Presentation given by: Jerrold Post, Ariel Merari and Boaz Ganor
22 January 2008

Boaz Ganor: Psychology is very relevant also in the organizational level. All the matters of group pressure, anyone who read recent articles of Professor Merari, knows how important these group pressure and group thinking in understanding terrorism and understanding suicide terrorism and so on and so forth. Questions of peer groups, the competition, the rivalry, the personal charisma and so on and so forth. Also in counter terrorism the psychology element is crucial in giving some answers to the very problematic research of terrorism. If we talk about public opinion or public resilience, the question of incitement and brainwashing, manipulation of people on hearts and minds, I suppose it all has to do, at the end of the day, with psychology.


So the first thing that I would like to state this morning is that this morning we are going to discuss one of the most important questions of the mind of the terrorist. And the second is that we are not just going to discuss this, we are going to discuss this with the two most important pillars of academic and practical research on terrorism. And we are fortunate to have them with us.

First and foremost we are fortunate to have Professor Jerrold Post with us and let me introduce him very briefly. I have four pages discussing his background but I will do it very briefly. Doctor Jerrold Post is a professor of psychiatry, political psychology and international affairs, and director of the political psychology program at the George Washington University. At the George Washington Dr. Post teaches a graduate course on terrorism and political violence as well as a course on leadership and decision making. He is the co-founder, director, of the George Washington University Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management. Dr. Post came to George Washington after twenty-one years career with the Central Intelligence Agency where he founded and directed the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, an interdisciplinary behavioral science unit which provided assessments for foreign leadership and decision making for the President and other senior officials to prepare for summit meetings and other high level negotiation and for use of crisis situation. He is a founding member of the International Society of Political Psychology. Dr. Post was elected Vice-president in 1994 and has served on an editorial board of political psychology since 1987. Professor Post wrote extensively articles, monographs, and books, and chapters in books, and he was ready to share with us his main thoughts on his recent book, which was just now published, The Mind of the Terrorist.

We have asked Professor Merari to comment after the presentation of Professor Post. I do believe that I do not need to present Professor Merari to this audience. If someone does not know Professor Merari please leave the room. Actually, Professor Merari, again, we are talking about definitely one of the pillars in the research of terrorism and the research of terrorism psychology. He was creating the field of terrorism and counter-terrorism in the Israeli academy and many of us, including myself, are being regarded lucky by being able to be his student and follow his steps.

I would like to acknowledge the presence of the two distinguished guests here that have another thing in common, another shared notion from, and I refer to another pillar that unfortunately is not with us but I would like to mention him this morning and I am referring to Professor Ehud Sprinzak, which is a close friend to Ariel and to Jerrold and also he is my PhD tutor and I just feel that need to mention him in this very moment and this morning. So thank you for coming and the floor is yours.

Jerrold Post: Our presence is graced by Rikki Sprinzak and I thought before beginning I would read the dedication of the book. “To Ehud Sprinzak, a pioneer of terrorism research who has helped illuminate the psychology of terrorism and political extremism.” This inscribed copy is for you, Rikki.

Indeed, Ehud Sprinzak and I shared a somewhat simplistic notion that if one wants to sort out what makes a terrorist tick, ask him. I’ve come to the conclusion that much more dangerous than the proliferation of weapons of mass destructions is the proliferation of terrorist experts who have never talked to a terrorist. And it is really mind-boggling the number of people who are pontificating about terrorists, who have never laid eyes on a terrorist. In contrast, there is a small, core group of genuine terrorist experts, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working for more than twenty five years. When I was asked by senior CIA officials “can we use the same at a distance psychological assessment techniques you’ve used to assess world leaders,” (I did the original Camp David profiles of Begin and Sadat for Jimmy Carter, )“can we use those techniques and apply that to terrorist psychology and terrorist leaders”, the first person I called was Ariel Merari. We had a rather remarkable conference in 1980.

We’ve been working closely together since. A new member of the esteemed group of people who talk to terrorists is with us today and that is Anat Berko. Her work in her book Path to Paradise: Illuminating the Inner World of the Suicide Terrorist is really quite remarkable and I encourage you all to read it.

What I am going to do today is summarize some of my views of terrorist psychologies, plural, and I think one of the first things to say is we should not be looking for one over-arching, explanatory model for the different kinds of terrorisms. We are talking about terrorist psychologies, plural, and I think that is important to emphasize. You will see a number of numbered slides. In the spring of 2005, I was challenged to chair the committee on the psychology of terror held by the Madrid summit on terrorism, democracy and security, , Ariel served on that committee, We drew up a consensus document so some of the numbered slides you see here are part of our consensus document.

And the first thing to say is that when I as a psychiatrist was asked by the CIA to look at terrorists, it was because I am a psychiatrist, for it was widely assumed terrorists were crazed fanatics were psychologically disturbed, emotionally unstable. In fact, most terrorists, as individuals, are psychologically normal. Indeed, terrorist groups and organizations screen out emotionally unstable people. You wouldn’t want a psychologically disturbed individual in the Delta Forces or in the British SAS commandos, nor would a terrorist group want an emotionally unstable person in their operational group, they are a security risk.

Terrorists don’t fit into a specific diagnostic range, they cover the entire diagnostic range. But when I say normal, I am talking in psychiatric language. They are not psychotic. These are not individuals who would be considered not-guilty by reasons of insanity. So, and this is one of our numbered consensus statements, “explanations at the level of individual psychology are insufficient in trying to understand why people become involved in terrorism. The concepts of abnormality, or psychopathology, are not useful in understanding terrorism. “With that, as a psychiatrist that specializes in the abnormal, I should just sit down, but I will continue nevertheless.

In fact, I was interested to hear of your recent article, Ariel. Ariel Merari has been a leading exponent of the importance of group organizational and social psychology. “It is group, organizational and social psychology, with a particular emphasis on collective identity that provides the most constructive framework for understanding terrorist psychology and behaviors.” The issue of collective identity is especially important. That shaping of the collective identity has inherent counter-terrorist prescriptions, for our long range counter-terrorism strategy.

So the cause is not the cause. The cause is the justification, and the rationalization, of often frustrated, and alienated individuals, who have had their identity shaped in some rather extreme fashions by leaders. Otherwise disorganized, disparate individuals whose life has been given meaning by a hate-mongering leader who tells them, and it’s a great comfort, and this is a substance free version of terrorist rhetoric be it from the IRA to the Red Brigades, “Its not us, its them. They are the cause of our problems.” And it therefore becomes not only not immoral to strike out against them, but it becomes a moral imperative to strike out against them. This produces some very powerful group dynamics. One of the reasons some of these terrorist causes, some of these terrorist organizations are so resistant to change over time despite having achieved most of those goals is that being a member of that group may have been the most important self-defining statement of that persons life and its very hard, when you’re considering yourself at the forefront of a great cause to step back and have a mediocre job on an assembly line.

Lenin says the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize but your lecturer for the morning says the reason for becoming a terrorist is to belong to a terrorist group. Once you belong to a terrorist group it is very hard to leave, and that’s especially true for these terrorist groups. There are a lot of conformity pressures, group-think, disagreement equals expulsion or death.

A brief anecdote, a Red Army faction Heidleburg cell member interviewed a number of years ago was really impressed with the focus of the Red Army Faction and how they targeted government officials and industrialists. Finally when he made “der Sprung” (the leap,) he was very startled when at his first meeting they talked about setting off a firebomb in a KaDeWe department store. Have any of you been to a KaDeWe department store? They are probably, one of the most opulent stores you will ever see, the least expensive women’s frock about $400 – in a room twice the size of this one, filled with wild game. He blurted out “there will be all these innocent victims.” A chill fell over the room and he realizes that he has threatened the group consensus and that he may be expelled from the group he has just entered the group and, more severe than that, he may be expelled from life. There is a saying that the only way to leave a terrorist group is feet first by way of the graveyard. At this point the leader of the group said coldly, “have you been to a KaDWe stores?” Oh yes” the new recruit acknowledged.” “Well, then, you know that the people that shop there are not innocent victims, they are capitalist consumers, they are the enemy and they deserve to die”.

So there is a sort of a bifurcated psychology those just like us agree with us and anyone else is the enemy. There are pressures to risk, the so-called “risky shift,” a phenomenon of social psychology that says that the group can make a more dangerous decision than any individual in that group would make. And the unifying effect of external danger is very important indeed. There is a lot of tension in the terrorist group but once society retaliates, as ultimately it must, it becomes an “us versus them” psychology.

