So few terrorists

Foreign Policy

A friend of mine recently shared this on Facebook. I thought it was a fascinating article, so I wanted to share it here. The writer, Charles Kurzman, a professor at UNC, puts forward the premise that if there are over one billion Muslims in the world who supposedly hate America and the West, why are there so few terrorist attacks? It would seem that there would be attacks all the time with such numbers. He uses the example of a "terrorist attack" in Chapel Hill back in 2006 to make his point.

While the attacker was a Muslim and he professed to be part of a jihad against America, the details of the case reveal that he was really just some sadly deranged man who used the language of jihad to justify his attempts to kill. He was incredibly incompetent in executing the attack, failing to even purchase a gun, and was sorrowfully lacking in knowledge about Islam, the very religion he claimed to be fighting for.

In looking at other recent attacks in the US, this seems to be the rule rather than the exception. They typically work alone, are mentally unstable, and generally incompetent. Where are the well-organized attacks that we all came to fear after 9/11? These attackers fit the profile of school shooters and Eric Rudolf types more than Islamic terrorists.

One of the goals of the 9/11 attacks was to actually get the US to fight, which is what happened. The US even went so far as to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and in fact was an enemy of Al-Qaeda. By getting the US to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, Al-Qaeda hoped that the Muslim world would become enraged and fight back. However, that hasn't happened, in fact, since 9/11 recruitment of militants has dropped. The vast majority of Muslim simply don't share Al-Qaeda's views or vision.

Kurzman lists a number of reasons for this, but the biggest one to me is that the victims of most Islamic terrorists attacks are other Muslims. Al-Qaeda isn't just fighting a war against the West, but also against other factions within Islam that are opposed to their goals. While the US invasions may have hurt the US's reputation among Muslims, these Muslims didn't turn to Al-Qaeda and other such groups because they were also killing fellow Muslims.

While I doubt I'll find it now, years ago I read an article that compared the Islamic terrorists of today to Anarchist terrorists of the early-20th Century. Anarchists were a major bogeyman of that time period, assassinating President McKinley as well as playing a role in setting off WWI. However, by the time WWII came around, Anarchists were largely forgotten. The author proposed the same would happen to Radical Islam. By attacking civilians, Anarchists damaged their image which hurt recruitment. Also, the conditions in which the Anarchist movement was created were changing. Anarchy was no longer a relevant ideology.

Radical Islam appears to be going the same route. As they continue to kill other Muslims, their support and recruitment numbers will drop. Also conditions in the Muslim world are changing. Most Islamic countries are former colonies, so they harbor resentment to their former colonizers as well as elements of neo-colonialism. However, as colonization becomes a more distant memory and the Western countries slowly decline in relative power, Muslims have gone from blaming the former colonizers to blaming their own governments for their relatively poor condition. The ideology of Al-Qaeda is no longer relevant to the average Muslim, if it ever was.