Thread: What makes terrorists?

I have been thinking hard to find an answer to this question for a while now. I came up with some observations which I'd like to share and see if other posters agree.

After all, nobody gets out of bed one day and says, "I want to bomb a bus".

Just imagine if one day a foreign army invades your homeland and drives you and your family out of your home at gun point and tells you to leave with just the clothes on your back you and your parents and siblings are thrown out with nowhere to go. You wind up in a makeshift shelter on some barren hills and you have to scratch for your sustenance. Your mother alongwith siblings are crying. YOur father is frail and looks hopeless and your siblings are cold and scared everyday. Many other people in similar circumstances join you. They were all driven out of their homes by the foreign power. There's no water to drink, no sewers, no electricity, no schools and no doctors to help you or your parents / siblings. Imagine living in such conditions for years and growing up in squalor. Then think of how you would feel if you were not allowed to squalid camp without showing an identity card to the soldiers who surround your miserable tin-roof town. The humiliation would be over-whelming.

The only jobs you can find are working in lands that were seized from your parents years before. You labour in the fields and look at the shiny new houses on the land that had been in your family for generations. The people who live there were born in the West and have taken your land with no other excuse than, "God gave it to us". You're a second class citizen with no citizenship rights. Perhaps you join with some of your friends and decide to fight back to regain your land. The soldiers, however, are equipped with tanks and machine guns while all you have are stones or small arms. You lob rocks at the checkpoints in frustration while the soldiers gun down your friends mercilessly. If you get arrested, you are sent to a prison where you're legally tortured and held without trials for years.

Meanwhile, your baby sister has died of malnutrition, your uncle's land was recently seized, your cousin's house was bulldozed to the ground, the ramshackle schools are sealed shut, and chances for any kind of future looks grim. The soldiers laugh at you and you see on the side of suply boxes in the prision storeroom, the words "made in America". Your anger at the soldiers and their people is so great that you begin to transfer some of it to those who are supporting them.

The invaders bomb your whole neighbourhood, storm in your house and rape your 14 years old sister and then kill the whole family before tourching them. You have no one to go to, you're miserable and have no hope for justice. You don't have any army to fight the invaders, you don't have any hope of organised resistance. Then you think about how to exact retribution, and individual acts of violence such as bombings come to mind. Thus, a terrorist is born.