Psychological processes and "the staircase to terrorism".

was killed on March 8, 2005, he also signaled his intention to have a dialogue with Vladimir Putin. Islamic fundamentalist terrorists or messianic terrorists like bin Laden and alZarqawi have a different agenda: to eliminate any political system that does not embrace Islam as the “only true religion . . . and [accept] that all other religions and civilizations [are] barbarian, evil, and animal-like” (Laqueur, 2000, p. 33; see also Marsella, 2004, pp. 44–45). As noted by Hallett (2004), in public these terrorists claim that they are motivated by a “selfsacrificing love for the oppressed” (p. 53) as well as the elimination of poverty and injustice, “but their true motive is the apocalyptic belief that the world is so corrupt that they must destroy it [including killing innocent children and women] to save it” (p. 63). Messianic terrorists consider “killing as a sacrament act” (White, 2003, p. 51). This radical fundamentalist belief is known as jihad, or holy war, rooted in Islamic terrorists’ interpretation of the method of the Prophet Mohammad (Laqueur, 2000), who went to Mecca and “declared a holy war, a jihad, on all nonbelievers” (White, 2003, p. 93). Islamic fundamentalist or messianic terrorists use Mohammad’s words (i.e., the Qur’an) to justify their violence. It should be noted, however, that the majority of more than one billion Muslims in the world are “peaceful citizens [italics added]” (Powell, 2004, p. 54) and that fewer than one percent of them interpret the Qur’an in a radical fundamentalist manner. A dialogue with the leaders of Islamic fundamentalist or messianic terrorist organizations may never be possible. This is the main message of the leader of al-Qaeda (bin Laden) in the Al-Qaeda Training Manual (U.S. Department of Justice, 2004): “Islamic governments have never and will never be established through peaceful solutions [italics added] and cooperative councils. They are established as they [always] have been . . . by gun . . . bullet [and] by tongue and teeth” (p. 1). In addition, bin Laden has confessed that he ordered the 9/11 attacks. Who would expect bin Laden to have a dialogue with President Bush in the White House? Could a dialogue with messianic terrorists not in leadership positions be achieved? The answer is “probably,” if that dialogue is theological rather than political. For example, in December 2002, Judge Hamound al-Hitar in Sanaa, Yemen, invited five al-Qaeda members in a Sanaa prison to engage with him in a theological dialogue with an emphasis on the interpretation of the Qur’an, not on the perceived injustice of the political system (Brandon, 2005). Judge al-Hitar asked those messianic terrorists to read the Qur’an and justify to him where this holy book states under which specific situations innocent civilians can or cannot be killed and where the book states that children and women can be killed. They could not find in the Qur’an the justification for their asymmetrical terrorist attacks. Judge al-Hitar, however, showed to them numerous passages in the Qur’an instructing Muslims that innocent civilians (including children and women) should not be attacked, that other religions should be respected, and that a fight against the enemy is acceptable only in self-defense. The results: Judge al-Hitar said that those five terrorists plus “three hundred and 64 young men have been released after going through [theological] dialogues and none have left Yemen to fight anywhere else” (Brandon, 2005, p. 10). Laqueur (2000) suggested that a major mistake made by the Egyptian government in response to terrorism was its brutal punishment of terrorists in prison with