>> I'd like to welcome you here
today for Scott Atran's lecture,
Looking for Al Qaeda, the,
does it say it up there?
Oh, it doesn't have a subtitle here,
The Evolution of Terror Networks.
Scott's current academic home is in Paris where
he's the Director of Anthropological Research
at the Centre National de
la Recherche Scientifique,
but he's also a very well known figure around
the campus here at the University of Michigan.
Over the years, he's had appointments
at ISR, at the Anthropology Department,
the Psychology Department as
well as here at the Ford School.
He's written many, many papers
and 5 books covering topics
in anthropology, psychology, sociology.
And his work has been widely
cited in major media outlets.
His latest book will be published
by MIT Press in March.
It's titled The Native Mind and the
Cultural Construction of Nature.
In it, he and his co-author, Douglas Medin,
draw in nearly two decades of cross-cultural
and developmental research to examine
the relationship between how people think
about the natural world and how they act on it,
and how these two phenomena are
affected by cultural differences.
He was here on campus this past academic year
and taught a very well received course here
in the Ford School called Transnational
Terrorism, Religion and The Limits of Reason.
We're really delighted to have him back
here today to deliver this public lecture.
We will try to leave some time at the end of
the lecture for your questions and we hope
that you will then, after that, join us for our
reception and more conversion after the lecture
in the hall just outside
there, outside the auditorium.
So with all of that, I now
welcome Scott Atran to the podium.
Scott. [Applause]
>> Thanks.
I'm glad to be back here.
I'm going to walk a little so I'm going to move
this like this so I can see a little better.
Some of these slides I'm
going to go through fast
because Bob wouldn't let me shorten my
presentation 'cause he said we had work to do.
So it's a little bit long.
And so don't read the slides
unless I really stop on them.
I'm going to use them sort of
these props to keep me going.
This is a scene from the Madrid trial
which I attended, a very interesting trial.
This will give you a picture of sort of what,
what a group of terrorist look like, right?
And there's nothing terribly
informative about that.
And in fact these guys are
pretty much a bunch of losers.
Is Qaeda, or its viral movement, an existential
threat to the United States or anybody else?
And my answer is not unless we make it so and
we're doing a very good job of making it so.
On October 25th 1962, there was a vote
in a nuclear submarine about whether
to launch nuclear weapons
against the United States.
United States didn't know at the time that
Soviet Premier had given operational control
of nuclear weapons to the submarine commanders,
but release of those weapons depended upon a
unanimous vote by the 3 commanders of the sub.
Two voted to launch them, one named
Vasili Arkhipov, probably saved the world.
He deserves 5 Nobel prizes.
There was an existential threat at the time.
There were tens of thousands of nuclear
weapons, each one on the average
about 10 times more powerful than
the one that destroyed Hiroshima,
and could have destroyed hundreds of
millions of people within 90 minutes.
Nothing remotely like that exists today.
Nothing in the wildest dreams of
these guys could compare to that.
With the reaction of the United States, I
consider it to be fairly hysterical one,
has led to the growth of this movement
around the world to where it has become now
on the verge of becoming
truly dangerous in places
like Pakistan, which does have nuclear weapons.
What we're witnessed to do-- excuse me.
What we'll witness today is a sort
of leaderless decentralized Jihad.
There are no leaders, there's
no command and control.
It has the properties of networks, and of course
networks are very different from hierarchies.
Hierarchies have command and control.
They have a delegated responsibilities,
networks are flatter,
they are loser, they are more flexible.
They are also much more reliable to be
infiltrated and disrupted than are hierarchies.
However, like criminal networks,
terrorist networks overcome this problem
by having very thick personal ties
especially ties based on kinship
and friendship, which overcome that.
In addition, terrorist networks defer from
criminal networks, gangs, drug cartels,
by the fact that the people who belong
to them are revolutionaries in the sense
that they are committed to something
that they're willing to sacrifice
for that goes beyond their material interests.
You have to ask yourself, why do revolutions win
out against much more powerful
resource rich adversaries?
And the reason is basically because of
the commitments they're willing to make,
of the sacrifices they're willing to
suffer in order to achieve their goals.
And that's what makes revolutions
very difficult to wipe out.
And the Jihad is a revolutionary movement.
It is part of a massive transnational
media-driven, political awakening
that has a fairly simple message.
A message that Muslims everywhere
under attack and that justice
in the world can only be brought
about by the violent overthrow
of the current world [inaudible].
I'm not going to go into the formal
properties of these networks.
Let me just give you a little notion
of what the Jihad is all about.
People often conflate Wahhabi,
Salafi, Jihadi, Arab, Muslims.
The Jihadis are not Wahhabis in general.
Wahhabi movement is a purest Salafi
like movement, fundamentalist movement,
restricted pretty much to Saudi Arabia that
is devoted to the Saudi regime and has been
for quite some time, does not preach
the violent overthrow of the government,
and does not preach attacks against
fellow Muslims except for Shia.
The Salafi movement is a much more general
purest movement similar to fundamentalism
in the United States, but it would be
wrong to equate the Jihadi movement
with the Salafi movement in
general just like it would be wrong
to quite the Christian identity movement
with say Christian fundamentalism
or William Peers [phonetic] and his
brand of militant white supremacism
with the Christian fundamental--
fundamentalist movement in general.
This is a movement which can best be
described as the Takfiri movement.
The Takfiri movement grew up in Egypt in
the 1970s, first in the fairly benign form
under Shukri Mustafa and preach Takfir
W'al Hijra, which means excommunication
and withdrawal, the idea was to emulate of
the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina
where he withdrew with his friends, he
regathered forces in order to go out again
to spread the word of Islam
and eventually conquer Mecca.
The original Takfiri movement
was a movement of withdrawal.
It based much of its ideology on
the writings of a marginal leader
of the Muslim brotherhood name Sayyid Qutb
who had spent time in the United States.
He was hanged by Gamal Abdel Nasser
in 1966 and his message of Jahiliyyah
of impurity having swept into the Muslim world
was having an enormous echo among students
in Egypt at the time especially
after the 6th day war and the defeat
of the Egyptian armies and
the humiliation that caused.
When Mustafa died in 1978, the Takfir
wal-Hijra movement turned violent.
The students who were not originally part of
the movement were imprisoned at the same time
as Shukri Mustafa, and who are radicalizing
then drew upon his teachings about withdrawal
but also argued that it was right and good
to kill fellow Muslims who had become kafir,
who had become infidel and
could be excommunicated.
In 1980, they formed their first movement,
it was called the Tanzim al-Jihad,
one of the 6th M years of the Cairo section
of that movements name was Ayman al-Zawahiri
who had since become the sort of number 2 of
Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda itself is a development
of this branch of the Takfiri Movement.
Almost all of the leaders, the senior leaders
of the Al Qaeda movement that began coalescing
around Bin Laden in the summer
of 1988, were Egyptian.
And the Egyptian core of Al Qaeda is this
Takfiri core is what made Al Qaeda what it is.
The only difference is that under Bin
Laden's tutelage in the mid 1990s,
the focus of the Jihad went from attacking
apostate governments within the Muslim world
to a cat tacking what they thought was
the root cause of the continued existence
of those governments which was the far enemy,
meaning the United States and its allies.