It is very important to distinguish leaders from followers. The role of the leader is crucial in drawing together the alienated and frustrated individuals into a coherent organization. He provides a sense-making explanation that’s unifying and produces a base religious and ideological justification to otherwise disparate followers.

Now I am not going to go in detail through this rather complex graphic of terrorism— this is from Alex Schmidt, but modified by me— but it shows just how diverse a phenomenon terrorism is and one shouldn’t be trying to find one over-arching way of thinking about terrorist psychologies. Social revolutionary terrorists, right-wing extremist, single-issue terrorist, nationalist-separatist terrorists, religious fundamentalist terrorists-extremely diverse causes. One of the points I would like to emphasize is that many of the causes we’ll be talking about are causes with which many or most of us would agree. Usual definitions of terrorism are violence or the threat of violence against non-combatant or innocent victims in order to gain a political, religious or ideological goal through fear or intimidation. The definition says nothing about the goodness or the badness of the cause, but it is the killing of the innocents in order to convey that message that is the central point.

This is a generational matrix that I developed a number of years ago that I think has a certain salience still. Down the left the youth’s relationship to their parents where L is loyal and D is disloyal. Across the top the parent’s relationship to the regime where L is loyal and D is literally disloyal, damaged, and dissident. The X in the upper left cell says that people who are at one with families which are at one with the regime do not become terrorists. There then are two opposite groups here if you look at it and I will say much more about the National Separatist terrorists who are loyal to families who have been damaged by the regime. They have heard from their parents in the pubs of Northern Ireland or the coffeehouses in Gaza and the occupied territories. They have heard about what “they” did to our families, the lands they took away, the economic opportunities that have been deprived from, and they are carrying on a family mission.

In contrast, the lower left-hand cell, the Social Revolutionary terrorists, are disloyal to the regime to which their family was loyal. Steeped in Marxist-Leninist doctrine, they have largely disappeared since the end of the Cold War, although we still do have FARC in Colombia. Their goal is to destroy the world of their fathers and their acts of terrorism are acts of retaliation for the real or imaginary hurts by the generation of their parents, it is vengeance against the society of the parents, dissent against parent’s loyalty to the regime.

I had an epiphany several months ago. These are the dynamics of Osama Bin Laden. Think about that for a moment. His family was highly identified with the Saudi royal family which enriched his family, his father Mohammed Bin Laden was worth 2-3 billion dollars when he died and Osama Bin Laden was reputed to have inherited 67 million dollars from the family construction business fortune at age 16. So when he was criticizing the Saudi ruling class from the Sudan for the hosting of the US infidels in the land of the two cities, Mecca and Medina, he was rebelling against the generation of his family and that is something useful to think about. This man was not just a religious fundamentalist terrorist, he sees himself and he embodies this social revolutionary fervor. For his troubles, of course, the Saudi government expelled him from Saudi Arabia and took away his citizenship and the family basically turned their backs against him. So he is not only a religious fundamentalist terrorist he is also a social revolutionary.

With that, I am going to concentrate on two major groups: the National Separatist terrorists and their psychology, as well as the religious extremists, especially the militant Islamists.

So the national separatists are carrying on the mission of their parents and it is interesting to talk to former members of the IRA, as I’ve done, who talked about how they were raised and hearing in the pubs their parents talking bitterly about the British, saying that it was time to stop talking about this and that its time to start doing something about this. I could make the same case for the coffeehouses in nearby, Gaza or the occupied territories. Their acts of terrorism or acts of retaliation, out of respect to their parents, they are loyal to their parents who have been damaged by the regime. . They are carrying on the missions of their parents.. So if you look at it like this it is quite a psychologically normal thing to do.

I’ll be quoting extensively, to get you into the mindset and show you how normal they are from a major paper I did with Ehud Zprinzak called Terrorists in their Own Words, where we were able to interview 35 incarcerated Middle-East terrorists, both religious fundamentalist terrorists as well as national separatist terrorists and I think you will see from their words just how normal they are.

Here you see the Green Line in Northern Ireland. The wall separates the Catholic from the Protestant sector. Let me give you a little psychological test here. What do you see in this picture?

Audience: Destruction

Post: Destruction. Ok, good, what else?

Audience: Life goes on.

Post: Life goes on, but how does it go on? What do you see in the posture of the woman?

Audience: Fear.

Post: Fear. So we have a woman, wheeling a baby carriage, and this cynical group didn’t say that there was necessarily a baby in the carriage and, in fact, in Northern Ireland women have used prams to bring weapons to their brothers and their husbands in the IRA. But lets take the more benign image, it is a bay she is wheeling.

Audience: Courage, I see courage.

Post: Courage, OK, but if you look at the back, what is that there in the window? Is that the terrorist? I see, and let’s assume for a moment that it is not a weapon but an infant in that pram. What does it mean to nurse an infant on the mother’s milk of fear, anxiety, distress, revenge? Can it help but have an impact on that child?

I went to a rather remarkable conference about 15 years ago, at Beer Zeit University in the West Bank and it was all mental health professionals. Either child psychiatrists or child psychologists, with the exception of the guests all Palestinians, who were trained either in Great Britain or the United States. So they were very well trained and the conference was on the impact of the intifada on the Palestinian children. And I still recall vividly, the PhD psychologist, trained in Berkeley who talked about the empowerment of the intifada, and said what a wonderful thing this was for the children. No longer did these boys feel weak and helpless, they felt like real men, they were standing tall against the enemy, how empowering it was for them. She then went on, being objective enough to say this, of course it was true there was a high incidence of bed-wetting in these kids between 9, 10, 11 years old, and there was no respect for the parents or teachers, but what a wonderful thing this was. And I was bold enough, or foolish enough, in this audience to raise my hand and say we are all interested in personality development, what does it mean, as personality is developing to be enshrining violence as the way of dealing with conflict and to be emphasizing the role of victim and that the outside enemy is the cause of all the problems. Aren’t we guaranteeing the generational perpetuation of hatred? Aren’t we guaranteeing the transmission of terrorism from generation to generation? At that point, the psychologist switched off and the Palestinian switched on as she said, not to worry, when our people have the economic and social justice they deserve all hatred will disappear.

Well, that’s foolish of course, and anyone who thinks about it will laugh cynically, because “when hatred is bred in the bone” and when from childhood on one is being taught to hate and that they are the source of all problems, the hatred does not disappear with the signing of a Good Friday Accord in Northern Ireland or an Oslo Accord here.

This is in Northern Ireland. If you read this he happens to be a Protestant, it is hard to imagine him not, in five or six years, being a member of the Protestant paramilitary or if he was a Catholic boy becoming a member of the IRA –you see, he’s exultant about Ireland going up in flames.

So these are some of the quotes from that project I worked on with Ehud, but look at this first one. It is a perfectly natural and logical sentiment. “I belong to the generation of occupation, my family are refugees from the 1967 war. The war and my refugee status for the seminal events that formed my political consciousness and provided the incentive for doing all I could to help us to regain our legitimate rights in our occupied country”. Nothing mad at all in there is there.

Merari: The interviews were conducted in Arabic?

Post: Yes, it was an interesting project. The interview team was retired Mossad interrogators and the biggest challenge was teaching them how to interview rather than interrogate. And we got some wonderful information and part of what that had to do with was stressing to them these were people that were going to be in prison for the rest of their lives in most cases. One of them was sentenced to 46 consecutive life terms and they had to make sense of their lives and we instructed the interviewers to play to their egos, and what they had accomplished and they started boasting about what they were doing and we got some fabulous information on recruiting and group dynamics and how they justified to us.

This is the summer camp of the Palestinian Authority. When I went to camp a few years ago now the final exercise was capture the flag. And the person who was able to, or the bunk, that was able to get the flag, around which was a cordon of counselors and got that banner won special privileges for his bunk. This is the graduation exercise of the Palestinian Authority camp and here they are taking kids and they are going to storm a mock IDF outpost and the person who is able to kill the mock IDF soldier will win the banner for his bunk. So this is being institutionalized officially as part of the indoctrination, early on.

Look at these kids. It’s really hard to look at them and not see this as being a long war indeed. They are what, nine years old, or so? They aren’t being trained to be terrorists, they are being trained to be soldiers for the revolution, and that’s important to emphasize.

