THE TERRORIST PROFILE
today’s terrorists use rational political goals as a convenient vehicle to express psychological violence.
"AUTHORITARIANISM AND PATHOLOGICAL HATRED:
THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE OF THE MIDDLE EASTERN TERRORIST"
unlv.edu
THE TERRORIST PROFILE
Varieties of Authoritarianism
The seed of Isaac must be annihilated - Ji'had member
Let's kick those goddamned Arabs out of here or let's give them hell -- Kahana Hay member
Approaching the terrorist act as expressing a paroxysmal hatred of the Other (or of self in the Other), a guiding assumption of this research posited ethnocentrism and its affective corollaries as axial in the terrorist psychosocial profile. In this research, ethnocentrism was first conceptualized and operationalized following Adorno's (1951) work which defines it as an ideologized system -- a relatively stable and organized complex of hostile attitudes towards a particular group -- including exclusion, annihilation, subordination, negative opinions, and the use of “moral” values justifying such attitudes toward a collective Other. In contrast to Adorno, however, our notion of “group” is significantly expanded in that it includes not only formal sociological and pseudo-sociological entities which constitute the targets of ethnocentric hostility, but also sociological non-entities. In other terms, anything or anyone who is not “us” is necessarily “anti-us”. Accordingly, we have approached ethnocentrism as: (a) the inability to see an individual as such (b) the inability to engage another on the basis of his/her individual identity, and (c) the compulsion to prejudge him/her according to stereotypes attributed to the collectivity s/he is assumed to be a member of. Informed by Erickson's developmental theory of personality (1963, 1968, 1964, 1976) Gottschalk and Lefebvre (1995) have proposed a theory of the psychological etiology of ethnocentrism according to which a sequence of frustrations during the development of individual's basic psychological needs fosters a negative identity which is then projected onto a culturally and ideologically defined Other.
Our findings reveal that the tendency most frequently articulated by terrorists of both Muslim and Jewish groups is a virulent ethnocentrism and racism which lead to the dehumanization of the Other. In such a worldview, the Other is often described a subhuman who cannot be eligible for respect, consideration, or human rights. We were in fact astounded by the similarities in the Jewish and Palestinian constructions of their respective “Others”. Thus, whereas a member of Kahana Hay explains that “the Christian and Muslim faiths are perverted, distorted, man-made vulgarizations of sections of the Torah,” such a sentiment is exactly replicated by a Hammas member who argue that both Jews and Christians “have distorted the message of God.” These views constructing the religious origins of the Other are also used to reinterpret the recent past, the present and the future. Discussing the Holocaust, Palestinian respondents of all political stripes dismiss it as a “a Judeo-American invention,” an “exaggeration” (Islamic Ji'had), or “information issued by Jews and their allies”(Hammas). Such views are also instrumental in framing their current perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Thus, a PLO member claims with all seriousness that “Jews want to dominate the world,” that “all Jews are Freemasons,” that “Zionism is a Freemason ideology,” and that “Jews are the enemies of humanity.” A PFLP member adds another twist to this picture by stating that “Jews and capitalists are synonymous words,” and for a female member of the same group, “Jews are the only subhuman race on the planet.” While members of the Hammas frame the entire Jewish question as “an artificiality,” an issue that “does not exist,” and which, in any case, was “raised by rich and influential Jews in the West,” such sentiments are also expressed by a Kahana Hay respondent who simply argues that “there are no Palestinians.”