Now the first, I'm going to give you some stats
of the first wave of this movement in Al Qaeda.
Our sample is 439 from Al Qaeda,
164 from the Jemaah Islamiyah
which is affiliated organization from Southeast
Asia, and from recent sample of Saudi jihadis,
who were not explicitly parts
of Al Qaeda given to me
by the Minister of Interior of Saudi Arabia.
And what we find is Al Qaeda members are older
on the average than other members of the Jihad.
They are also likely to be better educated.
They are-- the leadership is mostly skilled,
the members who actually do the attacks tend
to be less skilled, but in any event they're
more skilled than on other members of the Jihad.
And the plurality among those
who's skilled is that of engineer.
Engineer is the largest category
within the Al Qaeda movement,
an occupation followed by medical doctor.
In terms of nationality, Al Qaeda
itself is an expatriate movement.
That this is a Diaspora movement,
like many revolutionary movements including the
Palestinian movement, the IRA formed initially
in the Diaspora not in the countries of origin.
The other movements of course tend to
be much more localized than national.
In terms of income, Al Qaeda also has a higher
average income than this other movements.
And in terms of marital status,
most are married.
You can check the testosterone
theory about the virgins by the way.
I mean no one dies for virgins, that's a
sexual fantasy that the west has by politicians
and pundits, but at least within that
part of the world, I've never come up,
and I interviewed these guys all the
time, I never come up with anybody
who is remotely interest than dying for virgins,
probably interest in getting away from sights.
The new wave of Takfiri terrorism
is very different.
The new wave that tends to be much more
marginalized in their societies, poor,
less educated and much more likely to
be involved with criminal networks,
and that's a fairly reason phenomena.
At far as Al Qaeda itself, there
used to be about a thousand members
of Al Qaeda mostly built around
this Egyptian core of Takfiris.
There are maybe 100 less, 100 left
that's a reduction by an order
of magnitude, most of them are in Waziristan.
There are about a dozen small mobile
camps with about 6 people in each one
and a trainer, sometimes in the system trainer.
The largest one is a place called
Mir Ali in Northern Waziristan.
It's commander is a guy named
Abu Ubaydah al-Masri
who was the former Al Qaeda representative
for Nuristan and of course there were openings
in Al Qaeda after the United States attack
and he filled up one of those openings.
And he's a really dangerous guy.
The only, really significant Al Qaeda
plot since the bombings in Tunisia
in 2002 has been the airplane
plot, which is why you have
to put your toilet kits in plastic containers.
That was a very serious plot.
He was going to blow, they were going to
blow up 20 airliners over the Atlantic
and at very, came close to fusion.
That's the only one.
There are a couple of other smaller ones in
places like Copenhagen that have existed.
But for the most part, there are
very few true Al Qaeda plots,
none have been successful since 2002.
Most of the Al Qaeda people don't
know who the terrorists are,
couldn't communicate with
them even if they did know.
Let me just give you an idea of what
terrorist networks are like in terms
of trying to join up with Al Qaeda.
Most terrorist are caught
trying to link up with Al Qaeda.
In fact, trying to link up with something
that pretty much doesn't exist anymore.
Young people from all over try to
get Afghanistan and Pakistan to find,
make their way into Waziristan or other parts
of the border of the frontier to get training.
And they find that most of the people who are
waiting to accept them are intelligence agents
from the Pakistani authorities
or even American agents.
Some of them get there to a sort of a silk road
that is they know somebody who knows someone,
who may have had a relative, who have may
have been in the training camp one day
and they pay their own way, the people
who did the Crevice plot, for example,
the plot to blow up Heathrow Airlines, which was
headlined in the Boston Globe and New York Times
and Lumondes [phonetic], Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda
plot foiled were actually a bunch of friends
who decided to go and do something.
They paid 3500 euros to get in an apartment,
they finally found the traitor, a traitor,
a trainer, who was a friend of
a relative, who trained them.
They thought they were going to go to Kashmir
where the action was and the trainer said,
you know, why don't you do
something back where you come from?
And so they went back home, and if you look at
their e-mails they're sort of, it's ridiculous.
You know, one would say, how much of the
ammonium nitrate was I suppose to mix?
I forgot what they told us.
And that's about the level at
which these plots have carried out.
The reason that these organizations are
hitched up to criminal organizations now is
because the United States
has been largely successful
at stopping large scale money
transfers between these groups.
So you go where the money can be found.
And where can money be found
that isn't traceable?
In criminal networks.
It's not that the Jihadi's search for
the criminals, it's just that that's
where the network exists where they can ride
piggyback and get the sorts of ammunition
and arms and funds they need to
do the actions they want to do.
They're mostly self-mobilized,
self-generating guys who sit around, talk,
smoodge and decide they want
to do something in life.
There are no recruiters to Al Qaeda, there's
never has been any recruiters to Al Qaeda.
There's no recruiters gone to Europe, there
are no recruiters who go to Saudi Arabia.
Al Qaeda used to be like a funding
agency like the NSF or the NIH.
You put in an application, Al
Qaeda would accept maybe 15
to 20 percent if they thought it was good.
They'd give you some money, give you some
advice, may be try to find a suicide bomber
or [inaudible] but that was basically
the extent of the involvement.
At good cases, the Hamburg plotters,
Muhamed Atta and his friends.
We spent a lot of time with their
friends, their neighbors, their family.
Now why did these guys self radicalize?
Well, in the 1990s, they were
students at the technical university
in the Hamburg, suburb of Hamburg.
The interesting thing about them
was they were all middle easterners.
That means they were doubly alienated.
All the others were either German,
Christians, or Turkish and Moroccan Muslims.
So these were the Middle
Eastern Muslims who got together.
They also broke the Al Qaeda pattern.
They were bachelors.
They started talking to one another, eating
with one another, getting the haircuts
with one another, praying with one another
and then they'd started to live together.
The neighbors described 20 mattresses
that play stunk because like many Takfiri,
people trying to emulate the profit and his
friends as they withdraw from Mecca to Medina,
they would taken everybody from the
neighborhood, anybody who is passing through
and they'd start self radicalizing together.
Then they wanted to do something.
Islam was under attack everywhere,
they want to go to Chechnya,
didn't work out, they tried to go to Kosovo.
The Alabanian said get lost, and they
were lost themselves about what they do.
Someone came up with an idea, why don't you go
to Afghanistan and find out what's going on.
They eventually made their way to
Afghanistan where Khalid Sheikh Muhammed,
who himself had just come into basically Al
Qaeda because his proposal had been accepted
by Bin Laden and some of the others to blow
up something in the United States to sort
of rehash the plot that he had
tried out in the early 1990s.
And basically he said, "Hey
boss, look what we've got.
We got Europeans who don't need visas to get
into the United States, who can speak English
who can get-- who are, can mix easily in
European-American Society, let's use them."
So again, the idea is Al Qaeda didn't go looking
for them, they went looking for Al Qaeda,
even the sort of err plot Al
Qaeda was not something that came
from any kind of command and control network.
It's now taking place over the internet, okay?
