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Four factors make up the killer's, in this case Ahmed's, predisposition in Grossman's model.
Training
Training is perhaps the use of the Internet by jihadis that has received the most – though not the most accurate – coverage in the media. The efficacy of such training is hotly debated. Some aspects of jihadi learning can be taught online, such as ideological or religious indoctrination. Others, most notably terrorist tradecraft (e.g. the operation of firearms or making of explosive devices) are highly problematic to learn from a distance and from a book.
Experience
Given that terrorists cannot kill people without stepping away from their computer and getting out into the real world, at first glance experience would seem to be something that Ahmed cannot hope to acquire on the Internet. It is worth noting, in this regard, that there are certain activities that Ahmed can engage in, and engage in successfully, that will support the jihad in a meaningful way. These activities, often called e-Jihad, are not nearly as serious as the actual taking of human life, but represent a kind of "starter terrorism" which may well embolden Ahmed and maintain his morale while he seeks out the real world associations and opportunities that will allow him to kill, and die a martyrs death. Such activities include, but are not limited to, attacks on the websites of perceived enemies of Islam, distribution of videos and other files that promote jihad, and more ordinary cyber crime such as credit card fraud and software piracy. The nature of criminal justice systems being what it is – namely slow – Ahmed will likely succeed in these endeavors, or at least be led to believe that he has succeeded due to the lack of a swift response from the police.
Conditioning
When Grossman speaks of conditioning he is referring mostly to the deliberate application of classical and operant conditioning, and also to the affects of social learning processes, in efforts to increase the lethality of soldiers in combat between World War 2 and the Vietnam War. He then segues into a discussion of how these same processes are at work in American society today, with a particularly negative affect on young people. Here he also leans on the decades of research that demonstrate some sort of positive correlation between exposure to violence, particularly media violence, and subsequent aggressive or violent behavior.[11] While this is another subject that lies beyond the scope of this essay, suffice it to say that vivid portrayals of violence, up to and including the actual murder of hostages, are a frequently offered up for download and viewing on jihadi websites.[12] It is beyond doubt that such portrayals help to desensitize Ahmed and those like him to the violence they fervently hope to perpetrate.
Temperament
Grossman's work is based on the assumption that all but 2% (the "natural born killers," psychopaths, sociopaths) of soldiers have a powerful disinclination to kill. In terrorism studies, the consensus view is represented by Sageman's Understanding Terror Networks, where he tried and failed to find signs of clinical mental illness in the hundreds of first generation al-Qaeda members he studied. Jihadis, aside from their choosing to involve themselves in terrorist activity, seem to be relatively normal individuals. One caveat to this: as jihadis are increasingly self-selecting and self-organizing (i.e. homegrown) it may be that unstable individuals are more likely to succeed in involving themselves in terrorist activity than they would have been in an age where to be a part of al-Qaida meant getting to a training camp – where such people may have been rejected by the organization. To the extent that groups of jihadis form online, signs of obvious instability in members of the group may be missed, and by the time the group transitions to real world activity, such members may be too deeply embedded in the group to get rid of.
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[10] Spencer Dryden, drummer of the Jefferson Airplane, from the song A small package of value will come to you shortly, on the album After Bathing at Baxter's.
[11] List of references from my unpublished 2008 paper Video portrayals of violence on jihadi websites is available on request.
[12] 5 % of all discussions on jihadi websites exist for the sole purpose of distributing videos depicting explicit acts of terrorist violence, and such videos account for over half of all jihadi videos in circulation. This finding was subsequently duplicated in a study I did of jihadi videos distributed via YouTube. Regarding the latter, see: The Global Jihad on YouTube.
Posted on 10 March 2009 @ 18:16