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Originally posted by NousDefionsDoc
You are treading dangerously close to the social worker theory espoused by the left for so long.
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Yeah. I'm pretty sure I am. Since AQ leadership was heavily influenced by Marxism, I think that would kind of make sense.
Quote:
Originally posted by NousDefionsDoc
As for your examples, good recruiters will always target likely prospects. I would think there is a good deal more active recruiting of the disenfranchised than there is accidental encounters. How hard can it be to find out who is unemployed and doing poorly in English classes in these small tightly knit communities? The mosques and madrasas are the keys, as they are the centers of social life. And they both have everything to do with Islam.
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There is very little evidence of top down recruitment in AQ. Folks I know have used the recruitment chapter from HFCUI as a hypothesis for investigating this current issue and have not found more than a few incidents to back it up. Granted, they COULD get their act together and do some good recruitng, however that would leave tehm open to penetration and frankly, enough people want to join that they do not have to recruit all that much. From open sources, recruitment more accurately consists of facilitation of travel to a camp.
I am unaware of Origins of Terrorism's chapter on social networks (both analog and digital) (with attendent discussion of Granovetter's Strength of Weak Ties) and their effect on entry into a terrorist group.
If you are basing your understanding of Islamic terrrorism on Reich's book, I think you are doing yourself a disservice. There are several books out that I think do a better job of presenting the history of the radical Islamic ideology. Ghost Wars is one. His does not discuss the failure of Arab nationalism. I'll get into that at some point, but its time to PT.
Last thing: Reich could have used some better essays by some of those authors, particularly Post and Peg Hermann.