Controlling Home-Grown Western Islamic Terrorists

From Professor Michael Curtis, at American Thinker:

Theresa May, the home secretary in the British Conservative government, in a speech in the House of Commons on September 3, 2014, spoke of ISIS as a “group of murderous psychopaths.”  The videos of the two American journalist hostages about to be brutally beheaded show a level of evil that should draw the attention of the World Council of Churches, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Alice Walker, and the “scholars” of the American Studies Association, hitherto almost exclusively preoccupied with criticism of alleged violations of humanitarian rights by Israel.

The beheading of the second journalist, Steven Sotloff, is even more poignant than that of James Foley based on the knowledge that he was the grandson of Holocaust survivors, and the son of a mother who taught at a Jewish school in Miami.  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is not alone in regarding this cruelty of ISIS as “an act of medieval savagery by a coward hiding behind a mask.”  We are now aware that ISIS has committed other such acts, especially the execution by firing squads in desert areas of Iraq of more than 500, and possibly as many as 770, people.

Almost everyone, except perhaps for those named above, now appreciates that ISIS is not simply a “manageable problem,” as President Barack Obama described it, but is a group that must be crushed.  It is not sufficient to condemn the violent Islamist preaching with which the West has become familiar.  It is essential to end the brutality and the menace of ISIS by every means in the Western armory.  The wheels of judgment should not grind exceeding slow....

At the NATO meeting on September 4, 2014 at Celtic Manor near Cardiff, Wales, President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron urged their fellow members of NATO to confront the “brutal and poisonous” Islamic state.  A possible NATO coalition may be created to implement this response through a variety of measures: military power, diplomatic activity, and economic constraints.  However, it is disappointing that no specific pledges of action have been agreed upon.

It was more encouraging that NATO members understood that the more urgent and important issue facing the alliance is not the threat of Russia, however objectionable the policy of Putin towards Ukraine, but the Islamic threat from ISIS and other terrorist groups not only in Iraq and Syria, but also in their own countries.

It should be an international priority to end the caliphate announced by ISIS as soon as possible before it spreads its control over areas in the Middle East.  But equally urgent is the need for policies to deal with the threat of Europeans and Americans – namely, home-grown terrorists, who have fought for ISIS and may return to their countries of origin and undertake terrorist activities.

This issue is not easy to resolve, because what animates Western jihadists remains a mystery.  What makes Muslim citizens of Europe and the United States leave to join the ISIS group and be prepared to commit murderous attacks in their countries of origin when they return?  Are they psychopaths, or are they motivated to act through conviction on political and social issues?

Psychologists tend to suggest that there is no conclusive evidence to determine if terrorists or others who take pleasure in violence are insane, disturbed, or abnormal.  Regarding non-Islamic issues, one can identify the lunacy of the multi-murderer Ted Bundy, an apparently charming man, who confessed, “I just like to kill.  I wanted to kill.”  Likewise with the murderous Baader-Meinhof group (Red Army Faction), the far-left militant group in West Germany from 1970 1998 responsible for bank robberies and the deaths of at least 34 people.  They may have genuinely believed they were engaged in an anti-imperialist struggle and were acting on behalf of the counter-culture.

More.