You've got 3 high school buddies in
Canada, a few more in the United States,
couple of guys in Denmark and Sweden,
a guy sitting in his basement,
calls himself Irhabi 007, Terrorist 007.
Now these guys have met each other, I mean,
the high school buddies knew one another,
friends in America knew one another, but
over the internet they developed a chat room,
they decided they're going to blow up the
Canadian Parliament, they're going to blow
up the American Embassy in
Bosnia, of all places.
And you know what, they actually get together
for the first time at the airport in Bosnia
where intelligence authorities
have been following them.
They're arrested with suicide belts, AK
47s and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
What that tells you is anybody can become
a terrorist any time, any place today.
You don't need recruiters, they never did.
The new wave of terrorism is
about youth culture, okay.
It's not about the Koran,
never was about the Koran.
About 70 percent of the people who
joined the Jihad are Born Again.
They have no formal religious education,
they don't even come from religious families.
They come late in life and they have very little
knowledge or even interest in the Koran itself.
Again the message from where
I've been, you know, jungles of--
remote islands in Suluwasi or Borneo to
Morocco or London or the suburbs of Paris',
Islam is under attack, we've
got to do something.
It's a flat message in a fairly flat world.
Now, how do you change youth culture?
That's a big problem.
Not bombing these people
and hammering it, you know,
like and spreading mercury all over the place.
How do you deal with young people in search
of something greater than themselves?
And what I'm going to show you now is that
no one's really done any control studies.
But when you look at controls, what you find
is tens of millions of people are sympathetic
to the Jihad and these notions
of universal justice.
Very few people, 2400 people in all in Europe,
3000 in Saudi Arabia, less in other place
of the world have actually
committed themselves in some way
to violence, it's a very small proportion.
And you know what the greatest
predictor is of who will commit violence
versus who won't, does anybody have any idea?
[Inaudible remark] What?
[Inaudible remark] No.
The greatest predictor is when
they play soccer together.
Whether they play soccer together,
whether they're paint ball buddies,
whether they're bodybuilding
buddies, whether they're friends.
No one ever does it alone, okay?
And as far as violence is
concerned, you know, we did studies.
So far as I know the only
studies of humiliation,
people who are humiliated don't commit violence.
They're count.
People believe they're responding because
others they may love or be committed to,
they feel are humiliated but people who
are humiliated don't commit violence.
We regularly find a negative
correlation between them.
>> What about Khaled Qasim [phonetic]?
>> Khaled Qasim is a loner.
He has nothing--
>> That's what I mean.
You we're talking about [inaudible].
>> Yeah, he's a crack-pot loner.
>> Okay.
>> This is-- these people have
no criminal records to speak of,
fairly well-educated, poverty
isn't a big factor.
They spend a normal distribution,
there's nothing in their individual psyches
that's different from any of us, okay?
Really it has nothing to do with
individual personality factors.
It has to do with a small group dynamics,
the patterns of friendship and of kinship
and of neighborhood and of common activities
which determine who will join the Jihad
and whether or not they'll make it happen.
It's not about hierarchical organization,
command and control, recruitment
or brainwashing, there's none of that.
There's no brainwashing in the Jihad.
It's about fairly flat and fluid networks of
friends, families, neighbors, schoolmates,
workmates, soccer buddies, camp buddies,
body-building buddies, pin-ball buddies,
who self-radicalize in groups
and go looking for Al Queda.
And I'm going to give you some case studies,
some of the sort of famous case studies.
This notion that there are cells, you know, you
hear guys like George Tenet or the president
or anyone else talking about sleeper cells,
does anybody have any idea how many sleeper
cells there's been in the United States.
Okay, there's been exactly one sleeper
cell in the history of United States.
That was Colonel Rudolf Abel who was sent
by the Russians in the 1950s in an exchange
for Francis Gary Powers who was shut down
in the U-2 flight over the Soviet Union.
That's it, that's the only
sleeper cell that's ever existed.
Again, this is pretty much a fantasy.
And this notion that there are cells, there's
command and control, there's hierarchies,
there's bureaus, there's offices,
there's the chief of military planning,
there's the chief of operations, this is
simple bureaucratic mirroring by people
who know nothing other than their own
bureaucratic lives, who don't see things other
than through the lenses of their own lives.
You know, I get it from everybody, this
is, you know, what the Moroccan police give
that I can give you, what the Saudi's give
me, what the Indonesians give me, what--
you know, basically, bureaucrats interpret
the world in terms of bureaucracies, okay?
With structures and hierarchies and
all this has nothing to do with it,
which makes it a hard problem to deal with,
that these are the guys you
entrust to deal with a problem.
Same thing with Al Queda in the Maghreb.
Basically this new range of attacks in
North Africa is guys who apply to Zawahiri
and Bin Laden to become Al Queda, that
actually they have problems with Al Queda.
Al-Queda and the group Salafis
pull up Shaykhul Islam [phonetic]
and the other North African
groups who are always in conflict.
But it's a big logo now.
Zarqawi himself, he was a
competitor of Bin Laden.
There was no love lost between them,
but it's such a big brand name now,
everybody wants to belong, and so they
applied, it took about 6 months for the word
to actually get into the frontier regions.
And then, you know, Bin Laden's aware,
said, "Okay, call yourselves Al Queda."
And all of a sudden there's Al Queda,
the Maghreb, they do a suicide attack
for the first time and the headlines across
the world is "Al Queda in North Africa."
But again, basically they've got the consent of
somebody to use a brand name, same with Europe.
Let me just go through a couple of examples.
One is the Jemaah Islamiyah.
This is a very interesting organization.
It's an outgrowth of a Islamic
Revolutionary Nationalist Movement
that first emerged in the 1930s in Indonesia.
Helped plead Indonesia to independence
against the Dutch, fought the Japanese.
The leader was executed by Sukarno, and the
militant brand grew up during the 1970s founded
by 2 clerics whose ancestors were from
the Hadrawmat, that's the same area
where Bin Laden's father came from.
The Hadrawmaties have been in that
part of the world for 4 or 500 years.
There's a huge network of kinship relations
and commercial relations among Arab Seafarers
that have been to that part of the
world for hundreds of years and Al Queda
and the Al Queda movement is parasitic
on those pre-existing relationships.
Well, within this movement, there was a
split between the so called the Sufi's,
and this goes back to the
Hadrawmat back 4 or 500 years.
And those who wanted a Salafi version of the
Darul Islam, that is no music, no mysticism,
no metaphorical interpretations of God, very
similar to the splits between the iconic class
and the Catholics in the 9th and
10th century in Western Europe.
And they originally modeled themselves on the
Gamaat Islami, which was one this Takfiri groups
that emerged in Egypt in the 1980s under
the spiritual guidance of the blind sheikh,
Omar Abdal Rahman who's now in prison
in the United States for helping
to plan blowing up New York City landmark.
Well the Egyptian Islamic group
hasn't done anything in years
because after the Luxor massacres in late 1990s,
their relatives and friends in the Upper Egypt,
where they were from, basically said, "Hold off,
this is enough, we don't want anymore of this."
Since then there's not a peep out of these guys.
