Sally Neighbour: Inside the mind of a terrorist

Sally Neighbour's article in The Australian titled Inside the mind of a terrorist dated 19 February 2007 amongst other things identifies the bonding between disaffected young adults who turn to terrorism but are we still missing something?

In one part I'm glad that Sally acknowledged that Bin Laden is/was driven more by politics than religion. This is key to combating the myth of his motives as being purely religious. However, I feel we need to make more room in the overall discussion to explore some of the other myths surrounding our understanding of terrorism and terrorists. To examine issues that fall outside of what I call the symptoms of terrorism such as disaffected young adults and their need to bond. we need to do more than simply relate the personality traits that are present in one form or another throughout mainstream society.

Critically, I think we need to be aware that our burgeoning terrorists come from all walks of life, ideologies, religions and economic backgrounds. Thus, the one thing this broad demographic denotes is the overwhelming futility of attempting to "profile" would-be terrorists.

What it does identify however, is that as individuals, we often participate in collective actions at times for widely differing reasons. This ranges from our rebels without a clue all the way to intellectuals who have a broad understanding of the complexities of geopolitical dynamics. They may rally under the same banner but their respective raison d'êtres may differ markedly.

In this sense then, trying to understand the behaviour of individual terrorists (the foot soldiers) is tantamount to confusing a private soldier's reasons for joining his country's army as definitive insight into why his country is at war.

My point is that we need to look more broadly at the collective or organisational motives of these organisations as key indicators for their actions. This is more politically difficult for governments to do as this means treating the illness rather than it's symptoms.

Issues form the core of all disputes and by that I mean issues real or imagined. Some of these issues will be concrete such as specific economic, political, territorial issues etc. or may be abstract such as values, culture and belief based issues or a combination of the two such as historical.

I'm not suggesting that all issues can be legitimized just that they need to be heard. The argument that we will not legitimise terrorist activity by sitting down and talking with them is a straw man argument.

By this I mean that it is not enough for governments to rail against a terrorist organisation one moment and support them covertly the next (Hamas, Fatah, MEK and others). It is not enough for governments to demonize acts of terrorism but continue to support those same acts to meet their own short term goals. We must act consistently with our core policies if we expect others to believe we act in good conscience.

If we are unable to behave consistently with our core values and policies then we cannot hold ourselves to be any different from our claimed enemies. We need to understand that no matter what we do as a society we set an example--like it or not. We can choose to set a good example i.e. behave consistently with our core values providing the space for our enemies to follow or we can behave inconsistently and have our people wear the cost when our enemies do the same. However we choose to behave, consistently or inconsistently, behaviour in our society is guaranteed to reflect that.