No one is born to be “terrorist” and there are reasons why “terrorism” is becoming a global threat hidering security, stability and safety on different levels and scales. There are many basic and fundamental questions: what is “terrorism” and how people become terrorists.
Anders Behring Breivik, Norway, who murdered 77 people in the 2011 is a key case, that gives some clues on the phenomena, but in one of the most socially stable and peaceful societies on Earth. Anders Behring Breivik hated most humans, but women and Muslims above all. Seierstad, an extraordinary researcher, writes calmly and draws few conclusions. One of Us, which is as much about the victims as the killer, is a book “about belonging, a book about community,” she says, “about looking for a way to belong and not finding it.” “Our answer,” Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told Norwegians after the attack, “is more democracy, more openness and more humanity. But never naivety.” It seems that Breivik was, above all, a product of social isolation. He was a typical extremist, or more correctly “gradually turned to a permanent outsider”: friendless, unemployed, unmarried, living life online. Like every mass killer, he selected his victims. There are plenty of Breiviks around us but this one was handed luck. But who is Anders Breivik, what turned him to be a “terrorist” and what was the micro-social condition around him.
Read the story written by a high quality global journalist, Åsne Seierstad – author of the bestselling “The Bookseller of Kabul” (2002), a book on the nature of Afghan family life.
One of the most serious social defects and mental disorder is extreme and continual social isolation. It is, indeed, the very root of modern global threats “terrorism” that can turn people, rich and poor, or groups of people, to time-bombs. It is the cause of many instabilities in the MENA region and Africa, see the effects and details here: https://jl10ll.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/the-effects-of-extreme-and-continual-social-isolation/