This is from Leila Khaled. “I was abused in all the meaning of abuse. I was deprived of my home, my family, and children like me living in a miserable situation in camp. No work for our fathers and our mothers didn’t work through, just watched.” Her autobiography is really quite remarkable, one wonderful line, the deputy dean of her school, I just want you to imagine this, as a freshman, the dean calls her in and says, you know, this is at the American University in Beirut, and he says, you know we don’t allow political activity and you’re starting to be quite politically active and you’ll need to stop that. And she says, I told him that was the very core of my being and that if he tried to stop me I would slit his throat. And she went on to continue being politically active and he quieted down rather rapidly.

Merari: And she stayed in the university after that?

Post: She did, she stayed in the university and continued as a student.

This is from a very interesting case. I have been a witness, an expert witness, at five terrorist trials now. This is Mohammed Rezaq of the Abu Nidal group, a particularly violent terrorist group, as you know, and he really epitomizes the story of the generational transmission of hatred. When his mother was 8 years old, at the time of the 1948 war, they were living in Jaffa, an Arab suburb of Tel Aviv as you know, and he and his family were forced to leave and ended up in his grandfather’s farm on the west bank. There they lived an idyllic life until 1967 when, ironically, Mohammed Rezaq, our terrorist to be, was 8 years old and when they were leaving, the mother says to him bitterly, this is the second time this has happened to me. They end up in a refugee camp in Jordan, where young Rezaq went to school, funded by UNICEF money, and was taught by his PLO teacher that the only way to become a man is to become a soldier for the revolution.

They had reading, writing and arithmetic in the morning and from age nine on he was being trained to be a guerilla really and had ops course training, weapons handling and explosives training. I would like to tell you about one moment in the three days I interviewed him that I still remember with a chill. During the interview he behaved as if it was a military, after-action, briefing. He was standing there, in a parade rest stance, talking to me in a formal fashion. We had the tapes between the control tower and the cabin and he was negotiating with the control tower. They were on the ground in Malta and needed refueling for their forward flight to Libya. He said “we were at an impasse because they said they would not give me the fuel for the onward flight to Libya until I released the hostages, there were down, and I was told not to give them the hostages until they gave me the fuel and they said they wouldn’t give me the fuel until we gave up the hostages. So I had to get their attention and I was told that the first people to start killing were the Jews. So I went through the passports and I found the passports of two Israeli women and I had the porter bring one up and I grabbed her hair with my left hand and I put the revolver to her temple and I said OK, I am about to kill this Jewish pig unless you give me the fuel. And they foolish people, told me we are not going to give you the fuel until you release the hostages. So I blew her brains out. And by then I was getting rather hungry and I asked the porter to make me a sandwich and he made me a very nice pita roll sandwich.” It was so uncomfortable because it was like he was talking about taking the trash out. I blew her brains out and by then I was getting rather hungry. “And now I thought surely they would take me seriously. I said, OK, I have killed this one Jewish pig, I am prepared to keep on killing unless you give me the fuel and, to my astonishment, they said we told you we are not going to give you the fuel until you release the hostages so I had them bring the second woman forward and I grabbed her hair with my left hand and put the revolver up to her temple,” and I interrupted him at this point and I said, how did it feel killing a woman? And he said, like a mantra, “it was explained to me that in Israel both men and women join the army therefore they are both the enemy, therefore they both deserve to die.” Just like that, really it was quite chilling. These were not people he was killing, it was the dehumanized enemy. …He in many ways epitomizes the generational transmission of hatred.

This is from the series of quotes from the interview project. “Enlistment was for me the natural and done thing…in a way it can be compared to a young Israeli from a national Zionist family who wants to fulfill himself through national service.” “My motivation for joining Fatah was both ideological and personal. It was a question of self-fulfillment, of honor and a feeling of independence… The goal of every young Palestinian was to be a fighter.” “After recruitment my social status was greatly enhanced. I got a lot of respect from my acquaintances, and from the young people in my village.” “Anyone who didn’t enlist during that time (the first intifada) would have been ostracized.”

Ariel, we met, I think it was four years ago in Boston during the run-up to the Superbowl of the Boston Patriots. Ariel teaches a terrorism course at the Harvard Law School each fall, and I still recall vividly our conversation. I thought it was illuminatingly, chillingly, normal. Ariel said, “Well, you know, as I walk around Harvard square I am really struck that teenagers are teenagers the world around. I said, how do you mean? And Ariel said, “well, you go into a pizza parlor here and the kids are gossiping about their favorite team, the New England Patriots, the heroes on the team, the quarterback Tom Brady (and he’s going to play in the Super ball again in a couple of weeks,) and someday when the kids grow up they want to be a National Football League football player, a professional football player like their heroes. I said, yeah. “Well,” Ariel said, “it’s the same thing in the refugee camps, only their favorite team is Hamas, their heroes are the shaheeds, the martyrs, and someday when they grow up, which they won’t, they want to be a shaheed like their heroes. And as you know just like football and baseball trading cards in the United States they have shaheed trading cards in the camps. So we are talking about a very normal behavior.

I find this an interesting quote, especially the highlighted part. “The aim was to cause as much carnage as possible. The main thing was the amount of blood. Our action proclaims that I am here, I exist, I am strong and that I am in control, in the field and I am on the map. “So think about that. If that’s the way you are feeling about your period of service, it’s very hard to back away from this and one of the reasons we saw failure after failure before, knock wood, we finally after a thousand years may have resolved the long standing bloody conflict in Northern Ireland. But it is very hard to walk away from this kind of feeling and go to a mediocre kind of job. Indeed, after the Good Friday Accords, the so-called real IRA split off from the IRA and had a massacre in Omagh, in which 29 women and children were killed, and we had similar violence after the Oslo Accords. It was really quite predictable, that when the PA split from the Palestinian movement, when one is highly identified with the cause being a fighter for that cause may become more important than the actual attainment of that cause. Ending the conflict can have a negative impact on those whose whole identity was as a courageous fighter for that cause.

In this comparative study, in the book The Mind of the Terrorist, what I was quite struck by was that these causes, these national separatist causes, are particularly powerful, when there has been “identicide” committed by the majority. So Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern state of Turkey, despite earlier promises, actually made it illegal to even use the word “Kurd”, or to use the Kurdish language, and that identity threat was what the terrorist Abdullah Ocalan fed off of pulling together the PKK. Similarly Franco basically made any aspect of Basque identity illegal and this helped to provide a defensive foundation to defend their identity under threat. For Prabhakarn the charismatic leader of the Tamil Tigers, it was when the Sri Lankan Sinhala majority basically ignored the rights of the Tamil minority that gave rise to this charismatic leadership of Prabhakara. But part of that is the creation of a leader by the followers who needs someone to rescue them from this identicide.

So here we have this sense of defensive aggression really, with these groups, and what we’re seeing every day with the Palestinians, from their point of view, is defensive aggression. I recall vividly giving a lecture like this to the Egyptian Foreign Service graduating class. They were on a trip to Washington and I remember saying that this had nothing to do with the goodness or badness of the cause, but violence and terrorism, and when I talked about Palestinian terrorism half of them got up and walked out, shouting the Israelis are the terrorists.

Now we can move into religious fundamentalist terrorism, seeking to create or preserve a religious cause through violence. The first thing I want to say is that we are not just talking about militant Islamic terrorism. In the right here of course, we have a Khomeini, a Shiite Muslim leader, and on the left a Wahhabi Sunni Muslim, Osama Bin Laden. They have taken the same rather ambiguous verses from the Koran and using those verses to justify their violence for the “true believer” members. In fact, the commandment “thou shalt not kill” is not, when one traces its origins, “thou shalt not kill” it is “thou shalt not murder” and there are, in all of the Abrahamic faiths, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam , requirements, depending on how one interprets the verse, of a sacred obligation to kill. Rabin was really killed by a Jewish fundamentalist terrorist who, quoting a verse from Leviticus, “thou shalt not stand idly by the brother’s innocent blood” boasted when he was apprehended that what he was doing was following the word of God, …there was circle claiming in the radical rabbinate in Israel that by getting involved in the Oslo Accords Rabin had the “judgment of the pursuer” fixed on. This verse from Leviticus is interpreted to mean that if your innocent brother is being pursued by a killer you have a sacred obligation to kill the killer and Rabin, by putting a group of terrorists on the very borders of Israel, with the Oslo Accords, he had become a threat to the innocent brethren in Israel. He was sentenced to death by Amir’s religious reasoning.