But this had split off with the other group
headed by Zawahiri who was no longer embedded
in his society, who was now in Afghanistan
and who basically became more apocalyptic
in his vision saying, "Yeah, you know,
let's carry out any attack possible
and who cares about retaliation."
So at this time the Jemaah Islamiyah, who had
been part of the Jihad against the Soviets,
decided to ally itself with Bin Laden.
This is about the time that the original
Islamic group of which they had been mo--
on which they had been modeled, decided
to basically call everything off.
And they solely developed an organization in
1988, 1989 when they we're invited back, well,
when they came back here after Suharto's
fall that became increasingly Takfiri.
After Sunkarno's death, the founder
of the Jemaah Islamiyah died in 1999,
his sidekick, Abu Bakar Bashir took over.
And Bashir was sort of an oracular leader.
He wasn't an operational hands-on guy.
And so he allowed in the sense the
Takfiris within the group to emerge.
Now, almost all of descriptions
of the Jemaah Islamiyah are based
on these sort hierarchical
descriptions that you get officially,
through the Jemaah Islamiyah movement or through
the intelligence analyst or through the paper.
Now, we've worked a long time among our
consultants, the head of Australian intelligence
who tracked the Jemaah Islamiyah, worked
closely with a strike team leaders
of the Indonesian government
who've tracked these guys.
And we have, sort of, I can't say and
I-- University of Michigan payroll,
but as consultants, our guys who were
former leaders of the Jemaah Islamiyah.
And by, I spent some time interviewing
the amir in prison in Jakarta in 19--
in 2005, and this is what we found.
The organization predicts nothing.
There are 4 things that predict, who will
belong to an attack group and the likelihood
that they'll continue to belong to attack.
The first is what class during the
Soviet-Afghan War and then the original
and the immediate aftermath
that they graduate from.
They would go to the Abu Sayyaf
training camp near Peshawar.
Beginning in 1986 with Zukarnaen, who was a
sort of military leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah,
and depending on the year and their cohort, they
would form groups that kept together ever since.
The second greatest predictor is
marriages, and this refined again and again.
There are 30 marriages, okay, distributed
over 10 attacks, and think about it.
You know, these films, like the Godfather,
we see all these plots being hatched
in the marriage at the beginning of the
film, that's exactly how it happens,
because marriage is a great places to
hatch plots, much better than mosques
because you got every body there, they're all
relaxed, they can talk about whatever they want,
no one's really listening,
great place to do Jihad.
The third greatest predictor is actual kinship
relationships, brothers, sisters, cousins.
These are the clusters, family
clusters of some of the principal actors
in the attacks of the Jemaah Islamiyah.
These are the family ties over different
attacks, AE is the Australian Embassy bombing,
Bali is the Bali Attack of 2002, the second
greatest terrorist attack after 9/11.
PAR is the bombing of the Philippines
Ambassador's Residence in 2000.
And you can see again there are some fixed
family ties running through these things.
This is just the family ties
in one particular attack.
The Bali bombing of 2002 was
perhaps the most interesting
because it's the most lethal
and the most famous attack.
It's what made people aware
that Jemaah Islamiyah existed.
I mean these guys had been
existent for some time,
and even the intelligence authorities
didn't even know they were around.
Again, because in a little bit like drug
cartels or even gangs, it's family groups,
groups of friends, people who've
gone to school to one another.
This is the, a diagram of the Bali
attack, the different operations groups,
the suicide bombers and what not.
The dark circles mean that everybody within
that dark circle has known everyone else
and it's thickly related to everyone else,
otherwise you have, you know, many more ties.
And what we find is the red guys, they
all taught or studied at the Lukman School
in Malaysia, which was set up after
they were kicked out of the Indonesia.
The grey group is the guys who had Afghan ties
who weren't in any of the other madrassahhs.
The Al-Mukmin ties, the yellow guys is
another madrassah founded by the father of 3
of the Bali plotters, and the--
sorry, the Al-Mukmin ties,
that's the original madrassah
founded by Abu Bakar Bashir.
17 of the 27 Bali bomb plotters
went to the same schools.
Now, you look at this and you say like our
Secretary of State and our Secretary of Defense,
former Secretary of Defense, that
means madrassahhs are dangerous.
No, it does mean madrassahhs are dangerous.
There are tens of thousands of madrassahhs.
We're talking about 3 that are responsible
for all of the attacks, it's a little
but like saying, you have
Columbine, you have Virginia Tech,
let's close down the American
high schools and universities.
Now, it's a very small group that are
responsible for these kinds of actions.
This is the study we did.
So far, as I know, the only study
ever done of mardassahs themselves,
we did a comparative study of madrassahhs.
And we found that the ones associated with
Jemaah Islamiyah really aren't different, okay.
So here's a typical example, I-- we try to use.
When we do surveys, we do them as experimental
designs, we don't do attitude surveys.
So we ask questions they've
never heard of before,
and they have to form inferences
and responses on the spot.
So one of the questions we ask, for
example, "If a Jewish, a child who is born
of Jewish-Zionists, is raised
since birth by Jemaah Islamiyah,
will it grow up to be Jemaah
Islamiyah or Jewish-Zionist?"
Now, when we asked this to people in a
Christian identity movement, for example,
we get terribly racist, essentialist responses,
a Jew is a Jew, a Jewish-Zionist is Zionist,
a Zionist, that's the way God made
them, it doesn't matter who raises them.
These guys are different, most Muslim
groups, including for example of the Hamas
or the Hezbollah or even most Al Queda will
say, "No, they'll grow up to be a Muslim.
In fact in Al Queda Muslim, if he's raised
by Al Queda, which is the right way."
This is one of the few groups
that doesn't believe that.
So there are some starling differences.
These are just [noise] of what the
school connections are between the guys
in the classes when they went to high school.
Another set of connections, school
connections, between the major attack leaders.
Again, they crisscross the
organizational structure in every which way.
Again more school connections.
And now I'd like to go over
to the Madrid Attack.
The Madrid bombing, by a bunch of radical
students in hangers on, drug traffickers,
small-time dealers in stolen goods
and other sorts of petty criminals,
improbably succeeded precisely
because it was most improbable.
There was no ingenius cell structure, no
hierarchy, no recruitment, no brainwashing,
no coherent organization, no links to
Al Queda, yet this half-baked plot,
concocted in a few months, with a
target suggested over the internet,
was the proximate cause of regime
change in a democratic society.
So that's an interesting problem.
How could so few cause such havoc?
Not only so few, but basically
a few [inaudible].
These were mostly losers
who got incredibly lucky.
Most of these guys are caught.
These guys made it, some of them were
fairly smart, but the plot itself when we go
through it is so improbable, so unlikely,
where most of the people didn't have
any idea what the other guys were doing
and it worked precisely because of that.
The police were informed of what was going on
with every part of the plot since its inception
and before it, yet they were
never able to put it together.
So what we have back in the early 1990s.
We have up here a group of small
time Spanish criminal losers.
They go to jail because they're
selling dynamite diffusion
and to blow out fish, which is illegal.
They're stealing dynamite from the
dynamite mine where they work Las Conchitas.
This woman Carmen Toro, she's the sister of
this guy Antonio Toro who is the cellmate
of this guy, Trashorras, Emilio Trashorras.