Such constructions have of course enormous consequences for the kind of engagement members of terrorist groups are likely to develop vis-a-vis their respective Others. Not surprisingly therefore, for a Hammas member, “there is no such thing as an innocent Jewish civilian,” and in the words of a PLO member justifying the killing of children: “their simply being Jews was a sufficient proof of their culpability.” In his vision, “Israeli children are baby scorpions; you kill them before they grow bigger.” Asked about the political logic of killing Jewish civilians in Europe, a PFLP member answers simply “They were Jews ... Killing Jews is O.K. Nobody likes them.” For a second member of that same movement, “A Jew is first and foremost a Jew and a nuisance. Hitler was right on this point.” In the words of a third female member of this group, “nobody wants Jews on their soil and everybody is happy to get rid of them.” A similar outlook is also shared by the Kahana Hay member who paint Arabs as “wild beasts,” “scum,” “lazy,” “primitive hateful cowards” for whom “stealing and murdering is a way of life.” As a free-lance Jewish terrorist also insists, he purposefully “wanted to kill innocent people.” The solution proposed by the Kahana Hay member is to “kick them out of here or give them hell.” Members of both ethnic groups unmistakably echo each other by interpreting the Others' very physical presence as an abomination, a soiling of the land, a polluting of a state of purity which could/will exist if those Others could only be disciplined, converted or forcefully removed.
Terrorists of all stripes display marked puritan conformist tendencies. Emphasizing that children must be disciplined for their own good, they also promote submission to authority figures, patriotism, homophobia, fear of too much freedom, and -- among male members of fundamentalist Islamic groups -- traditional views of women which are also highly charged with fears of her seductive and corrupting powers, a point we develop below. Whereas members of the Islamic Ji'had and Kahana Hay see free sexuality as decadent and homosexuality as a “crime,” “abomination,” or “sin,” they also articulate a similar distaste for the ideas of democracy and freedom. Positing that “Westerners have a notion of freedom that is in fact not freedom but slavery,” a Ji'had member adds that, in any case, “man cannot be his own guide and must be guided by God in the same way that a child is guided by his parents.” While a Hammas respondent insists that “man is weak and subject to bad influences,” for the Kahana Hay member also, “believing in democracy is believing in the wisdom of man above the wisdom of God,” clearly an irresponsible mistake. He believes instead that “there ought to be an elite of well-formed and organized leadership constituting a Sanhedrin of pious judges headed by a Jewish king who could guide the people out of its moral and political chaos in the way of the Torah...”
Subjects' insistence on absolute submission to just leaders and strict religious laws, and their disdain for sociopolitical organizations based on human decisions and democratic processes are also reinforced by an authoritarian aggression against those who do not share their vision. Such motivations not only encourage a mercilessly hostile construction of the ethnic Other but also of members of their own ethnic group who do not share their beliefs and/or who seek peaceful resolutions to the conflict. Thus, for a PFLP member, “Palestinian militants in the Peace Now movement are traitors whose faith is death. Jewish peaceniks are our preferred targets.” For another PFLP member, “Jewish peace activists pervert Palestinians into believing that living in peace together is not only possible but desirable. Those Jews are much more dangerous to our cause than Kach or Kahana Hay terrorists.” When told that 80% of the Palestinian population in the newly autonomous territories seem to support the peace process, a third PFLP member resolves this inconvenient fact by simply stating that “80% of my people are wrong and defeatists.” If members of secular and pseudo-revolutionary terrorist groups such as the PFLP justify an absolute intolerance for dissenting viewpoints on political, historical and strategic grounds, members of fundamentalist terrorist groups justify it on religious ones. For a Hammas member, “Arafat and the PLO are worse than non-Muslim enemies. His death will be violent and exemplary.” Or again from a leader of the same group, “people who violate Koranic laws know they are misbehaving and are a bad influence. They also know that in Islam, punishment must be an example.” As he adds,
A Muslim regressing to atheism is a fool, a traitor or a malicious heretic. It is a religious obligation to kill him/her. A Muslim becoming an atheist freely chooses to die but does not have the courage to kill himself by his own hands. For a pious Muslim, not killing such a person is sacrilegious.
In a similar vein, for the Kahana Hay member, “those not agreeing are ignorant of their own history and rights” and he proposes to “expel from Israel the non-Jews who don't want to live according to the Jewish laws pertaining to Gentiles living in a political and territorial Jewish entity.”