Let me just note that those who would kill abortion providers in the United States, are the Christian fundamentalist terrorists. Ex-communicated Bishop Troche, likened to the Holocaust what happens in abortion clinics. “If you are walking down the streets of Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the major killing camps during the Holocaust, and you came across Dr. Mengele, and you killed him, would you be a murderer? No, you would be a hero, you would be killing a perpetrator of the Holocaust and you should be considered a hero. A Holocaust is being committed against the unborn children of this nation and anyone who kills a doctor, a nurse, or a health care worker involved in this genocide is not a murderer, and is a hero, and they deserve a red ribbon.” Once you accept the premise of something there is something compelling about the psychology behind it.

So other terrorisms are interesting in influencing contemporary society; fundamentalist religious terrorism wishes no dialogue with contemporary society and, in particular, radical Islamic terrorism seeks to eliminate Western presence and influence. Most importantly, these are true believers who are particularly responsive to authority and whether it is a rabbi, a priest, or in this case particularly, the Ayatollahs, they are highly authoritarian and hierarchical, and there is an absence of conflict for the “true believer” because his actions have been sanctioned by religious authority.

These are some quotes from the radical Islamists, incarcerated terrorists. “At the age of 16 I developed an interest in religion. The Koran and my religious studies were the tools that shaped my political consciousness; the mosques and the religious clerics provided the focal point of my social life.” “I came from a religious family which used to observe all of the Islamic traditions. My initial political awareness came during the prayers at the mosque that was where I was asked to join religious classes. The sheik used to inject some historical background into his sermons and would tell us how we were essentially evicted from Palestine”.

Now, I don’t think you can look at this picture and not be persuaded that this is going to be a long war indeed, or this next one, or this next one, or this next one. These are very young children here … We can’t look at these pictures and say, my if they are being started on a pathway so early, and obviously this is not a choice these children are making on their own, they are being led into this pathway and by the time they are 15, 16, 17, they have been on this pathway for decades.

There is an interesting issue which I believe needs to be part of a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy. What does it mean to not be able to mourn the loss of “my son, the martyr?” The social pressure is to celebrate this. I believe there is a difference between public celebration and private grief. A Pakistani Muslim journalist who works for the United Nations did an interesting study that she called “Talking with the Human Bombs” She interviewed one mother who had lost her first-born son in a so-called martyrdom operation and her second son was on the way and she said, “If I could, I would take a cleaver and cut open my heart and take my son and sew him inside to keep him close to me and protect him”. It was the women, the mothers of Plaza Major, who played a role in stopping the state terror in Argentina. How can we mobilize parents to be impeding the movement of their sons and daughters on the path to martyrdom?

I won’t go into detail about, in the amount of time remaining, about this case, but this is a very interesting man, Kalphan Khams Mohammed. I was on the defense team here, after checking this out with the Department of Justice—it was in the death penalty phase— and he was really a very striking, unquestioning, person who, when he was asked by his brother to leave school, which is a terrible thing to do, it is going to really compromise his future, and he became an assistant grocery clerk in Dar Es Salaam in Zanzibar where he was living, and the only place he felt he belonged was in the mosque. He was solitary, alone, friendless, isolated, except for in the mosque, and there he was told that you are all members of the umma, the community of observant Muslims and it is our obligation to help suffering Muslims wherever they are and was shown pictures, videos, of Muslims in mass graves in Bosnia and the bodies of Muslim women and children in Chechnya. And he was shown pictures of the Serbian soldiers and the Russian soldiers and he decided that he wanted to become, in his words, “a soldier for Allah.” And when he mentioned this, and I take this as a spotter for al-Qaeda, he was told that you have to get training to do that and using his own money he went first to Pakistan and then to a training camp in Afghanistan. There he had seven months of training including some specialized courses. At the end of this time, and by the way half of this training was ideological with four hours of military training and four hours of ideological training every day, and at the end of this time they offered him a position in Kashmir. He envisaged himself as being a soldier according to the fourth Jihad, the Jihad of the sword which states that we are obligated to pick up the sword against those that take up the sword against Muslims. And he saw himself in uniform fighting uniformed soldiers. Referring to Kashmir, he said “That’s irregular conflict and I don’t want to do that.” They said, OK, lets keep in touch and they exchanged cards and he went back to his menial job as an assistant grocery clerk in Dar Es Salaam until three years later he gets a call, in the middle of the night, do you want to do a Jihad job? He said yes, yes, yes, without even asking what it was and he became the local recruit for al Qaeda for this operation, leasing the safe house, renting the truck. A very sweet guy. In fact, when they told him when they were leaving to get rid of the food grinder that was being used to grind dynamite, his mother didn’t have a food grinder and he gave her that and that was how they traced him down. But at one point he asked the al-Qaeda cell member, the cell leader, say what is this Jihad operation anyway? And the al-Qaeda cell leader, as he reported, said your job is not to ask questions, your job is to follow instructions. These are your instructions, get me a Fanta, (the orange drink that the Pepsi-Cola Corporation makes,) and that he shouldn’t ask him any more questions. This is like the lowest of the low and one of the exculpatory principles concerning the death penalty is for low level members of a conspiracy- he is now serving life without parole in a super-max prison.

“There are no moral red lines in Jihad, there are no red lines. The mass killings, especially the suicide bombings, are the biggest threat to the Israeli public. The extent of the damage, the number of casualties is of primary importance.” Now a brief discussion about suicide terrorism. Mohammed Hafez, a Jordanian American, has written a very interesting book Manufacturing of Human Bombs. He sees there being three conditions necessary to support a program of suicide terrorism. One, a function of the culture of martyrdom. Two, an organizational decision to employ this as a tactic. And three, a supply of recruits willing to give their lives to the cause in a martyrdom operation.

As you know there is a very strict prohibition against suicide in the Koran. “Whoever kills himself with an iron weapon and the iron weapon will remain in his hand and he will continually stab himself in the belly with it in the eternal forever and ever.” Pretty unambiguous that, but this is not suicide. When we had the opportunity of interviewing some major suicide bomb commanders one of them got quite angry at me. We said “You say that you are doing this for the service of Allah, but the Koran strictly proscribes suicide, how can you justify suicide terrorism?” “This is not suicide. Suicide is weak, it is selfish, it is mentally disturbed. This is ishtishad, which means martyrdom or self-sacrifice in the service to God.”

This first quote is from Hassan Salame, currently serving 46 consecutive life sentences. Martyrdom operation bombing “is the highest level of jihad, and at the depths of our faith. The bombers are holy fighters who carry one of the most important articles of faith.” I rather like this quote, from a commander who is only serving 26 life terms, and in particular the middle sentence. , “I remember that aside from the tremendous respect I had for Halil, and the fact that I was jealous of him, I also felt slighted that they did not ask me to be the third martyrdom operation bomber”. I think that is really interesting. I am sort of an intermediate athlete and I play tennis twice a week, not terrific, not terrible, and I still remember with shame in the sixth grade, at recess, when I was the last person asked to be picked on the pick-up baseball team. This guy’s feelings are hurt that he wasn’t asked to be on the pick-up suicide bomber team. So this is a very normal and deeply entrenched sociologically. It is very important to be reminded of that these are not crazed fanatics by any means.

This is from the earlier Israel post-mortem study of suicide bombers. These data are out-dated now, but they are rather interesting. So-called suicide post-mortems have reconstructed the lives of individuals leading up to the suicide. 17-22 year-old young men, uneducated, unemployed and unmarried, they were unformed youth really, who were kept under tight control until they carried out this suicide attack to keep them from backsliding. . I might note that now the age range is 13-55 or so, women as well as men,, so it is much broader now and deeper now. They were told that “you have a worthless life ahead of you and you can do something now to gain honor and respect in your life, you will be enrolled in the hall of martyrs and your parents will gain respect and prestige from your act. Very different, in my judgment, from the September 11th suicide hijackers. Late 20s and early 30s, the ringleader Atta was 33. He and two of his colleagues were getting masters degrees at the Technological University in Hamburg, 15 of the 19 were from Saudi Arabia, with comfortable middle-class backgrounds, four from Egypt. They had been on their own in the west for upwards of 7 years. I see them as fully-formed adults who are true believers, who have subordinated their individuality to the group and accepted, uncritically, the destructive charismatic leadership of Osama Bin Laden. Their main social identifier became being a fighter for the radical Islamist cause.

