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What Makes a Terrorist?

(City Journal) James Q. Wilson - To cope with terrorism, my colleagues felt, one must deal with its root causes. I was not convinced. My doubts stemmed from my own sense that dealing with the alleged root causes of crime would not work as well as simply arresting criminals. German and Italian authorities, faced with a grave political problem, decided not to change root causes but to arrest the terrorists. Within a few years the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades were extinct. But Islamic terrorism poses a much more difficult challenge. These terrorists live and work among people sympathetic to their cause. Those arrested will be replaced; those killed will be honored. Imagine what it would have been like to eliminate the Baader-Meinhof gang if most West Germans believed that democracy was evil and that Marxism was the wave of the future, if the Soviet Union paid a large sum to the family of every killed or captured gang member, if West German students attended schools that taught the evils of democracy and regarded terrorists as heroes, if several West German states were governed by the equivalent of Fatah, and if there were a German version of Gaza, housing thousands of angry Germans who believed they had a right of return to some homeland.
2004-01-14 00:00:00
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