Inspired by a rigidly dichotomous view of a world populated by masters and slaves, oppressors and victims, strong and weak, terrorists believe that the Others are cunning and treacherous subhuman entities who can only understand the language of force and violence and who, in any case, must endure suffering for the sins of their parents, for their potential future ones, or for just being who they are. Accordingly, there is room for neither negotiation nor dialogue, and solutions to conflicts must by necessity be violent and brutal. For a PFLP woman,
Jews only understand violence and strength ... The Israeli peace effort is just a sign of weakness, there is thus no other solution but fight.
This sentiment is again advanced almost verbatim by a Kahana Hay member for whom “negotiating means that you recognize your weakness. If violence on our part did not solve the problem, it is because there was never enough of it.” As he continues,
Arabs don't have the same respect for life, peace, and democracy as we do. They understand talk about peace as weakness and fear. Arabs value strength and uncompromising determination.
The themes of power and strength are also frequent in the terrorist discourse, regardless of its language. While the free-lance Jewish terrorist justifies his murderous action as resulting from his being enraged by a “feeble government” guilty of “cowardice" and of “paralyzing” and “emasculating” an army which was once the “best and strongest in the world,” a PFLP terrorist insists that “a better world will arise when the weak of today becomes the strong of tomorrow and when he becomes the master of the one he was enslaved to.” Such tendencies are also articulated by an Islamic Ji'had leader who hopes that “when they'll be weak enough we'll be strong enough and shoot them away.” The terrorist discourse constructs human relations as a brutal zero-sum game played out between the powerful and the weak. In such a rigid system, there is no room for shades of gray, ambiguities, negotiations or power distribution. One must claim one camp or the other, and anything in between will be either converted, expelled or destroyed. As a PFLP member puts it, “the life of an indifferent bystander is worthless.”
Having delegitimized the Other’s history, human rights, and legitimacy, terrorist constructions also darken the picture by emphasizing two kinds of violence: the one the Others have inflicted or could inflict upon “us”, and thus, the necessity of inflicting it upon them. The Others’ perceived treacherousness and beast-like quality makes this necessity all the more persuasive. Violence then does not only constitute a means of resolving conflicts but also an axial principle organizing the terrorist’s worldview, a supreme tool enforcing a rigid categorization between the strong and the weak, the winners and the losers, the true from the false. Ultimately, as Gottschalk and Lefebvre (1995) suggest, this compulsive and exclusive utilization of violence as the only strategy constitutes the lethal articulation of psychological motivations; the political justifications are but convenient vehicles.
Varieties of Pathological Hatred
Fundamentalist Nightmares of Dangerous Purity 7
Because only a minority of those who hold fundamentalist views engage in terrorism, an effort was made to isolate those items which distinguish fundamentalist terrorists from non-terrorists. As a result, a theoretical distinction was introduced to distinguish “general fundamentalism” from “exclusionary fundamentalism”. The concept of “general fundamentalism” refers to the compulsive need to integrate and force Others to one's own value system and to make them at least externally identical to oneself. At some level, therefore, general fundamentalism still articulates a principle of some reciprocity: Once the world has been made morally and behaviorally homogeneous, its laws are the same for everyone. By comparison, “exclusionary fundamentalism” extols the physical elimination of Others without even wanting to convert them. If in general fundamentalism, the different Others remain pariahs as long as they have not converted to one's own faith, in exclusionary fundamentalism, the Other is unconditionally rejected as s/he can never become “one of us” (see appendix # 2).
