Though I believe that thorough scientific education probably has a secularizing effect, as shown in a great divergence between American scientists' and non-scientists' views on God and immortality, there are exceptions. For instance, some major terrorists appear to heartily embrace both science and religion:
<blockquote>It is one of the widespread assumptions of the war on terrorism that the Muslim religious schools known as madrassas, catering to families that are often poor, are graduating students who become terrorists.
Last year, Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced madrassas in Pakistan and several other countries as breeding grounds for "fundamentalists and terrorists." A year earlier, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had queried in a leaked memorandum, "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"
While madrassas may breed fundamentalists who have learned to recite the Koran in Arabic by rote, such schools do not teach the technical or linguistic skills necessary to be an effective terrorist. Indeed, there is little or no evidence that madrassas produce terrorists capable of attacking the West.
And as a matter of national security, the United States doesn't need to worry about Muslim fundamentalists with whom it may disagree, but about terrorists who want to attack it.
We examined the educational backgrounds of 75 terrorists behind some of the most significant recent terrorist attacks against Westerners. We found that a majority of them are university-educated, often in technical subjects like engineering.
In the four attacks for which the most complete information about the perpetrators' educational levels is available - the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the Sept. 11 attacks and the Bali bombings in 2002 - 53 percent of the terrorists had either attended university or had received a university degree. As a point of reference, only 52 percent of Americans have been to university. The terrorists in our study thus appear, on average, to be as well educated as many Americans.
The 1993 World Trade Center attack involved 12 men, all of whom had a college education. The 9/11 pilots, as well as the secondary planners identified by the 9/11 commission, all attended Western universities, a prestigious and elite endeavor for anyone from the Middle East.
Indeed, the lead 9/11 pilot, Mohamed Atta, had a degree from a German university in, of all things, urban preservation, while the operational planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, studied engineering in North Carolina. We also found that two-thirds of the 25 hijackers and planners involved in 9/11 had attended university.
Of the 75 terrorists we investigated, only nine had attended madrassas, and all of those played a role in one attack - the Bali bombing. Even in this instance, however, five university-educated "masterminds" helped to shape the Bali plot.
Like the view that poverty drives terrorism - a notion that countless studies have debunked - the idea that madrassas are incubating the next generation of terrorists offers the soothing illusion that desperate, ignorant automatons are attacking the West rather than university graduates, as is often the case. In fact, two of the terrorists in our study had doctorates from Western universities, and two others were working toward Ph.Ds.
A World Bank-financed study that was published in April raises further doubts about the influence of madrassas in Pakistan, the country where the schools were thought to be the most influential and the most virulently anti-American.
Contrary to the numbers cited in the report of the Sept. 11 commission, and to a blizzard of newspaper reports that 10 percent of Pakistani students study in madrassas, the study's authors found that fewer than 1 percent do so.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Peter Bergen, the author of ''Holy War Inc.,'' is a fellow at the New America Foundation. Swati Pandey is a research associate there.)
(Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey, "The Myth of the Madrassa," New York Times/International Herald Tribune, <http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/14/opinion/edbergen.php>, 15 Jun. 2005)</blockquote>
>[lbo-talk] Appeal to Ignorance
>W. Kiernan wkiernan at ij.net
>Sun Jun 12 10:16:41 PDT 2005
<snip>
>>[D]uring the past 20 years, suicide terrorism has been steadily
>>rising because terrorists have learned that it pays. Suicide
>>terrorists sought to compel American and French military forces to
>>abandon Lebanon in 1983...
>
>I don't understand why Pape arbitrarily distinguishes between
>suicide attacks "authorized by a national government" and those
>authorized by quasi-governments like Hezbollah and the PFLP.
According to Robert A. Pape's own explanation, "Suicide terrorism (and terrorism in general) occurs under the reverse structural conditions. In suicide terrorism, the coercer is the weaker actor and the target is the stronger. Although some elements of the situation remain the same, flipping the stronger and weaker sides in a coercive dispute has a dramatic change on the relative feasibility of punishment and denial. In these circumstances, denial is impossible, because military conquest is ruled out by relative weakness. Even though some groups using suicide terrorism have received important support from states and some have been strong enough to wage guerrilla military campaigns as well as terrorism, none have been strong enough to have serious prospects of achieving their political goals by conquest" ("The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review 97.3, <http://danieldrezner.com/research/guest/Pape1.pdf>, August 2003, p. 4). So, in his view, the distinction isn't arbitrary -- rather, it is based on different kinds and amounts of resources available to states and non-state actors -- differences that may have impacts on strategic and tactical calculations.
>And I thought "terrorism" referred to violence against civilians for
>the purpose of levering public opinion (as distinguished, for
>example, from the goal of killing off the workers in the enemy's
>munitions factories). If the 1983 attacks in Lebanon, directed at
>buildings full of soldiers, were "suicide terrorism," then I guess
>the term is being used to describe _any_ combat involving sure
>self-destruction for the attacker. In that case the Kamikaze
>campaign by the Japanese Air Force against the U.S. Navy was the
>Twentieth Century's most destructive program of "suicide terrorism."
Pape, like most scholars who subscribe to the basic premise of US imperialism, has a prejudiced definition of "terrorism" that encompasses both attacks on civilians and combatants. We don't have to agree with his definition to learn from his analysis of the strategic logic of suicide attacks, though. -- Yoshie
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