Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists Read Online Free PDF Page A

can only be two states, one for us and one for the Israelis.”

     
AI Aqsa Martyrs Brigade poster of Nabeel Masood, Ashdod suicide bomber.
     
I asked if he was proud of what his son had done. He showed me a pamphlet, specially printed by Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and endorsed by Hamas, praising the actions of his son and the two other young men who accompanied him.
“My son loved life. Here, you take it.” He pushed the pamphlet into my hands. “Burn it if you want. Is this worth a son?”
Outside in the narrow street, kids were playing fast-paced, acrobatic soccer off the high house walls, some marked with fading, ghostlike posters of the Martyr Nabeel. “What do you feel about what Nabeel did?” I asked.
“His courage will make us free!” exclaimed a boy, kicking the ball. Another boy echoed his words and gave a ferocious kick back.
Nabeel was, for one flaming moment, the hero every boy here wanted to be.
This kind of courage to kill and die is not innate. It’s a path to violence that has to be cultivated and channeled to a target. The culture of violent jihad is the landscape on which the path is trodden. Fellow travelers—mostly friends and some family—walk and furrow the path together. They leave pheromone-like tracers for those who come after, letters of love for their peers and heroic posters and videos with the thrill of guns and personal power made into an eternally meaningful adventure through sacred-book-swearing devotion to a greater community and cause.
I returned to Israel on a Friday evening. Unlike Jerusalem, which is quiet on the Jewish Sabbath, Haifa atop Mount Carmel was alight. Joyful groups of high school girls were scurrying everywhere. I asked three hitchhikers who were holding hands, just as my daughters do with their friends, if anything special was up. “Yes,” one girl said, very sweetly. “You’re not from Haifa; you see, it’s a weekend and holiday, and no school!” Hamas leaders contend that these young girls, too, merit death because they will become Israeli soldiers. The Hamas weekly, Al Risala, proclaimed in an editorial that “martyrs are youth at the peak of their blooming, who at a certain moment decide to turn their bodies into body parts—flowers.” In a moment of naive epiphany, I felt that if this blossoming young woman could just spend a little time with one of these young men from Gaza neither would need to die. But the wall grows between them each passing day, blocking all human touch.
Then I remembered something Nabeel’s father had said. I had written it down, but it hardly registered at the time: “My son didn’t die just for the sake of a cause, he died also for his cousins and friends. He died for the people he loved.” And my puzzling over that sentiment then became an overarching theme of study for this book.

THE CAUSE
     
Humans and other primates have two preoccupations in life: health and social relations. Actually, they’re often the same: socialize to survive. But unlike our hairy distant kin, humans are also obsessively cause-seeking animals. So much so that we can’t help believing that the world was created for the cause seekers, or at least for the collectivity that seeks to show through sacrifice how much it cares. This belief that our world was intended for the committed community is what I call the Cause. It is a mystical thing, a product of our biological evolution and history that gives spiritual purpose to our lives. How and why this illusion came to drive humanity and make itself real in the creation of cultures and the religious rise of civilizations is the deep background that frames this work.
So what’s the foreground about? It’s about attempting to demystify terrorism, lessen our fears, and reduce the dangers of violent overreaction by talking with people in the field—especially terrorists, but also ordinary folk who know them, support them, and can easily become them—and then using science to probe deeper into how they