And she will eventually marry Trashorras, they
also happened to be cousins to begin with.
You got a bunch of Salafis who are actually
frustrated Muslim Brothers who fled Syria
after Hafez al-Asad, in the late 1980s, cracked
down on the Muslim brotherhood in Syria.
And they fled as refugees to Spain.
They were invited for involvement in the
9/11 plot by Baltazar Garzon but they were,
since their conviction was since overturned
by the Spanish Supreme Court
basically had nothing to do with it.
These guys, they're all became petty
drug dealers from the same neighborhood
in a small tumble-down place called the
Jamaa Mezuak in Tetuan, North of Morocco,
which is right near the Spanish
enclave of nothing Ceuta.
Nothing changes here.
Now, some Moroccan students and one Tunisian, an
economic student who got a scholarship to study
for a PhD, an honor student,
hook up after mask with some
of the Salafis that had come from Damascus.
These guys are 3 brothers
from Tetuan, all drug addicts.
This guy, he's a sort of little Napoleon,
more like James Cagney in Public Enemy.
I mean, a tough little guy who you don't mess
around with, but he's also a drug addict.
He meets a girl, Rosa, a Spanish girl in a
park bench, who's a crack addict in 1992.
She's 13 years old.
He's very ugly, and she says basically, "I don't
want to talk to anyone as ugly as you are."
But he sticks around anyway, and
eventually she becomes his girl.
She becomes pregnant, and while she's 5
months pregnant, he decides he's going
to kick his crack-- his heroine habit.
He does it by turning to religion.
And if you follow people who've
actually kicked their heroine habits,
the only ones who can do it really cold turkey
are usually those guys who find religion,
otherwise they really need medical help.
Anyway, he's successful.
He goes to his friends, fellow
drug pushers, the 3.
2 of the 3 decided to kick the habit with him
and they become his life long
friends and his bodyguards.
This is his cousin who also
doesn't kick the habit.
Okay, the original group of Salafis from
Syria together with the students from Morocco,
and the 1 Tunisian, started meeting
at this river and having picnics
on the Nayalcarnero River in the late 1990s.
They started singing Jihadi songs.
They start chanting, playing soccer together,
deciding that they have to do something.
They have no idea what to do, and so
they started forming new connections.
Oops, let me go back.
They started forming a thick set of
connections of friends, of family,
of guys they meet at the culture
association in the mosque,
at the barbershop, at the butcher shop.
It's really hard to get through the thick
set of relationships that are involved,
but they start forming a thick community.
By the way, this guy Cartagena, he's a
police informant who's part of the group,
who's reporting as this is going on.
The whole time they start calling
themselves al-Harakat al-Salafiyyah
which means the Salafi movement.
They also start calling themselves Takfir
wal-Hijra after the old Takfiri movement.
But again mostly they just talk and scream
and yell and run around and play soccer
and have picnics together and they're going to
do this until right before the plot is hatched
because they really have no idea what to do.
Meanwhile, this guy who is a jewel thief
and a male strip dancer and a bouncer,
he gets thrown into jail with these 2 guys
who are the guys selling the
dynamite to the fishermen.
He gets strong in the same cell, he's got a
friend, I believe, who's called the rabbit.
The rabbit has to be, happens to be, one of
the messengers for the drug guys who have
since moved to Madrid from Tetuan.
The police released Zuhier, who's
playing all sides of the gang.
And his police handler, named Victor,
says, "Look, you go back to Asturias,
that's the northern Spanish town where you
were imprisoned with Trashorras and Toro,
the 2 Spanish losers who were selling dynamite,
and you try to find out who's their new market."
So Zuhier goes back up in Asturias.
He's know one really who's a market,
he starts talking to his friend, Aglif.
They use to go to this sort of these
whore houses on the outskirts of Madrid.
And Aglif says, well, my friend who just
got out of prison, he had, Jamal Ahmidan,
this little sort of Public Enemy James Cagney
type, he had been put in prison for murder.
He had a knife, some guy kill him but that he
paid off the family and was eventually released,
besides he was so tough no one
wanted to testify against him.
He comes back in late July 2003 to Spain.
He starts smoodgeing around with Aglif, who
says, "Hey, by the way, there's a guy I know,
Zuhier who's trying to get
rid with some dynamite."
Now, meanwhile Ahmidan has become
thoroughly radicalized in prison.
He wants to go to Palestine to kill Jews.
Then they try to get him to be
involved in the Sufi movement, yeah.
They tried to get him to be
involved in the Sufi movement.
He's assigning violent enough for me.
And he wants to become a Salafi Takfiri.
He's mopped in around for a month
or 2 and eventually he meets
up with the Tunisian, Serhane,
where are you Serhane?
You're up here somewhere.
There you are.
Who becomes a sort of substitute
radical preacher in the mosque,
he's left his economics' scholarship,
he's becoming increasingly radicalized
with his friends especially in
soccer, he's expelled from the mosque.
He has nothing to do by the way.
These groups of students have
nothing to do with the drug pushers,
this is where they push the drugs in
the same neighborhood of Lavapies.
But the interesting thing is
it's all the same neighborhood.
So this is where they push drugs.
This is the restaurant all these guys would
eat at called the Alhambra Restaurant,
where they eat sandwiches, I like that.
[Laughter] They'd all play soccer in front
of the Oulad Akcha house in Villaverde,
those where the 2 guys who kicked the
habit with the little Napoleon guy.
But here's the most amazing thing.
Five of the 7 guys, so they do this plot,
the plot is hatched from October to December,
they still don't know what they're doing, right?
But Jamal, this sort of hands-on guy, this
drug dealer who's actually killed people
and he actually goes up in the middle
of the plot to blow away 2 guys in Babel
for not giving them the drug money
because he needed the drug money in order
to buy the explosives for the Jihad.
Five of those 7 guys, who blew themselves up,
were the drug guys, who had found religion.
And who only gotten to the plot a
few months before it was hatched.
The plot itself, by the way, they concocted
it finally when they downloaded something
on the internet from the Zarqawi website,
which said, "Why don't you blow up something
in Spain before the elections," and
finally they felt something to do.
The students who had been yelling for
3 years, 4 years about something to do,
finally found a little guy who's willing to get
the dynamites to them and actually do something.
And the interesting thing is 5
of the 7 guys who blew themselves
up all came from one neighborhood.
Two were brothers all linked to that friend
Jamal Ahmidan, that little Napoleon guy.
A guy named Kounjaa, who was known as the
first Afghan in the neighborhood because he put
on this Afghan smock, this hat and start
preaching Takfiri, and a candy salesman,
a gay candy salesman named Rifaat.
These were the guys who blew themselves
up when the police captured
them, cornered them in Madrid.
Now, Kounjaa's cousin was married to a guy named
Hamza, and these guys, all on 2006 and 2007,
went to Iraq to blow themselves up.
They all came from this neighborhood within
400 square meters, grew up as kids together,
went to this elementary school called
the Abdelkrim Khattabi Elementary School,
and were all in the same
class since first grade.
This is the kids coming out of the school.
This is the kids going to the school.
Now, Kounjaa preached in this mosque.
But again it's not in the mosque,
we though it was in the mosque.
