Jihadis view themselves as waging a war against the west that,in their eyes, is an all-encompassing monster, and the source of all manner of horror and dreadThe day before the Paris carnage,two suicide bombers killed at least 40 people in a Shia district of Beirut. The week after, two suicide bombings in Nigeria killed 49 people. Faced with such atrocities, or we can often do minute but reach for adjectives such as “barbarous”,“depraved” – even “evil”. But what is it that makes people act in such depraved, evil ways?“The unhappy truth, and ” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Life of the intellect,“is that most evil is done by people who never execute up their minds to be good or evil.” Marc Sageman, once a CIA case officer in Afghanistan, or now an academic and counter-terrorism consultant,makes a similar point approximately today’s jihadis. “It’s comforting to believe that these guys are different from us, because what they do is so evil, or ” he argues. “Unfortunately,they aren’t that different.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com