The acid test is whether these organisations enjoy the support of the communities in which they operate. If they do, then no amount about big words will provide understanding. A more useful lesson can be drawn from the Israeli experience - 60 years of increasing brutality has not blunted the Palestinian desire for freedom, if not justice.

Don’t create an fake argument that terrorists can only be understood by understanding that they are not like us; they are inherently violent. Rather understand that are indeed like you, they want to be free of oppressors and occupiers. Of course the problem with that is that you would first have to admit they you are an oppressor and an occupier…

However, “the lion’s share of modern terrorism” decidedly is NOT “Muslim, inspired by and committed in the name of jihad,” but state terrorism such as America finances against Palestine and wreaks against places like Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq openly, and elsewhere clandestinely. It is not even true that the lion’s share of non-state terrorism is “muslim” ~ drug-related terrorism accounts for more than all other parties combined, or did the last time I looked at the USG statistics and pie-charts.

But it is true that the demise of the (corrupted) caliphate and the spread of Leninist anti-colonialism has fostered a generation of “do-it-yourself” amateurs waging “jihad” in violation of all the rules of jihad (”struggle”) and “qital” (fighting) in Islam. Hasan al-Banna, Abu Ala Maududi, Sayyid Qutb, Ruhollah Khomeiny, and Ali Shariati all propagated Leninism dressed up in religious rhetoric, they were dialectical materialists steeped in the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (’Ali Shari’ati’s mentor at the Sorbonne) and the tactical methodologies of Lenin and Trotsky adapted to their twisted (and inherited) vision of Islam. Today’s “terrorism” is European in its genesis as well European/American as in its motivation.

American understanding, however, is not. And that is more than half of the problem.

The global virus of racist Arabism has claimed/claims millions of victims, it includes:

Kurds (under Saddam or Syria), Berbers, Jews (inside Israel - the genocide campaign since the massacre in 1929 by the Mufti Haj Amin Al Husseini until today, or in the Arab world or on ‘Arab street’ in Europe, etc.), Africans (genocide in Sudan, oppression in Egypt, Slavery in Mauritania, etc.)…

It’s clear you’re from the US. Your prose is unreadable.

“There is no simple explanation of contemporary terror. Simple explanations are liable to be simplistic, and always are.

(…)

“The root-cause of terror is jihad. Don’t only study jihad, please, study the mind of jihad, and the mind powering the mind. That might be a useful starting point.”

So, if simple answers are always simplistic, and the simple answer for the causes of terrorism is jihad…

@ Hal: Bruce cites this article in his newsletter as an “Interesting rebuttal”. And, actually, I thought that he reported Abrahms’ paper fairly neutrally, without either endorsement or negation, but maybe that was just me.

This is demonstrably false.

For example on page 21 of the PDF file (labeled 32:4 | 98 ) It appears at least twice in a discussion of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Apparently you ran a search, which for some PDF reason does not work on this document, rather than go to the trouble to read the article.

I also don’t understand Greg’s comment, as the Schnieir article he links to completely endorses Abrahms’ analysis.

Turning from a reasoned discussion of terrorist mindsets and how Radical Islam does (and/or does not) spring from cutural attitudes and mental constructs into an unsupported series of sneering attacks on any effort to bring potential terrorist recruits into the mainstream of non-terrorist culture seems jarring and disconnected from the rest of the article.

If you discard the last three paragraphs, this was a good and informative exposition of the authors’ reasoning. The two paragraphs before the last contribute nothing.