You know, there was an article in the Washington
Post when we first gave this information
which said, you know, they're
Al Queda recruiters.
Al-Queda, I'm looking for the Al Queda
recruit, all I see is the donkey.
[Laughter] And we find out most of these stuff
is going on at the Chicago Cafe, you know,
that's because that's where things
happen, you know, people watch Al Jazeera
and they get supper-- I don't know
if you ever watched Al Jazeera News,
you get 15 minutes of Iraq.
It's not like watching CNN or Fox, you see
fathers running through the streets of Baghdad
with the brains of their children falling out.
You get 5 minutes of Palestine,
pretty gruesome images as well
and 1 minute for the rest to the world.
It's a little bit like Fox in reverse, right?
This is the scene right below the
mosque where they play soccer in Jihad.
They were all soccer buddies and they
all went as soccer buddies to Iraq.
When I went to Ceuta, which is a nearby Spanish
enclave, and I was asking the kids, you know,
trying to figure out, you
know, why do these guys do it?
How do they get involved?
So I say to them, you know, who are your heroes?
So they say to me, okay, first hero is about 50,
a sample of about 50, first
hero is Ronaldinho, okay?
He's the Brazilian soccer
star from the Barca team.
Everybody is either a Barca
soccer fan or a Madrid soccer fan.
In fact there are 2 cafes in this plaza,
one right there which is the Madrid Cafe
for the Madrid guys and the
other for the Barca guys,
but it's both showing Al Jazeera all the time.
The Terminator is number 2, but
they have no idea he' related
to the present Governor of California.
And number 3 is Osama Bin Laden.
So why do they do it, people in our society now?
Well, Muslims in our society bind
into the American dream, okay?
Muslim, the demographics on Muslims
in the United States society exactly mirror
the average of the United States society.
Muslims in Europe, in Spain for example are
19 times more likely to be poor, marginal,
and it goes more or less in the same
fashion for the rest of Western Europe.
We find, for example, there is no radicalization
despite the hype you get in congress
and I've testified in front of God knows how
many organizations or committees and what not,
they've only been really 2 cases of
radicalization in the prison population
of 2.3 million, I mean that's not a lot, okay?
But 60 to70 percent of the Muslims, of
European prison populations are Muslim.
Very much like African-Americans in the United
States and for very much the same reasons.
So there are no reasons,
in the sense social reasons
for Muslims become radicalized
in the United States.
The problem of radicalization of prisons in the
United States is basically among Afro-Americans,
not Muslims who originated from foreign sources.
And what makes someone become radicalized
to take the path of violence is first
of all not humiliation again, okay?
It's moral outrage.
And that moral outrage is often lived
vicariously looking at the internet
or in television where people feel that their
people are being violated, murdered or whatever.
Now, that is a virtual, imagined community.
Why should someone who lives in the
jungles of Sulawesi, this remote island
where anthropologists like myself would dream
about going a generation ago 'cause
they were cannibals, 3 generations ago,
and people in Morocco or Spain
dream about the same thing
when they've never been out of their villages.
That's only possible again because of this sort
of massive media driven transnational awaking.
And it's creating a virtual community.
That virtual community, that media
driven virtual community is being created
to a large extent as well by the
actions of the United States.
I'm not going to go into that,
everybody knows the story.
All I can report to you is that
the greatest heroic thing anybody,
any of these young people can do is say
go to Iraq and fight American soldiers.
They dream of it.
They've never been out of Borneo or Sumatra,
they dream of fighting Americans in Iraq.
I'm not going to go through to any of this.
I will go towards the end, but what not to do?
You know, I have many prescription about
what not to do like spend millions of dollars
to study the Koran or make
predictive models and widgets.
I mean, look at these guys, you know,
you're going to predict this male strip
dancer is the key link between the losers
and the Spanish prison and these drug guys and
these students who couldn't get it together?
Come on. You'll never going to
get that with skill free modeling
or skill modeling or God knows what.
But how do you deal with it?
Well, this moral outrage becomes effective
only if it personally resonates with you, okay?
It doesn't personally resonate
with Muslims in the United States.
There's just nothing to resonate with.
It does resonate with people in Europe and
in North Africa and in the Middle East.
If police, for example, are particularly hostile
then although you don't experience the violence
of occupation or invasion or anything
else, you start empathizing with it.
And that's what we find again and again.
We find the most successful people at
stopping the Jihad or people who treat it
as a public health problem,
it's not a criminal problem.
The way the Saudis, the way the Turks,
the way the Indonesians have virtually stopped
Salafi attacks is basically go to the families,
the friends, the relatives, the neighborhood,
say, look we don't want to a problem.
What can we do so that people
don't take the path of violence?
They give gifts in Ramadan, they find jobs,
they talk to the families,
now, oh, this is being filmed.
One senior law enforcement agent, who is a
witness to testimony by this various heads
of intelligence said, "Can you
see me with Timothy McVeigh."
I mean, one of these guys, the head of one
of this intelligence was actually hugging
a mass suicide bomber who had been released
because he was much more
effective in getting others to turn
than if he had stayed in
prison and been hunger shot.
So he's out hugging this
suicide bomber and this law,
senior American law enforcement agent
says can you imagine me hanging--
hugging Timothy McVeigh?
I'd be hanging my balls from
the dome of congress.
So it is very hard for law
enforcement in the United States to go
into this mindset because of our laws.
But I want to tell you, it is very successful.
There hasn't been a single Salafi
incident in Turkey for example,
since the Istanbul bombings
and in Indonesia since 2005.
So how did we deal with it?
This is what [noise], well of
course we have to deal with problems
of social alienation in these societies.
But more important, think of things like
the boy scouts, high school football.
You know, where did that come from?
Why did it work?
It worked because we were an immigrant
society and we had to integrate people
in our social structure, in our social network.
And it was largely successful.
You know I had, as I said with Bobby [phonetic],
you know, I had also been one of the first ones,
you know, back in the 19, late 1960s, first
one to vote against ROTC, fraternities,
young college football, you know, kicking
around a pig skin and making a big deal of it.
But now I really see what that does.
It binds people in a sort of
communitas like no other thing.
And that what's happens with these friends
and that's the only way to get them,
I think a way from the kinds of,
given that their structure is
basically one of family and friends.
70 percent of the people
who join the Jihad do it
through their friends, 20
percent through their family.
Their friends become their families because
their sisters start cooking for them
and they start marrying their
sisters one another.
Less than 10 percent come from
many schools and that's only
in 2 countries, Pakistan and in Indonesia.
Provide for alternative dreams and heroes
because that's what youth can connect into.
Look at the new comic book series
called the Muslim 99 Super heroes.
This has going great guns in Indonesia,
Qatar and Kuwait even in Iraq.
Kids are buying this up, eating this up like
kids in our society use to eat up Marvel comics,
Superman and Batman and Truth and Justice of
the American way, and it's making headway.
That's going to have a lot more effect than
giving the e-moms to preach moderation.
Dreams and heroes mobilized in the Fight for
Faith and Friends, Causes and Camaraderie,
perhaps more than industry and power,
give impetus to lives and civilizations.
