. (The burning question was of course the prospect of Turkey becoming a member of the EU; it has been a longtime member of NATO. But the framework for the "Brussels Seminar" was much wider than that.)

I worked for several months with Marc Luyckx, then a practicing futurist with the European Commission, on a joint concept paper. (We called it "Religion and Governance," but the EC was skittish, not wanting to advertise that it is discussing religion; the final draft was called "Civilisations and Governance.")

In our paper we guessed that the collisions of the 21st century would not be so much conflicts between organized religions as _within_ them, between "fundamentalists" and what we called "transmoderns."

Fundamentalists of many faiths (Eric Hoffer's "true believers"), we argued, feel threatened by modern society, tend to treat traditional scriptures as absolutes, dividing humankind into irreconcilable believers and infidels. Transmoderns are more inclined to see their ancient traditions or new spiritual insights as raw material for wider human reconciliation, as the basis for an intensified search for common purpose among peoples of differing races, creeds, and national origins.

There is plenty of room in this pluralistic scene for striving toward an ultimate, universal Truth. But the search requires tolerance of other peoples' path to the elusive goal, and of the differing liturgies with which they celebrate the goal and describe their search. And it doesn't require any seeker to concede that any of the others has already found the Holy Grail -- or that the universal/pluralistic search can now be called off.

As John Gardner wrote not long before his death: "The goal is to achieve wholeness incorporating diversity. That is the transcendental task for our generation."

At the 1998 Brussels Seminar, the President of the European Commission, Jacques Santer, seemed to sign onto this framework in his opening statement. And positive reactions came from invited experts on Islam, Buddhism, and Confucian thought, all of whom (along with Christian and Jewish thinkers) thought the most dangerous collisions would be within and not between religions.

Zia Sardar, the Muslim scholar and professor who edits Futures journal in London, emphasized the constructive trends in current Muslim thinking: "The West," he said, "has always seen Islam through the lens of modernity, and concluded that it is a negative, closed system. Nothing could be further from the truth. Islam is a dynamic, open system with a very large common ground with the West. . . . Islam is intrinsically pluralistic. It considers that in essence every culture has a piece of the truth."

The implication was clear: Islam is rejecting, not the West, but "modernity." So what Luyckx and I were calling the "transmodern" way of thinking might open a door to a new dialogue with Islam.

There is much more to be said, especially about the "separation of church and state" issue, and about the connections between terrorism and religion. This is already much more than a screenful, but perhaps enough to show why I'm leery of lumping terrorists, assorted governments, and Muslim rethinkers into a compost called "Islamist."

Participant
Good discussion.

If we take the view that we have a struggle of modernism vs traditionalism, then the technocrats want us to agree that the "correct" side and adequate definition of modernism is free markets and globalization. Yet we know that the major problem is economic exploitation that then gets mixed up with religious history.

Those who take the free market view assume that working on dialog among the faiths will have as the outcome a support for free market perspectives. But that is exactly what the faiths are against, because of the deep inequalities created among populations and destruction of faith based world views.

The apparent conflict of Christian/secular west vs. Islam is overlaid with another struggle of faith based vs. free market world views. Try to locate yourself on both of these dimensions and see how much tension you carry within.

I found this article by Stanley Hoffman very helpful, as he takes Friedman and Fukuyama as indicators of a failed argument. failed because of simplistic assumptions.

Participant
It doesn't seem so clear to me that the Islamic Terrorists are engaged in a rejection of modernism in favor of fundamentalism. It's possible to interpret the evidence in that manner, but is it convincing and definitive?

We're looking at this as a clash between belief systems, and possibly it is, but am I being unreasonable to suggest that it may just as easily be about more basic human conflicts? Access to resources, domination, status, power have motivated humans seemingly forever (and most primates for that matter).

Islamic terrorists are active in Kashmir, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Chechnya to name but a few. Are they all waging terror because of a deep and cherished belief in Allah and specific rules? Or is it possible that they have difficulty competing in the modern world and their religious tenets simply provide additional passion? If you can't win the game that's being played then change the game to one you think you can win?

I raise the question because so far in those countries where the Islamic fundamentalists have been able to impose their will we see no evidence of improvement for the citizens. The mullahs and their followers do better in this material world which they disdain - they profit from the modern world and they control with a brutal hand. It's very hard for me to view the Mullahs or the Taliban as seriously religious people. Under their rule the bullies, the ignorant, the cruel are rewarded solely because the population is repressed and disadvantaged at the point of a gun. Intelligent, capable women are forced out of competition in an artificial manner that allows men to reap basic rewards, based not on their ability but simply their gender.

