Thomas P.M. Barnett Quotes

First of all, radical beliefs are not a predictor of terrorist behavior: most people who hold radical beliefs never become terrorists, and some terrorists don't hold radical beliefs.

Some say that by fighting the terrorists abroad since September the 11th, we only stir up a hornets' nest. But the terrorists who struck that day were stirred up already. If America were not fighting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, what would these thousands of killers do - suddenly begin leading productive lives of service and charity? ... We are dealing here with killers who have made the death of Americans the calling of their lives.

What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists - whatever else they might be - might also be rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions.

I think that a lot of terrorists have been middle class and, more surprisingly, many of them have been people who were not directly affected by the things they're angry about.

Since 9/11 we have somehow come to accept the 'radicalization' narrative, which basically holds that people become terrorists through a series of consecutive, traceable steps laid out for them by large international Islamic organizations. Reality is messier, and also smaller.

ISIS rules Muslim apostates every day and then beheads them. Poorly educated guys get Islam for Dummies, petty criminals who think they're suddenly changing their lives because they see the light. The best way to fight them is to show them they don't know Islam at all, and that they are in fact working for the other side.

Granted, terrorism is a real problem everywhere. But you can't prevent it. Terrorists are nutcases who are hellbent on killing people for ideology. That's pretty hard to stop.

One of my problems with terrorism is that it's self-evidently bad. The main thing that makes it complicated is the fact that it works. When you go at it with a moral hammer, it's really, really bad. It's so bad you wouldn't believe it because you don't accomplish anything. I think the one thing terrorists themselves are vulnerable to is mockery. It's an excellent weapon.

No religion is responsible for terrorism. People are responsible for violence and terrorism.

If you want to become an Islamic radical and have yourself circumcised, I invite you to come to Moscow... I would recommend that he who does the surgery does it so you'll have nothing growing back afterward.

We can't accommodate terrorism. When someone uses the slaughter of innocent people to advance a so-called political cause, at that point the political cause becomes immoral and unjust and they should be eliminated from any serious discussion, any serious debate.

Terrorism cannot be isolated from its political, historical, and even social context.

Nobody knows what self-radicalized means, and that's one of the weird things about the way that we talk about terrorism. We talk about radicalization as though it were a thing, as though you could sort of track it and identify it, and that's not the case.

Terrorists have goals beyond their supposed pacts with God. They are authors, too.

ISIS uses traditional media platforms as well as widespread social media campaigns to propagate its ideology. With the broad distribution of social media, terrorists can spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize vulnerable persons of all ages in the U.S. either to travel to foreign lands or to conduct an attack on the homeland.

What we're seeing at the moment is people being radicalised or adopting Islamist, murderous Islamist ideology very, very quickly so that you have people that are not on the counterterrorism radar screen who then often, as a result of mental illness, will then attach themselves to this murderous ideology and then act very quickly.

Initially, terrorism was a certain mixture of politics, economics, and religion. Now, it seems that terrorism is more individual and done to avenge personal grudges. So there are two kinds of terrorism.

Radicalism and extremism, while they are dangers, they exist in every society on some level.

I worry about international terror as a method for bringing about political change or sociological change in different countries. And this concerns me because our homeland is not - we see now, is not immune from this kind of dastardly attack. And so I worry about that a lot.

There's a real danger when people get distracted by peripheral issues. They get distracted by democracy building. They get distracted about military conflicts. We need to focus on defeating jihadism.

Using terrorism or jihadists or extremists for any political agenda is immoral.

I take a very simple view that a violent extremist at some point previously been an extremist, and by definition is an extremist, so you do need to look at that non-violent extremism.

There is a direct correlation between what al Qaeda says and what it does. And the one thing that has been the gold standard of correlation has been bin Laden's 1995 - or was it 1996? - pledge that every attack is going to be more powerful than the last. If you go back to the first attack in Yemen in 1992 and chart it out, every attack has been more powerful, more destructive than the last one.

Americans are going to see that as the more religious a Muslim is, the more likely they're going to end up somehow fighting for ISIS' cause.

Terrorism is the intentional use of, or threat to use violence against civilians or against civilian targets, in order to attain political aims.