Faith and friendship, this is my punch line,
faith and friendship provide humans with a sense
of being that is larger, deeper, and more
enduring, than a walking shadow of poor player
that struts and frets his hour upon
the stage and then is heard no more it,
a tale told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury, signifying nothing.
And just another quote from Shakespeare, which
really captures the people who join Jihad,
never alone, always as friends, always for a
cause that gives their friendship solidarity,
and eternity in the sense of being
and meaning, greater than themselves.
This story shall the good man teach his son,
from this day to the ending of the world.
But we in it shall be remembered, we
few, we happy few, we band of brothers,
for he today that sheds his blood with me,
shall be my brother, but he ne'er so vile,
this day shall gentle his condition.
And ask yourselves, and this is final slide,
ask yourselves why all political systems,
all imagined communities of none of kin
describe themselves in terms of fictive kinship
of brothers, and sisters, and homelands,
and fatherlands, and motherlands.
Aristotle, I think got it right in the
ethics, where he said friendship, philia,
is the basis of all political union.
All political union that defines who human
beings are, that as communities of none of kin.
And as a final reflect for those interest
in evolutionary theory, it's a fact worthy
of deep meditations, of Konrad
Lorenz, that for all we know the bond
of personal friendship was evolved by the
necessity for certain individuals to cease
from fighting each other in order
to more effectively combat other
fellow-members of our species.
Since the Pleistocene, humans have
been their own worst predators.
When humans first formed groups of none of kin,
they were able to dominate all threats
that came from the animal world.
They soon became their own worst enemies and
they began forming larger and larger groups.
And if we look at the way they form larger
groups from the Pleistocene until today
through all of recorded history and through
every society the anthropologist ever studied,
it's always in terms of bonds of
friendship and fictive kinship.
And that's what you got to deal with really.
That's what this movement is about.
It's not about generals,
and command and control.
Thank you.
[Applause]
>> And thank you.
Thank you very much.
We've got time for questions.
So, I'll let you identify them unless--
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> No questions?
Yeah?
>> I've got a question.
So this is a very interesting and unique
perspective on the terrorism problem
and what motivates the terrorists, it's
very different form what we typically hear
from the US policy and the
way it's framed in media.
And so if this is the, you know, the basis,
it would suggest that the US
government's approach is very off-phase.
And if that is the case, then what do
you think is motivating the US government
to take this approach that's not, you know,
as [noise] reminded about the actual problem?
>> Okay, the question is, this
is a very different approach
from the approach we usually hear from
policy makers in the United States,
and if this is truly the case, why is it
that the United States government
leaders pursue the policies they do,
which don't seem to have much relevance
to this particular set of phenomena.
That's complex, the answer is fairly complex.
For one thing, a very superficial level,
I've talked about bureaucratic mirroring.
It's stunning that no one actually does
fieldwork with these guys, no one talks to them.
If you look at the books written, you know,
any of them, dying to win or the latest book
by Alan Krueger out of Princeton University
on the Economic Causes of Terrorism,
they're very smart people, but none of them had
ever met a terrorist, ever seen where they live,
never talked to them, never eaten with them and
they really have no idea who these people are,
and why-- and they're normal people who
do the things they do, that's one problem.
The second problem is this
idea of bureaucratic mirroring.
The guys who do the analysis of
intelligence or in the case officers,
they're just out of school like you.
There are reasons, structural reasons,
why the field officers never do analysis,
but they just mirror their bureaucracies and
they can't interpret the world in any other way,
they have no references to do it.
But third, and most important,
it is politically convenient
to believe there's a boogeyman out there.
I mean, nothing mobilizes
society and political passions
like an enemy you can put your teeth into.
And the Al Qaeda is about the best boogeyman you
can possibly come up with, fits it all together,
and there's a sort of perfect storm of
psychological biases that can be plugged
into this, the need to tell a
story, sort of fundamental actr--
all sorts of, which of cognitive biases.
And if you look at the actual response
of our political leaders, you
know, it's sort of pathetic.
Basically you got, you know, I shouldn't say
this, but you know bunch of a little Indians
with no chief running around, and
these guys are determining the course
of the debate on presidential politics.
Thankfully or unthankfully
is moving to economics
because were driving into a recession right now.
But it still dominates to a larger extent
and literally at least in the beginning
of the campaign, not only here, but in the
countries of Western Europe, is run on the basis
of how you're going to respond
to this particular threat
without any knowledge of
what the threat is or care.
Let me tell you, we've talked to some of
the candidates and their staffs and things
like that suggesting the things like,
no, war and terror, this is ridiculous.
I said, no, we can't, we can't put that
phrase aside, the public understands that.
And there was a debate actually in the
administration, the first couple of days
about whether this was supposed to be a
war and terror or crime against humanity.
Think of how it would have played out if
it was declared a crime against humanity,
and the support and the were-- whether
it could have actually been sustained.
Politically in the United
States is another matter.
But if it had been sustained as a crime
against humanity, the present status
of the world would be much
different than it is today.
So it is a political issue, and the careers
of our major politicians and political parties
and affiliations depend upon how it's
treated and how are you going to describe.
You're going to describe this is a
bunch of guys running around the place,
opening up with opportunities, you know, getting
involved here and there and maybe succeeding.
No, you got to make it something
profound and strong and deep.
And by so doing, by the way and this is a
peculiarity of human categorization versus a,
you know, categorization of natural
kinds, when people categorize human kinds,
whether they'd be people or political
process, is there's a looping effect.
No matter how arbitrary and false it is to begin
with, once you make that category, the frame,
you force in the sense history and
behavior into that frame, okay?
I'll give you just another example.
African-American, okay?
Or that was once called Negro that
they were supposed to be some race.
I remember a friend of mine who was
supposed to pick up some guy from New Guinea
because his skin was dark and he was dark, and
this was a French intellectual leader, south,
who said, "Well, you're black and he's black."
Well, biologically that's crazy notion,
but the fact that the world treated,
the western world treated those people as
the same even though there were as distant
as you could possible be in human
evolution since 50,000 years,
made that category real however false it was.
And that's a property of human
kinds and we do it all the time,
and I'm afraid Al Qaeda has
become one of those things.
It has created and so in reality, and so in
reactions in the world, is now become a logo
that carries essential properties,
it's being transformed all the time
because it never fits reality quite
nicely, and we're witnessed to the spread
of this viral ideology because
of this category creation.
Yes?
>> Couple of years ago Charles
Tilly was lecturing here in Michigan
>> Yes.
>> And he was asked, he was
talking about networks,
and he was asked what does
he think about terrorism?
He said, you know what, terrorism is not
a network, it's a strategy usually used
by governments but some times
used by pride of people, too.
You seemed to suggest that sort of
forming the networks, junior rate terror.
Isn't, sort of some independent networks that
form sort of your own radicalization to terror,
or it is sort like in my term, I don't know,
maybe Muslim radicalism network that some times
at some small chance can
sort of manifest it this way?
>> I'm not sure if I understand you correctly.
So Charles Tilly came here and
said terrorism is a strategy.
>> Terrorism is a sort--
>> Sort of strategy, not networking.
And are you asking me if I consider
these networks to generate terrorism?
>> Yes, what do you think of [inaudible].
>> All right.