In nature, globalization changes long established survival strategies and competition becomes fierce while new orders and alliances are being established. Is it possible that this is playing a driving role in what we are seeing?

Participant
The sophistication of this discussion has hit a new high and I look forward to its further development. Most of it is beyond my "expertise" but there is a recognition that runs through most of the comments which is both relatively new for this kind of exchange and of great importance to keep reminding ourselves of its value: the growing complexity of most 21st century international issues.

It will come as now surprise to Dick if I use one of his comments as an illustration -- with both apologies for doing so and full respect for his fund of information:

#62: "The birth RATE in the US has fallen, and is in negative territory even in Catholic countries such as Italy."

According to the World Population Data Sheets of the Population Reference Bureau reveals that the Births per thousand for the U.S. dropped from 15 in 2000 to 14 in 2003, but the population increased from 275.6 millions to 291.5 millions. The projected population for 2050 in 2000 was 403.7 and increased to 421.i in 2003. There are over 20 different population statistics monitored by the Population Reference Bureau, all indicating continuing growth rates but with different impacts depending upon the specific population criteria being considered.

What so many of us fail to recognize when talking about population is that the larger the total population in numbers, the greater the actual individual population results in future forecasts. Ten percent of 1000 is 100, and 200 in the case of 2000. Elementary, of course, but not normally instinctive.

When using population in any discussion, the following words of wisdom quoted from the Population Bulletin of Dec 2002 is worth keeping in mind:

THE UNITIED STATES WILL CONTINUE TO GROW AND TO DIVERSIFY RACIALLY AND ETHNICALLY IN THE COMING DECADES. THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE GROWTH AND CHANGE WILL BE FAR REACHING. POLYCYMAKERS NEED TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THESE CONSEQUENCES AND STRIVE TO ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE APSPECTS OF A GROWING POPULATION WHILE GUARDING AGAINST THE NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF POPULATION GROWTH AND CHANGES.

Participant
Kip, a few words in response to your thoughtful comment I:65:

"We're looking at this as a clash between belief systems," you write. I don't know who "we" means in that sentence, but I'm not. Indeed, I thought I was arguing that the clash was mostly within belief systems -- based, of course, on differing views not only about beliefs but about power, discrimination, and domination. The Iranian mullahs whose social and material motives are described with such eloquence by Fred (Participant) are a case in point precisely because the material and social consequences of their actions are so far from the interpretation of Islam by other Moslems, such as the one I cited in I:63.

Yes, the impacts of globalization are playing an increasingly "driving role" in the new kinds of clashes. But the argument (the cover story, if you will) increasingly takes the form of differing interpretations of what devotion to Allah/God requires of 21st century devotees. And that's why I think it's important for us not to lump differing kinds of Moslems as "Islamists" -- just as I would resist a Persian analysis of American culture and politics that lumped the Christian right and my Christianity as somehow belonging to a common category they might want to call "Jesusists."

Participant
Harlan, it's so good to welcome back your experienced hand in these matters.

Today's massacre at the Mosque, killing Hakim, among dozens, perhaps hundreds of others, adds to the complexity of what we face in that region. The cleric Hakim, a very popular figure, has called for an Islamic state. No one seems to know who led the bombing, but the possibility that it could be the beginning of the intercultural warfare among the three main groups in Iraq that was predicted to happen if we invaded, is now being talked about again.

One of the problems we have in helping to formulate policy in this discussion is that, as Doug Carmichael mentioned in a side conversation, events seem to outrun our conceptual abilities.

Participant
Don, I appreciate your clarifying comment about population growth. I certainly didn't mean to communicate that such growth is no longer a problem. It remains a most difficult aspect of most of the issues we are discussing, particularly the growth rate among the Moslem population.

It is my understanding, however, that the frightening linear projections of the middle of the last century have given way to the belief now that world population growth will level off and begin to decline after it reaches about ten or eleven billion. Even this number stretches the carrying capacity of the earth's resources, given the political problems connected with their fair distribution, but it is encouraging to know that in the middle of this century, we may see the end of that growing problem. Do I have that right?

Participant
Nicholas Kristof, in his NY Times op-ed column today, compares a struggling democracy in the Ukraine (freedom) with the centralized orderliness of a province in China (authoritarianism), and concludes that however brutal the Chinese development has been, it can now point to an economy that has tripled in size, while the Ukraine's has shrunk by half.

Coping with the chaos we are encountering in Iraq as we try to institute democracy, we may see the same dynamic operative there--with Iraqis longing more and more for the orderliness of an authoritarian rule. The administration hoped we could make a showcase for democracy in Iraq, but that possibility is now clearly many years away, if ever. The Ukraine has been trying and failing for fourteen years.

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