Now, how could they say that they were committed Muslims when there were a lot of accusations against them. They didn’t wear beards, weren’t seen praying or fasting, and didn’t go to the mosque. At the trial, in the spring and summer of 2001of Khalfan Khamis Mohammed one of the documents that was introduced by the government was the al-Qaeda terrorism manual. It is a very interesting document. I have published an edited version of this showing the distorted way that quotes from tre Koran were taken out of context .In chapter eight of this document it is stated that when a Muslim is in the land of he enemy, that he shouldn’t reveal his true name, shouldn’t have a general appearance that would indicate an Islamist orientation, shouldn’t visit Islamic places: mosques, libraries. Well, these are the very requirements of being a good Muslim.

They then explain, in lesson eleven, concerning the issue of clothing, if the Muslim is in a godless or combat area he is not obligated to have a different appearance from those around him. The Muslim men prefer or even are obligated to look like their surroundings provided his action brings a religious benefit. Resembling the polytheist in religious appearance is a kind of “necessity permits the forbidden.” So basically the manual states that even though what you are doing violates the commands of the Koran and goes against the rituals of being good Muslims, since this is in the service of Allah and is in the higher service of Jihad, it is permitted. These are exceptional times and this requires exceptional actions. .

This is from the al-Qaeda training manual and this is really quite remarkable. I believe this was penned by Zawahiri,, clearly a classical scholar. “The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates, Platonic ideals nor Aristotelian diplomacy but it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and the machine gun.” And this is from the 1998 Fatwah. Note the last line in particular, after a couple of verses from the Koran, justifying what he is doing, “We, with God’s help, call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded , to comply with God’s orders to kill the Americans and plunder their money whenever and wherever they find them”. That’s a remarkable statement. When I reviewed this with a moderate Muslim cleric, he was outraged, stating that bin Laden is acting as if he is the new messenger the prophet, and the notion that the Koran would require the killing of all Americans amounts to blasphemy.

Now, an effective counter-terrorism program should have five elements. One, inhibit the potential terrorist from joining the group in the first place. Two, produce dissension in the group. Three, facilitate exit from the group. Four, reduce support for the group and delegitimize the group. The first four are all group-oriented and they all have to do with psychological phenomena. These are not easy, how do we inhibit potential terrorists from joining the group in the first place? A colleague of mine was r the Under Secretary of Labor for International Affairs. Having nothing to do with counter-terrorism he supported a 25 million dollar grant to Pakistan to inhibit child-labor, setting up a network of secular, and moderate curriculum schools. It costs $80 to educate a child in Pakistan for a year. Every child in one of those schools was a child not in a radical madrasa. And how can we help increase the opportunity for kids to succeed within their society rather than have bright ambitious kids seeing that the only possibility is to strike out in despair. Two, Produce dissension in the group. That is easier said than done, but very important to do. Three, Facilitate exit from the group. A number of states have had quite positive amnesty programs. Once you are in you are on the most-wanted list. And quite importantly Four, reduce support for the group and delegitimize the leaders. Right now we have a situation where for every terrorist that is killed or captured there are ten more waiting in line to join the group. So it isn’t a matter of just taking out the leadership. But how can we delegitimize Bin Laden? And marginalize what is now mainstream activity? That isn’t just information operations; it is deeds as well that are very important. And. Five, if the goal of terrorism is to terrorize, if we can create resilience to being terrorized that is counter-terrorism

Let me note one other phenomenon that makes achieving these goals rather daunting. We now have a situation where there are some 5000 radical Islamist websites. The kids are being socialized early on and as infants and children entering the path of terrorism and martyrdom. You can have a virtual community of hatred among people that have never been face to face. We are not countering those messages at all. And this isn’t just home-grown terrorists; it is now estimated that 80% of new recruits to the global Islamic jihad are being recruited in the Diaspora. The foiled plot out of Great Britain, at Heathrow, were Pakistani-British citizens - the leaders of which had gone back to Pakistan and met with al-Qaeda officials. So it isn’t just “homegrown terrorists” either. No good deed goes unpunished, but as a consequence of the destruction of central command and control in Afghanistan we have a much more dispersed organizational network now, with however a reconstituted al-Qaeda central still playing a major planning, coordinating and logistical role, not only inspirational.

If you consider that terrorism is a vicious species of psychological warfare, you don’t counter psychological warfare and this type of warfare you don’t combat this with smart bombs and missiles. You must counter it with psychological warfare and the United States, at least, has been dreadfully remiss in not more vigorously employing information operations as a central component of its counter-terrorism strategy.
In concluding, one of the things I want to emphasize is this -- the only way to totally eliminate terrorism is to eliminate democracy. The goal rather must be to reduce terrorist so that it interferes minimally with our open Western way of life. We are really at great hazard when we give up the civil rights of liberal democracy we really have descended to the level of the terrorist. Right now we have rocketing across the radical Islamist websites the Abu Ghraib prison slide of the rogue prisoner who is being tortured and humiliated. That has been a wonderful recruitment device for the radical Islamists and it is terribly important that we not degrade our own society’s values with respect to civil liberties while we are going after these terrorist fighters.

…


Ganor: Thank you Professor Post. I think that you were remarkably well and we see that in explaining that terrorists that are not psychologically disordered should be understood in the framework of the social discipline and the psychological discipline and the psychological tools. There are many questions that are being raised from your presentation and I am sure that we will discuss that afterwards but something that puzzled me is how does the combination, the objective connection between altruism and terrorist activity is being combined in the decision to commentary the comment to launch terrorist attacks and so on and so forth and we will have time to discuss more of this later on.

Right now I would like to turn to Professor Merari which I cannot think about any other person in the world that can comment in a better position, in a better academic manner to the presentation that you have gave, Professor Post, so Ariel, the floor is yours.

Merari: Thank you. Before we start, it is my pleasure to serve as the discussant for Professor Post’s lecture. I have known Jerry for many years and we did some things together, learned a lot from him, and I really have a very high regard for his contribution to the study of terrorism over the years. I think that there is no other person in the world that has contributed this much as Professor Post to the understanding to the psychological element of the phenomenon of terrorism, especially in as much as it relates to terrorist behavior. The idea of the resistance to change, Jerry I am sure was the first to explain that, why terrorist groups are so resistant to change and why the terrorists are so reluctant to leave their groups and to return to normal life. And the understanding of the diversity, the psychological diversity of terrorists and it is an important matter that Jerry discussed in his work, as early as in the 80s. Some of it has been, Jerry explained in his lecture, the difference between those terrorists that fight for their fathers as opposed to the psychological traits of those who fight against their fathers, which differentiates between the types of terrorist groups.

Jerry has forced to bear his vast knowledge of the big realm of terrorists and terrorist groups around the world actually so it is really part of his work and I am very glad that we had the opportunity to listen to Jerry’s summary, however brief, of his work.

Now I would like to add that, in general, the issue of the importance of psychology, Jerry said that, or maybe it was Boaz, Boaz started it actually by saying how important is psychology for understanding terrorism, and for me as a psychologist but in education, of course I am not going to contradict this person, however I would like to emphasize, and I am sure that you are a psychologist I would like to still say that not everybody recognizes the importance of psychology and terrorism. Perhaps to put it more accurately even those that would do the lip service to recognizing the importance of studying psychology in terrorism looked much psychological work, I think, has really influenced yet what has been actually done for coping with terrorism.

Now I think if we are to kind of classify academic approaches to studying terrorism I think there are two major approaches. If you look at the extreme one is the political science approach that says that terrorism is the result of certain conflicts, certain circumstances. But if under some circumstances there will be terrorism, for instance if you these are the people that talk about the root causes of terrorism, emphasize the root causes of terrorism. If there is occupation, if there is deprivation, if there is hunger, or other maladies of society, then terrorist groups will emerge. But this is basically the political science approach, talking about causes, conditions that will create terrorism.

On the other hand, maybe to black and white or very simplistic I should say, there is the psychological approach, to the extreme. Which looks at the individual, not the circumstantial conditions, but at the individual. Some people are prone to violence and some people are prone to political violence, to participate in political violence. Now the problem of the terrorism research over the years, a problem which Jerry has fortunately avoided, he gave us a good example, his lecture, by combining the circumstances with psychological traits, by in large has been that researchers have talked about either the conditions that create terrorism or personality traits.

While what should really be done is an integration for better understanding of terrorism. Now part of the problem has stemmed from the understanding of the concept of normality, normalcy. What is normal? This has been a problem that I think led many people among the terrorist researches to take erroneous, extreme erroneous positions. Now many people in the media, in the public, and unfortunately in terrorist researcher community said “terrorists are normal” period. And therefore everything is circumstances. What’s normal?