>> Is it a network or a strategy?
>> Yes.
>> Is it like a network around this
strategy or just like much larger network
that sometimes involves this one--
>> All right, terrorism is even worse
than Al Qaeda or democracy as concepts.
I mean, it's so fuzzy and vague.
I use it because it's get me in
the front door of policy groups.
Terrorism of course is a method.
It's essentially being applied these
days to the use by transnational actors
for attacks against non-combatant civilians.
That's the way most people
sort of feel about it.
It's actually a method like guns.
I mean there's nothing to it, there's
no kind, that's called terrorism.
Anybody can be called a terrorist
or freedom fighter or whatever.
I'm talking specifically about a
specific group, the Takfiri groups.
Although there are various very, very great
similarities between how these groups form
in human groups in general, be they
spontaneous groups of the internet or gangs
or drug cartels or our own political leadership.
I mean, it's an all boys
network and things like that.
What I'm saying is that terrorism,
the phenomena of Takfiri terrorism,
the one that everybody is scared about but
won't call that, you know, Muslim terrorism
or whatever for whatever reasons,
that phenomena is based on 2 things,
the kinds of ordinary networks
that drive most of human behavior,
and the most important predictive factors
are just knowing the ordinary networks, okay?
Secondly, the friendship [inaudible].
Secondly is the cause, this sort of ideological
factor that gives coherence to fraternity
and camaraderie and friendship in a
sort of eternal way and cause people
to actually commit their lives to one another
and die for one another, and that's a result
of historical process of fairly
reason origin that I've mentioned,
the collapse of the Soviet Union being one.
A very similar phenomena occurred between 1878
and 1914, and that was the Anarchist Movement.
People thought that the anarchist,
there were some central movement.
And these were terrorists in the same way.
They would blow up people, they would
blow up themselves to blow up people.
A lot of them were students,
very well educated, middle class.
They were quite successful on the havoc
they wrote much more than Al Queda.
I mean they manage to kill the President of
the United States, the Archduke of Austria
that started World War I,
Prime Minister of France,
was it the Queen of Italy or Queen of Italy.
Half, you know, about, a half
of dozen top Russian ministers,
caused havoc all over the world.
Scotland Yard was set up, the Russian Okhrana,
which became the PCIAs or the NKVD and the KGB.
The secret service sort of split
and became the FBI at the same time,
all those result the anarchist threat.
Teddy Roosevelt, when he took over from
McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist,
gave his first speech to Congress and
said, "Look," this is very similar
to George W. Bush's speech on September 19th.
There is evil in the world, okay?
This is a battle against good and
evil, you're for us or against us,
and also gave himself the right for the
United States for the first time in history
to interfere in other places in the
world in order to stop this evil act,
which was the greatest threat
against humanity at that time.
It was only until the Warren commission redid
a study in the assassination of presidents.
They cited, well, there really was
no anarchist central after all, okay?
And it's very similar.
Why did the anarchist movement disappear?
Well, basically it disappeared because it was,
because of the war and because it was, I mean,
it had, you know, it kept going,
they blew up things in New York,
there was a Spanish Civil War, but
basically died out after World War I
because the Bolshevist co-opted
their support and their audience.
Well, I don't think we should wait for
someone like the Bolshevists to co-opt this.
You know, and Marvel Comics is even better.
But we should think about what kinds,
and we can't predict this stuff,
but we should start forming strategies
about what can attract young people?
Besides rave, okay?
What can really move young people
to find meaning in their lives
and Devo's [phonetic] won't do it, right?
Globalization isn't going to do it, that's
for a bunch of wealthy people who smoodge
in airport lounges and wealthy hotels
and eating in 3-star restaurants
and decides the world is going to be like them.
For most of the world, globalization does
not mean everybody is happier, healthier,
and hippier, it means they're unmoored
from their societies and their traditions
and they don't know where they are and they're
looking for where they are and what are,
is our society going to do to get this
people sympathetic to us rather to them?
And I don't see anything.
Did you know the National Security Council,
for example, which is the primary mechanism
in the United States for forming foreign
policy, Congress has no effect, none, okay?
The pundits have very little effect, it's
the president, it's National Security Council
which decide foreign policy in United States.
There is not a single permanent representative
from health or education or welfare or anything
to do with actual human beings in their
interactions on the National Security Council
with permanent representation, okay?
It's mostly military, intelligence
and close association with economics.
And so we're not getting the
kinds of strategies we needed
to actually deal with the world as it is now.
This is not a soviet threat.
This is not a battle against
power blocks looking
to position themselves for
control over the world.
This is an ideological battle, but one which is
thoroughly integrated into notions of community
and neighborhood and friendship of people trying
to find again the meaning in lives in a world
where traditional relationships are being
unmoored in an incredibly rapid-base.
>> I think one more question?
>> Yeah.
>> Is it possible that 9/11 and Al
Qaeda itself is a part of that frame?
>> What frame do you mean?
>> You said that some people crave
category if they [inaudible].
>> Well, and the question is this
9/11 and Al Qaeda a part of a frame.
It's part of lots of competing frames.
I mean, we can describe all of
human discourse, political discourse
in terms of frames, as Bob would say.
The particular frame of Al Qaeda, the
historical frame of Al Qaeda is, you know,
I've talked about anarchism as sort of the model
for understanding the social dynamics of it.
The Nazi movement, I'm not saying these
people are Nazis, I'm just talking about the--
the Nazi movement is a good example of what of--
what Al Qaeda is like in the sense that it is a
thoroughly modern movement, thoroughly modern.
But it has atavistic cultural
elements of a very peculiar kind.
It is almost tribal in the sense that it
wants to create a sense of deep community
of communitas almost of collective [inaudible].
There's, there are many sort of symbol, if you
look at the poetry of it, of the ritual of it,
you find that the idea of trying to
create a virtual community of people
who can personally relate to one
another at a very emotional level,
not in intellectual level at all.
And in that sense, it's a derivative of that
movement and let me, I don't know if I talked
about it here, I don't think I did.
So my last comment monotheism
created the notion of humanity.
Humanity didn't exist before monotheism.
If you go to the jungle in New Guinea or
even Egypt which had the classification
of different human kinds, there was no
notion of humanity between monotheism.
The secular monotheism since the
enlightenment are monotheisms nonetheless.
All the -isms, the anarchisms,
colonialism, Fascism, Communism,
even democratic, and they try to save humanity.
You see that's their object.
You can even find in Matthew,
in the book of Matthew,
Christ saying you're either
for us or against us.
And so there was a division in
humanity between those who should
or could be saved and those who couldn't.
And most of the clashes that have
led to the greatest mass murders
in human history are result of that fact
that ones group wants to save humanity,
and there's another group who
doesn't really want to be saved.
And so they can be dumped in the
garbage, and they fight back.
And I think Al Qaeda fits very
well into this millennial tradition
of monotheisms that are out to save humanity.
And as such it's intrinsically violent
movement because all movements that try
to save humanity will become violent
because there a lots of people
who just don't want to be
saved by that movement.
>> Okay, thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
That was wonderful, and now we've got food
and drink out in the hallway, and, you know,
we can continue the conversation out there.
Thank you very much.