Positing a universe organized by one true God and religion “which gives all answers to all questions,” the Ji'had member dismisses all other truths as erroneous, deceitful or downright lies. The goals of his movement is to make “all Palestinians go back to Islam,” after which “the whole world is to be Islamized.” As he also argues, “Muslim societies must cease to be secular,” and “governments of predominantly Muslim societies will be coerced” along the Islamic path. For a Hammas member also, a danger greater to Palestinians than Zionism or US intervention is “perversion” -- referring here to Western influences among Muslims. For a second member of the same group, beyond the radical transformation of Israeli society along Muslim parameters, their mission is to “make all Muslims obey God,” after which “Islam must dominate the world” -- a tendency which he sees as simply irreversible. As he explains, “there are no nations but already Islamized lands and still pagan countries to be Islamized.” For the Ji'had member, finally, “heterogeneity leads to anarchy, which leads to decadence ... A society organized around Islam is a society without conflicts.” Similar convictions attesting to this inability to acknowledge and accept heterogeneity and the existence of belief systems different than one's own are also articulated by the Kahana Hay member who argues that “a non-believing Jew is a mistaken Jew.” As such, the first step in his movement's mission is to force all Jews (at least those who choose to remain in Israel) to live by Noah's seven commandments; the second is “to impose them on the world.” In his view, “the world will be either entirely good or entirely evil,” and in any case, “there are no in-betweens.” In both cases therefore, subjects do not simply display overwhelmingly absolutist views of truth, but they have also taken upon themselves the particularly worrisome life project of enforcing them upon Others.
That psychological motivations rather than reasonable political aims fuel terrorist activities is further supported by an analysis of their visions of the present and their plans for the future. Indeed, rather than legitimizing the killing of others by advancing a vision where the people on behalf of whom they claim to fight could attain some sort of modest happiness, the future terrorists propose is a rather grim and severe totalitarian order. Punctuating their discourse with terms such as “absolute truth,” “power,” “strength,” “unacceptable difference,” “irreconcilable polarities,” “conspiracies,” “perversions,” “decadence,” “revenge,” “punishment,” and the redeeming “value of suffering,” the terrorist vision constructs a future which begs psychological exploration. Organized around the principles of severe religious justice administered by wise leaders, swift punishment executed by authority figures, sober discipline delivered by strong fathers, and strict obedience enforced on children and wives “for their own good,” such a vision evokes an everyday where thought and relations are strictly organized, where all ambiguity has disappeared, where disobedience is severely and publicly punished, and where all Otherness has been converted, expelled, or destroyed.
Non-Perspectivism
By non-perspectivism, we refer to a person's inability to recognize that the motivations which guide another’s actions may be different than one's own. Subjects' high scores on clinical scales measuring Paranoid, Psychopathic Deviate, and Hypomanic tendencies led us to hypothesize that one's suggestibility to the terrorist call might be importantly correlated with the level of identity development attained before engaging in terrorism. In other words, (a) are we all potential terrorists? or (b) is our suggestibility to the terrorist call inversely related to the developmental level of psychosocial and psychomoral identity? Common-sense and findings reported in existing research suggests a negative answer to the first question and a positive answer to the second one. According to our research as well as others, most terrorists started engaging in terrorism either around pre-adolescence or were born and raised in an environment which was at least sympathetic to terrorism. Based on a developmental psychology perspective, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that those who were raised in an environment suggestible to the terrorist discourse stayed imprisoned in a socio-cognitive egocentrism which prevented them from progressing toward the development of an individual-based legitimate positive psychosocial identity, and which stunted the ability to conceive that others could hold different perceptions of reality than oneself. It thus seems that the terrorist perspective incapacitates one to differentiate between one's internal and external affective world, between object and subject. While psychopathic deviance and paranoia are illnesses of the self, both disorders are, in psychosocial terms, forms of non-perspectivism.
With regard to this dimension, terrorists of both groups are again interestingly similar to each other. Here again, although a few terms are switched around, their discourse basically remains the same. Thus, for example, a Hammas member states that “Judaism is basically wrong because it does not seek to proselytize,” “European youth rebel because they do not have a true faith,” and the French government authorizes the building of mosques in various cities “not as a token of tolerance but as evidence of their doubting of their own faith.” For a PFLP member, “Israeli peace efforts signify that they begin to realize they're becoming weaker,” and for the Kahana Hay member, “for an Arab, to speak of peace and to agree to territorial concessions doesn't signify enlightenment but weakness and fear.” Whereas terrorists explain Others' actions by projecting their own motivations onto them, they also hold on to the belief that once these Others will be led to the terrorist's “truth”, they will quite naturally embrace it and reject their former mistaken beliefs. For example, the Ji'had leader believes that if people throughout the world “hear us and are open to the Message of Islam, they will willingly convert” because of a “deeply authentic human need which is to belong to a faith they know to be true.” For the Kahana Hay member, those who don't agree are mistaken because “they have not yet been allowed to receive the message of the Great Rabbi.” In this social psychological “space”, s/he who doesn't share my wants, beliefs and distastes is wrong and cannot possibly be allowed to retain this difference. Confronted with my Truth, the Other will assuredly understand and accept it, and s/he who refuses will just have to disappear.