On the other hand some psychologists and I should add some psychologists would have never seen at terrorist except on television. Would have never talked to, talked to terrorists. Would have said terrorists are crazy, are paranoid, or they suffer from other kinds of abnormalities, psychological abnormalities, and that is why they are terrorists. All in all, what is normal? This is the questions.

Now, a person, as we know, has not got to be psychotic to be a terrorist. Being psychotic is not a pre-condition to being a terrorist. Nearly almost all terrorists who we know, and there are a lot of people here who know terrorists, or have talked to terrorists, know that they are not crazy, in the clinical sense. In the district psychiatrists who put an order to hospitalize them into a mental institution. Does that mean that they are normal? In other words, do they not have certain traits, still within normality classifications, but certain psychological traits that make them more likely to join a terrorist group, or to make it more specific, to be a killer, to be a person that is able to pull the trigger and kill, at point blank, a four-year old child, or bash a four-year old child in the head with the butt of his rifle. Now we are talking about a certain terrorist that we know that is, who is allows us to release.

Is it normal? Is everybody able to do it? Or are there special traits, not necessarily psychotic that separates these people from the crowd? Now, is everybody able to carry out a suicide mission? I believe not. Some people are more likely than other. IF you explain it all by religious fanaticism or by any other motivational cause then you should assume that hundreds of millions of martyrs around the world, at least 10s of millions of them are fanatic and all of them firmly believe in paradise and that shaheeds go straight to paradise and believe that they have a duty to become shaheeds, being a shaheed is a great honor so all of them should be lining up for the honor of being taken up on this expedition. But honestly, not so many of them do it. Let me tell you that I maintain a database on suicide terrorism updated frequently and so far there have been 2300 cases world wide. Not millions. At the same time that Gallup polls or the pew foundation polls show that large percentages of Arabs in Arab countries, not just in radical Islamic countries, say that suicide bombers are great guys and carrying out suicide attacks against westerners is justified, in Iraq, in Israel.

So, there must be some psychological factors, not craziness in the clinical sense. This must be investigated further. We have done some work here in Israel. It has not been published yet really, but more work is needed for us to understand better psychological traits that make one more likely to become a certain type of terrorist. I agree certainly with Jerry that there are different types of terrorists. Psychologically there should be presumably a difference between the guy who serves as a money-launderer for a terrorist group or the forger, the guy who makes false documents, and the guy who pulls the trigger and kills a four year old girl or a suicide bomber. These are different types. Actually there e have found that there are differences between the guys that organize suicide bombings, psychologically, and the guys that carry out the missions. They are different types of behavior we look at so that we can make a better psychological assessment in the way that they interact with society.

Now, in the short time that I have just a few more minutes, I would like to touch upon another point that professor post has mentioned. There are many aspects of terrorism and psychological factors of terrorism but I will just be electing a couple of points. Now, I think it was Jerry that coined the term “hatred bred in the bone” and this is very important to understand, a very important concept. There is a pretty elderly very interesting person in Israel, by the name of Zaev Idiansky, I don’t know how many of you have heard of him. Anybody? He is a very interesting person. Zaev Idiansky was a member of Lech. Lech, the so-called, Stern Group, before, well, it depends whether you are a leftist or not. If you are, it is a group, if you aren’t it is a gang. The Brits called it a terrorist gang but I think depending whose side you are on. We had a Prime Minister of course who was a member of the Yair Stern group. You can’t say it anymore.

Anyway, Zaev Idiansky was a member of the Stern Group, Lech for us, and after the State of Israel was established he studied political science in Jerusalem and he married a girl from Yahud and his political science work focused on anarchists in the second half of the 19th century and the early half of the 20th century. He wrote a number of books, very good actually, about Russian revolutionaries as well.

Now, it is very scholarly work for people who are not only interested in this period but for people understanding early terrorism as well. Anyway, he mentioned what he called the 20 year cycle of terrorism. When he talked about the waves of anarchists in Europe in the second half of the 19th century he said that those who were children in the 1848 revolution became terrorists of the early 1870s and those that were children in the early 1870s became the terrorists of the wave of anarchism in Europe in the 1890s. This is a very interesting concept and there is no statistical work or statistical foundation to support this work and I think in general it seems plausible. If we look at our experience here on a smaller scale, a more focused scale, those who were children in the 1948 war for the Palestinians the Naqba, for us, the war of independence, they established the Palestinian terrorist groups in the 1960s. Look at it, the history of the founders, they were either teenagers or children in 1948 and those that were children in the 67 war were the activists of the first intifada, twenty years later. Now if you look at this cyclical thing as Jerry described the role of education community atmosphere I think, I think this is something that we have to think about. What can we do about it? That is a different question. It is much easier to understand the principle, to understand the background, than to do something about it but we have to remember it. We have to remember when we talk about education how important it is in forming the opinions and motivations of a certain society. In that the long range effect of education is crucial of course. We are not talking about today’s terrorism but terrorists twenty years from now so we have to focus on that. And the last word, Jerry listed here a series of steps of a program of counter-terrorism. All of them are important but I think that if I had to say it, to rank what is most important, I’d say influence the other side’s society, influence the adversary’s society. The opinions, the motivations, the emotions of the adversary. That society which generates the terrorist and that is the most important thing. We are talking about just as an example suicide bombers, Palestinian suicide bombers. Why do they rally up? Why do they come and volunteer or agree, and it is about half and half, half volunteer of their own volition and the other half of them say yes when they are approached by a recruiter. Why do they agree? Is it because they are religious fanatic? NO, they are not more fanatic than others. Is it because they are more idealistic? No, they are not. Is it because of some psychological traits? Yes, to some extent yes, but primarily they rally up in large numbers because society says that this is pure heroism. Not because of religious because society, Palestinian society, they see on each and every wall in their neighborhood poster of shaheeds. Because their teachers in school educate them that shaheeds are the greatest thing and imams in mosques tell them. Because all Palestinian society says that if you are a shaheed we will love you and that is the most important area if we are looking at psychological ways to influence terrorism, to make terrorism stop or at least.

Thank you Boaz for inviting me and thank you Jerry for your interesting lecture and thank you for listening.

Ganor: thank you Ariel. We have here our masters class in terrorism, some of the students here, some of them that participated in my class on the phenomenon of the suicide attack can identify the resembling sides in our approaches and our differences in emphasizing the factors but I will not comment on your comments because then we would spend a whole day on that. I do believe that we agree on many more factors than we disagree but there are some obligations in this approach. I also, as a courtesy, to Israeli counter-terrorism activity I would not ask you to ask about your success in Israeli countering of adversary society, although I know what would be your reaction to that. Without further ado I would like to open the floor for comments and questions.

Question: A couple of quick questions for Dr Post. I am, just in your observation about the, role of robust interrogation, torture, and the mental aspect …

Ganor: Please present yourself, anyone that …

Question: I am a journalist, could you, what is your observation on the efficacy of embargoes and the role that they play in counter-terrorism?

Post: Well, in my very last slide when I was talking about the only way to eliminate terrorism was to eliminate democracy. I was intending to address exactly this question. I actually did an article for the new journal, Security and Democracy, called Crimes of Obedience, talking about the torture phenomenon. I thought it was absolutely appalling that in the same week that Sgt. Grainer was on trial for his role as torturer of the Abu Ghraib detainees that Alberto Gonzales was undergoing his confirmation hearings to be attorney general, he who spoke about how the Geneva Conventions were outmoded and how President Bush could avoid war crimes prosecution. Herb Kellman is a prominent Harvard social psychologist who did a study of the Myali massacre during the Vietnam War, and he concluded that three factors are necessary for a sanctioned massacre, and one can make a case that the torture at Abu Ghraib was indeed sanctioned. One: authorization, two: routinization, three: dehumanization. These were not just the acts of rogue lower level soldiers. They were doing what the system asked of them and was expecting them to do and the guards were “commended for preparing the subjects positively for a positive interrogation.” We have a wonderful gift for euphemisms, and if instead of asking the guards to prepare the detainees for a positive interrogation we asked them to violate the Geneva conventions and asked them to break down the resistance psychologically and physically of the subjects, people might not be so willing to obey the system. I saw that as a very serious breakdown of the fabric of society. I have no doubt that some useful information was elicited, but at what price? Who asked the question, if, not if but when, this goes public what will be the consequences of this? So I feel that it was dreadful, and I am unambivalent about this. Thank you.

