Here’s What a Man Who Studied Every Suicide Attack in the World Says About ISIS’ Motives

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/heres-what-a-man-who-studied-every-suicide-attack-in-the-world-says-about-isiss-motives/

Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.

He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents. “Very often, suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to overcome,” and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show, Politics and Reality Radio, last week. But, Pape adds, there have been “many hundreds of secular suicide attackers,” which suggests that radical theology alone doesn’t explain terrorist attacks. From 1980 until about 2003, the “world leader” in suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist group of Hindu nationalists in Sri Lanka.

Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.

He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents. “Very often, suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to overcome,” and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show, Politics and Reality Radio, last week. But, Pape adds, there have been “many hundreds of secular suicide attackers,” which suggests that radical theology alone doesn’t explain terrorist attacks. From 1980 until about 2003, the “world leader” in suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist group of Hindu nationalists in Sri Lanka.

[Drahthaardogs]

1. If you have any religious upbringing, you know what ISIS wants

They are looking for a reckoning and they believe the end result of that will be the conversion of the Christians and the end of the Jews.

[Sherman A1]

2. Thanks for posting!

I will read it a bit later.

[malaise]

3. Precisely

It's why the racists in American hide under the cloak of fundamentalist religious sects and cults.

[MisterP]

4. right, the Hebdo shooters were alcoholics and the Bataclan ones lived their life

in a haze of weed, hard liquor, not going to mosque, and Friday sex

"Islam" for them is an identity tag, a hollow cliche: if they were devout that would mean they'd have standards and criteria, and would make judgements on their own rather than what their handler told them

the US's focus on theology alone in fact helped create IS--that Islam's problem was that it didn't have a Martin Luther and that it listened to its ulema too much ...

[Heidi]

5. Kick!