Necrophilia
Erich Fromm (1976, 1973) distinguishes between two elementary personality orientations polarized on one continuum and competing for the same pool of psychological resources. The biophile orientation is the creative, constructive, communicative, humanistic pole of the personality which is attracted by life and movement. Based on the "being" rather than the "having" mode (1976), this orientation combines optimistic attitudes directed towards the present and the future, beliefs in the inherent wisdom and sociability of human beings, and the refusal to hierarchize humans according to arbitrary emotional positive and negative axes. This orientation can admit sacrificing oneself on behalf of cherished values or faith, but never and under no circumstance can it accept the sacrifice of others on behalf of one's own value or belief system. The biophilic orientation is not simply non-fundamentalist and non-exclusionist, but represents their very antithesis. It is an orientation dominated by the love of life. In contrast, the necrophile orientation is the stagnating, autistic, self-destructive pole of the personality which is attracted by death and the past. According to Fromm, this orientation is manifested by one's preference for conflictual and pessimistic interpretations of interaction, and a preference for brutal and expedient solutions rather than for patient negotiations. In this orientation, death dominates life, having supplants being, the letter of the Law displaces the principle of Justice, the Nation is more important than Society, Class is more relevant than People, and Color is more salient than Person.
In addition to various themes connoting authoritarian submission and aggression, terrorists also often articulate necrophilic tendencies where the desire for violent revenge, the celebration of suffering and death is frequent. Thus, members of both Palestinian and Jewish groups echo each other's voices in their stated desire to inflict “suffering” and “bitterness” on the Other in order to “teach them” a lesson. Whereas a free-lance Israeli terrorist declares he wants “to make them suffer like they make us suffer” and to purposefully “hit innocent people,” a Hammas leader echoes such dispositions by claiming that “through his fighters, Allah punishes the enemy by striking at what he cherishes most -- his children -- so that the source of his love should become the source of his misery.” As a Kahana Hay member also adds, “we'd rather dies for a real Jewish kingdom than be annihilated by Muslims or live in sin.” Another PFLP member perhaps most eloquently summarizes this tendency by simply stating that “ultimately it is our violent death that gives sense and value to our life.” And if this sentiment may sound courageous as a slogan, when placed alongside the other tendencies mentioned above, it becomes clear that this death-wish through the destruction of others is expressive of psychological motivations rather than being instrumental to a political agenda. As remarked above, such an agenda leads to a rather grim yet familiar dystopia which is only comfortable because it is strictly organized, violently maintained, and purged of all ambiguity.
A Gendered Order
Already in 1933, Jung established the existence of an imago, complementary gender identities in the human unconscious whose repression and denial produced identity-tension and anxiety. Since 1974, Bem and her colleagues have experimentally established that subjects who rated highest on her scale of androgyny displayed the most psychological equilibrium and social adaptation. In contrast, subjects whose gender identity was highly conforming to traditional stereotypes fared much lower on such skills. Like Jung, she concluded that androgyny is the most adaptive personality orientation in society -- even a traditional one -- and the most valid and reliable indicator of psychological health and personality integration. In contrast, fundamentalist terrorists depict a strictly dichotomous gender hierarchy and articulate a vision of gender relations which is fraught with hostility and danger. For a Hammas member, "nude women constitute a temptation to rape," and in any case, "her role is to stay home, take care of the children, and be materially taken care of by her husband." In his view also, the husband should "punish his wife the same way he punishes his children...out of love, to make them obey." As he continues, |