Question: I have a question about the gendered approach, and if is goes how does that inform the counter-terrorism approach to the role of the family?

Post: A favorite graduate student, an American Muslim woman of Pakistani origins, woman, Farhana Ali, was presenting at conference this summer called “The Bomber Under the veil” She has been writing about the changing role of women in Islam, not just about the changing opportunities but in effect the equal opportunity, right to kill yourself opportunity. This relates to the question Boaz raised earlier about altruism. There is some data to suggest, and this isn’t so much quantitative as it is qualitative, from interviews, that for the women in particular they are imbued with a sense of altruism and there are doing this for their people.

Merari: I think in the Palestinian case it is quite the opposite.

Post: You are quite right. It is quite different.

Merari: Women are not imbued with a sense of interesting work on women, but should you like to comment perhaps. But women in the Palestinian case more often than not are persons that have problems with society, they are outcasts perhaps.

Post: To be sure.

Merari: They are volunteering to carry out suicide attacks, not always suicide attacks but attacks, you know, stabbing in attempt, to stab a border guard in Jerusalem or the police, and she knows that she will be caught but this is escape from her life problems, for her, quite often. Not great idealists, I mean some are.

Post: To be sure, that is the case for the so-called Chechen Black Widows, whose husbands have been lost, who have no prospects of a rewarding life ahead of them, and there are a disproportionate number of women suicide terrorists for the Tamil Tigers, in part because there is a security advantage: they are not going to be searched as carefully. But there is no one simple answer. Berko, for example, has also found the issue of altruism for her people raised by a number of her female interview subjects. .

Question: I would like your opinion about the following idea. Unlike other forms of conflict, terrorism depends on the co-operation of the victim because the casualty cost of terrorism is significantly lower than the standard cost of warfare on society. The question is, how much can we do to stop terrorism by simply not agreeing to pay the psychological price in our community considering that we are working against democracy? For example, if we created the conditions that wouldn’t allow for the advertising of events. If we have a policy, the government, the society, that took steps to avoid the expansion of the fear factor by not allowing the media reaction and so on and so forth. Do you think that would be beneficial in countering the effects of terrorism?

Post: Margaret Thatcher spoke of the media as the oxygen which is required by terrorism and after all we need to do, in that case, is turning our society into a totalitarian state with a controlled press, and we won’t have a problem whatsoever. This or course is inconsistent with a democracy. I do think the media plays a crucial role, especially the new media, the 24/7 cable channels, the internet and I don’t know how we could close that down. There was no terrorism in the Soviet Union until Glasnost and Perestroika because, to play off an old philosophical conundrum, if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? If you have a totally controlled press, and a terrorist attack occurs and it is not reported it is a failed terrorist attack. It is designed to have an impact on that other audience and the media is the vehicle but I think that is an awfully high price to pay, to shut down the media. Having said that, the media needs to be actively involved in all the simulations and political-military gaming work we do so that they understand that when they uncritically report they are serving as the megaphone for the terrorists.

Question: An interesting comparison on profiles would be between the terrorists and Ahmadinejad.

Post: You want me to compare Mahmud Ahmadinejad to the profile of a terrorist? Ahmadinejad is really a very interesting character and I will be describing him this afternoon at the Herzilia conference when I present a profile of him. I think what is crucial in understanding him is that he is a “twelver’ Shia and many of the actions that he calls for, such as his sponsoring of the Holocaust denial conference, the elimination of Israel from the face of the earth as an illegitimate state, to his promotion of a nuclear program, seem designed to produce chaos-the Shia twelvers believe that a period of chaos will precede the day of judgment, after which there will be a reign of eternal peace under Shia Muslims of course, and there is good data to suggest that Ahmadinejad is an activist Shia twelver Muslim. Meaning, if you can create chaos you can help advance the arrival of the Messiah, so in terms of the question, why is he doing all this? Why is he creating all this chaos? That might produce a smile upon the face of Ahmadinejad, in some ways, but I don’t really put him in the psychological company of terrorists. …

Merari: Jerry, if I can briefly add, to this, you said that terrorists are not crazy, well Ahmadinejad is crazy.

Post: Well, no, I said that I don’t see him as crazy, you have to understand the cultural context, and he comes across as quite, sophisticated in some ways. But he is the person reportedly, (and one of the problems is that we don’t have awfully good data) he is the person reportedly who purchased 500,000 pink plastic keys to put around the necks of the child martyrs going unarmed into combat and trained the legions of child martyrs in the Iran-Iraq War

Question: I wanted to know if you see any similarities between terrorist organizations with groups like the Mafia in the US?

Post: That is really a very interesting question Mitchell. I want you to know that some of the first research I did, before terrorists were easily available to interview, or at least I wasn’t able to interview them, was with three models. Youth gangs, organized crime and religious cults. All of which have something to contribute. You don’t have to look into a refugee camp, you can look into the ghettos in Washington DC to see the weakened family structure, the normalcy of firearms, the way one achieves honor is by being the most violent in the group etc. I think it is very useful model indeed. Also the religious cult where one totally takes on the guru as your interpreter of what is right and what is wrong and what is required and what is prohibited and members subordinate their individuality to it and I think all of these models are indeed quite useful.

Question: When I was a child I was indoctrinated to go into the army to do dangerous things with my life, things today that rationally speaking I don’t understand how I did it, but I want to know if you have looked at the similarities between what I have been through and what a terrorist has been through?

Post: Absolutely, I am often asked this question about basic training. What do we do in basic training? We teach people that it is patriotic to kill for a cause. We break down their resistance to their prohibition against killing and part of that is the group psychology that is promoted.

Merari: One addition, with your permission, usually soldiers are trained to stay alive and reach their friends. This is the main important point. Thinking about this guy as a soldier, no Israeli soldiers is trained to die, only to live.

Post: Well, as Barak was saying yesterday, being willing to die for your country is part of the basic philosophy, not being trained to die.

Question: I have a question about what Dr Merari said. You were talking about two different conditions. You were talking about political science approach and the psychological science approach, how do you feel about interdisciplinary approaches like the social movement theory? Do you think they can fill the gap?

Merari: Yes, to some extent of course. Social movement theory kind of bridges it but not all the way because social movement theory still deals with masses of people, group masses of people. Group of people, a community, a class, a race. But it does not deal with the question of why a certain individual joins the group, or why a certain individual is willing to take high risks where as others in the same movement are not, willing to take these risks. Social movement is really sociology really, social movement theory is really the area between sociology and political science, they are not in the area between sociology and psychology. I think, so you still need to bring in the psychological individual aspect into integrated with sociology with sociology and political science to understand it really. There is at the level of the group, the individual in the group and the level of the community mass, the mass of the community, the nation, even the nation under certain political situations. For example, Ted Robert Garr’s work historical work, why men rebel, why big communities rise up and Ted Gurr’s work was important, but he was in political science and we need all three elements.

Post: I might note that I still find very illuminating Hoffer’s work, The True Believer, which talks about how could so many follow Hitler and talks about how he manipulated the slime of discontented souls. I think that is a marvelous phrase and what you are saying Ariel concerns the individual in the group. What we really need to be looking at is that broader group and then within that group there is some data to suggest that the death of a brother or friend may move an individual from being in the group, a member of the culture of militant Islam, to be willing to make carry out an act of suicide terrorism. What pushes an individual over an edge? And it may be an individual who has precipitating circumstances in his own family or circle of friends.

I talked to some of your Dutch colleagues at the embassy in Washington who were studying the very disturbing issue of radicalism in the European Diaspora, in particular the Dutch Diaspora, the assassination of Theo Van Gogh, by a militant Muslim and this is a phenomenon that is very worrisome to our European neighbors. Somewhere between 80-85% of new recruits to radical Islam are coming from this Diaspora, sons and daughters of individuals who went to Great Britain or France or Spain or the Netherlands for a better life and found themselves confronted by their choice between giving up their life as a Muslim to join the host community. One of the recommendations of our committee at the Madrid summit was a necessity for on the one hand community programs to help integrate the émigrés while on the other hand respecting their culture.

Question: I was interested in what goes on in the mind of the terrorist in prison. What actually happens then? I mean, is there a chance of more aggression or radicalization? Especially with regard to Israel where Palestinians are being arrested on a daily basis and they are releasing terrorists, as a goodwill gesture, what exactly goes on in the mind of a terrorist in that case?

