Assessing Al-Qaeda (merged thread)

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to FP Blog for 'Why Is It So Hard to Find a Suicide Bomber These Days?', which is sub-titled 'A decade after 9/11, the mystery is not why so many Muslims turn to terror - but why so few have joined al Qaeda's jihad'.

Link:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article..._days?page=0,0

The author starts looking at the case of Mohammed Taheri-Azar, who launched a vehicle attack on fellow students at the University of North Carolina in 2006.

For several decades now, Islamist terrorists have called it a duty for Muslims to engage in armed jihad...Tens of thousands have obeyed, perhaps as many as 100,000 over the past quarter-century, according to the U.S. DHS...At the same time, more than a billion Muslims -- well over 99 percent -- ignored the call to action....by my calculations, global Islamist terrorists have managed to recruit fewer than 1 in 15,000 Muslims over the past quarter-century and fewer than 1 in 100,000 Muslims since 9/11. (Moving on)

By the U.S. Justice Department's count, approximately a dozen people in the country were convicted in the five years after 9/11 for having links with al Qaeda. During this period, fewer than 40 Muslim Americans planned or carried out acts of domestic terrorism... None of these attacks was found to be associated with al Qaeda.

(Final sentence) We may not be so lucky in the future. But even if they succeed in killing thousands of us, attacks like these do not threaten our way of life, unless we let them.

I am sure we will see more such commentaries before the 9/11 anniversary. SWC has touched upon this issue before, although on a quick scan I failed to identify other thread(s). Often I cite Bob Jones reference to the difference between those who are angry and those who are motivated to take action.

What FP Blog did not state is the author, Charles Kurzman, has written a book 'The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists' and was reviewed on:http://motherjones.com/mixed-media/2...zman-jihadists

Amazon link, no reviews:http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...orists&x=0&y=0

[Umar Al-Mokhtār]

the answer lies in that there just are not that many psychopaths per 100,000 people, regardless of theology or culture, and using coercion to engage in suicide bombing only goes so far.

I also cannot fail to notice how the most strident calls for violent jihad come from those exhorting for others to do it.