Part One
Terrorism is loosely defined as the perpetration of acts of violence against innocent people for political reasons. The explanations given for the rise of this phenomenon vary from political to socio-economic to cultural to religious, and so forth. We are also told that people commit those horrendous acts when they do not have comparable, conventional military means of retaliation and are feeling desperate. Terrorists are held to be individuals who are brainwashed, callous, immune to human suffering, and full of hate.
The above-mentioned description of terrorism may be seen to be applicable to the likes of Al-Qa’ida, the IRA, the Tamil Tigers, and Tim McVeigh, among others. Still, there are certain situations to which the conventional image of terrorism may not be directly related but which, nevertheless, contain strong elements of terrorism, most especially the commission of indiscriminate acts of violence against civilians for political reasons. This particular conception may conjure up horrific acts of destruction, such as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. It can also include the wanton murder of people by the likes of the Islamic State group (IS). Organizations such as Hizbollah and the Taleban may come under this umbrella.
While it is true that terrorists may be motivated by political, cultural, ethnic, racist, or religious reasons, this fact in and of itself does not fully explain why those individuals in particular commit those execrable crimes. For this to happen, those factors have to be intertwined with the desensitization of one’s feelings towards the suffering of others, aided and abetted by a certain perspective- cultural or otherwise- that dehumanizes the victims, despises them, and robs them of any worth whatsoever. “I never lost a night’s sleep over it” the American pilot, Theodore Van Kirk, navigator of the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 was quoted as saying, adding that if he had to, he would do it again, the savage killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians notwithstanding. Likewise, it is very likely that terrorists by and large do not lose any sleep over the carnage that they wreak on innocent people and would do it again if they thought it was necessary. It is worth our while at this juncture to try and draw a comparison with the animal kingdom and how humans interact with it. Such an analogy may, in my estimation, help us understand more about why people commit acts of terrorism.
Human beings have always felt superior to animals. This is reflected in many ways, including the frequent attribution of negative human characteristics to animals even though animals are innocent of them: someone may be called a donkey (stupid), a pig (dirty), a shark (a swindler), a cow (a bad woman), a vixen (a quarrelsome, spiteful woman), a snake in the grass or a viper (insidious and spiteful), and so forth. Generically, when we describe human beings as “animals,” we mean that they are cruel, savage, barbaric, and vicious. And yet, reality indicates otherwise: Although the donkey is not the brightest of animals, he is certainly not the least intelligent either. The French idiom “têtu comme un âne” (literally translated, “stubborn as a donkey”) falsely accuses the donkey of stubbornness, even though studies seem to indicate that the donkey’s reluctance to be compliant stems from his lack of trust in humans (Not particularly unwise!). Similarly, the pig is a clean animal since he keeps his eating and sleeping areas separate from where he disposes of his waste. Besides, if the pig rolls in mud, it is because he wants to cool himself since he does not have sweat glands. Nothing particularly dirty about that. And what is the connection between bad women and the cow? Or swindlers and the shark? What makes people think that the snake is spiteful or insidious? Snakes are very shy creatures and slither away upon sensing approaching footsteps; they attack only if threatened or confronted and they crawl away once the source of danger backs off. As for being insidious, snakes cannot walk like humans do; their crawling is determined by the way they are made. And yet, against all reason and common sense, people obstinately persist in projecting their own nasty traits onto animals. As mentioned earlier, this is extended to the usage of the word “animal” itself to mean vicious and cruel. But are animals really savage and brutal?
First of all, most animals we know are far from being vicious: Cows, horses, sheep, rabbits, cats, dogs, giraffes, kangaroos, mice, monkeys, donkeys, and so on. Even those animals that we regard as savage appear to be so only due to their urgent and immediate need to feed themselves and their families: The lion, the tiger, the cheetah, the jaguar, the puma, the hyena, the wolf, and the shark all need to survive the best way they know how; they simply cannot live on plants. Naturally, animals can become aggressive for different reasons, e.g. if they feel threatened; if they need to defend their territory; and if they require access to a vital natural resource, such as water. The natural urge to mate with females can be another reason why some animals may become aggressive. Physiological changes, like when elephants are in musth, may account for some of their occasional aggressive behaviour.
Admittedly, one does find certain unsavoury acts in the animal kingdom: When a lion dies, another lion would want to take his place and mate with his female. But because the lioness would not be ready to mate until her offspring grew up, the new lion would kill her cubs to hasten the process of mating and have young of his own. This infanticidal tendency has also been observed among monkeys and bottlenose dolphins, and for the same reason. Even worse, some cases of infant cannibalism have been noted in the animal kingdom, such as those among some komodo dragons, tigers, and jaguars, which explains why the mothers are determined to keep those males away from their young.
Nevertheless, all of the above-mentioned acts of savagery in the animal kingdom remain the exception, not the rule. Moreover, most animals do not kill for sport and this includes sharks which are mistakenly perceived by most humans as thoughtless predators (hence the idiom “loan shark”). In fact, out of hundreds of shark species, only a handful of them have been involved in killing humans, often because they mistake them for seals. But, one may ask, what about humans?