Post: I will respond partially but you will be in better position to answer this. Certainly with those who have long sentences there is a major social life within the prison which if anything reaffirms their identities. I found that there was a sense within those that have left there is a badge of honor for going back to society after having been in prison. Having said that, there is some interesting work being done now on rehabilitating terrorists, which is different from reprogramming, but in how to rehabilitate the committed terrorist is very challenging and I think there is long way to go in that direction. It is reaffirming their identity not necessarily challenging their identity. Ariel, is there anything you want to add?

Merari: Well, it is a multi effect. They are not radicalized in jail because they are sufficiently radicalized before. But they do not become more committed terrorists. They do get organized and they get technical training, how to do this, how to do that, they are part of an organization. There is a very tight organization of prisoners but interestingly, politically, they become more moderate rather than radicalized. If you look at Hamas people in jail, including to those sentenced to thirty life sentences I suppose are more moderate than their leadership, free. Why? For two reasons perhaps.

One, because they have daily contact with the prison staff. Yes, they are Jews, they are jailers and yes these are Palestinians, but they are still someone to person to talk. They have some contact to Israelis that is not all negative. Secondly, they want to get released. OK, so they are much, the, the Hamas prisoners in general would very much like to see an agreement between Hamas and Israeli government. They are more moderate …

Ganor: I think you mean pragmatic

Merari: Yes, you are right, not moderate, pragmatic. We are talking about the immediate future which is pragmatic, not moderate, perhaps all of them want to see Israel eventually destroyed but for now they are more pragmatic.

Question: I was curious if you mentioned your partner in the ICT program. I wonder if there are historical examples that, I was thinking counter-insurgency efforts in the Vietnam war the (something) that was designed to bring people over from the North Vietnamese army, the Viet Cong, to the South, to turn many of the people in the south fight against the north but that is counter-insurgency so I am wondering if you use any of these tactics in your terrorism program.

Post: One of the things, that I have been struck by, although rather belated, was I was invited by to my astonishment to CENTCOM to organize a conference on using psychological techniques to counter suicide terrorism. That was interesting, and I had several experts join me and what kind of bedazzled me after I was talking for about ten minutes, was that one of the senior military commanders said “Dr Post, you haven’t even mentioned the empowerment by terrorism to those who are underpowered, the pride to those who have been shame and have been humiliated. Is that not important to understand?” I said, facetiously, “Gee, you sound like a shrink.” The very issue of the long war, which is a fairly new addition to the vocabulary is an understanding of these processes, of how long it is going to take. I see in the military, in particular, the increasing need to understand a range of new approaches. when you talked about historical approaches, amnesties, there were a number of countries which used them quite successfully, Italy broke the back in many ways of the Red Brigades with the Pentiti program, Great Britain had the Supergrass program, the Basques were doing something of a witness protection program to giving plastic surgery and settling people with financial security in Latin America so there have been programs. And to pick up on something you said earlier Ariel, there is something of a there is kind of a new terrorism literature out there which Martha Crenshaw has done a nice job of attacking, which sort of acts as if all of the previous understanding concepts of terrorism no longer apply, as exemplified by Robert Pape of Chicago and Mark Sageman’s book on understand terrorist networks Terrorism is ever evolving, building on the past. . Certainly we believe quite strongly that there is quite a lot to learn from historicaly from programs that have worked and those that haven’t worked but it is necessary however to put each terrorist group accurately in their own political, cultural and historical context. We think quite crucially that their psychology must be at the heart of any program designed to counter them and it must be in that political/cultural/historical context.

Question: What do you think about moral judgment of terrorists, of their criminal aspect? What are the normative lives on the other side when they decide to be a suicide killer? In the same time the splitting…

Merari: Split personality

Question: No, the splitting of the moral judgment to be able to do this…

Post: It is their morality that they have subordinated their individuality to the clerical authority who defines this as being a higher morality so they define what they are doing as quite moral. I don’t see it as splitting.

Question: It is like the morality of the Nazis, that they can be really nice and have families …

Post: What Lifton calls the doubling phenomenon. That was what was compelling to me about the terrorist phenomenon I described on the plane, he did not have a qualm, he didn’t have an iota of empathy, he was doing his duty as a soldier against this dehumanized enemy.

Question: I am doing my PhD on the profiles of leaders of these groups and criminals and I found out that most of the research focused on terrorism and didn’t focus on psychology, I mean more of the security, economic, social and it is an honor to speak to you because most of them don’t use psychology, and I thought that perhaps it is much harder for us to, as human beings, to look at suicide attackers as an individual and to imagine the situation and I would like to hear your point of view about it and I can say that I think that they are doing the same thing because I got to interview almost twenty leaders of Hamas that are in the army prison and when I asked one of them, do you know that I could be one of the victims of the operations that you organized, and he says, no, of course not, you are not …

Post: You are different from them

Question: They do the separation like we do. Do you think that it is going that way?

Post: In the first place, you must get together with a good friend who is a forensic psychologist, and is in the audience today, Anat Berko, who did her dissertation, her book, on this very topic, and that is something that she ran into regularly, the importance of the capacity to have empathy with these individual. I have to say that every one I have interviewed, every one, I have come to understand the world through his eyes, I am still somewhat embarrassed that in Federal Court in New York where they tried the al-Qaeda terrorists, the terrorists whom I had interviewed and I was sitting right next to the victims, and he was in his jumpsuit and in shackles and he turned around and saw me and gave me a warm wave … it was a little bit disarming but I think it is absolutely imperative to get into their hearts and minds and psychology. That is the only way that we can really deal with them. In some of your work with the failed suicide terrorists if we can better understand what leads someone to back down at the last minute that is a theme that we have to trumpet out there to hopefully magnify the doubts of others and the only way is to get into their minds. So this is crucial and probably part of that impediment that you are talking about. We are all potentially terrorists, it is a very human phenomenon on one level under the right circumstances and its really terribly important not to just be talking about them. The need to have enemies is deeply rooted in human psychology and one has to be comfortable with one’s own psychology before one can really understand the other.

Ganor: I would like to take this opportunity, first of all to acknowledge and thank Anat Berko, who actually initiated this meeting of the day and thank you for that. I would like to thank again Ariel Merari for, once again, contributing an enormous wealth of knowledge for all of us and to Professor Post, who took this trip and found the time to visit us. I would like to take this opportunity and extend as a token of appreciation my book which not by coincidence is also dedicated to Professor Ehud Sprinzak so there is another common bond, so this is for you. And, since Ariel has it already, and since we all know that in the academic world that being a counter-terrorism expert you have to cover your head all the time, so I brought the ICT hat for both of you.

Thank you very much.

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More about the participants:

Dr. Jerrold M Post has devoted his entire career to the field of political psychology. During his 21 year career with the Central Intelligence Agency he founded and directed the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, an interdisciplinary behavioral science unit which provided assessments of foreign leadership and decision making for the President and other senior officials to prepare for Summit meetings and other high level negotiations and for use in crisis situations. Dr. Post initiated the U.S. government program in understanding the psychology of terrorism. In recognition of his leadership of the Center, Dr. Post was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit in 1979, and received the Studies in Intelligence Award in 1980. He received the Nevitt Sanford Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Political Psychology in 2002. Dr. Post has published widely on crisis decision-making, leadership, and on the psychology of political violence and terrorism, and recently has been addressing weapons of mass destruction terrorism: psychological incentives and constraints, as well as information systems terrorism. In His latest book, "The Mind of the Terrorist: The Psychology of Terrorism from the IRA to al-Qaeda" Dr. Post identifying and exploring three types of terrorism: national-separatist, social-revolutionary and religious-extremist. Analyses of beliefs and motives—often taken from the personal statements of members and leaders—illustrate how a psychologically normal person becomes an agent of extraordinary violence. According to Post, understanding the psychology and sociology of terrorists is vital in a true war on terrorism, which is, after all, often rooted in conflicting ideologies (~Publishers Weekly).

Prof. Ariel Merari is member and former chairman of the Department of Psychology at Tel Aviv University and Director of the Political Violence Research Unit. He has been a visiting professor at Berkeley and Harvard, and a Senior Fellow at the International Security Program of the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. He established Israel’s Hostage Negotiations and Crisis Management Unit and commanded it for more than 20 years. He has served as a consultant to various branches of several governments. Prof. Merari has responded to Dr. Post's lecture on the issue of the psychology of terrorism.

Dr. Boaz Ganor is the Founder and Executive Director of the International Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT), and Deputy Dean of the Lauder School of Government, Strategy and Diplomacy, IDC Herzliya.