We Must Change Terrorists' Minds

From The Plain Dealer/September 14, 2001
By Tom Feran

Cleveland, OH -- At a quarter to nine, on an impossibly clear morning in a city where such starts seldom occur, Jim Siegelman and Flo Conway looked up from their morning coffee to see what they've warned about for 25 years.

"We saw a plane fly low over our apartment, heading south, which is a flight path nobody flies over Manhattan," Conway said. "It was so low it was like precision flying, through the space between buildings. It was the first plane from Boston to hit the World Trade Center."

They were unscathed in midtown, where a freshly cleansing northwest breeze spared them the enveloping clouds of smoke, dust, ash and death. But none of us escaped the blowback.

"Blowback is what the CIA used to call it when covert operations came back to haunt them," Siegelman said. "Blowback is the cost of covert operations."

Siegelman, who grew up in Shaker Heights, and Conway are researchers and authors who have spent a quarter century studying an escalating pattern of cult fanaticism and religious-political terror around the world. They testified at the first House-Senate hearings on cults and their dangers in 1979, and have documented some of their findings in two groundbreaking books, "Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change" and "Holy Terror: The Fundamentalist War on America's Freedoms in Religion, Politics and Our Private Lives."

From the Manson family to Jonestown to Waco, from a Tokyo subway attack to Oklahoma City, they watched as sects and individuals with extreme, apocalyptic beliefs took aim at a wider society. They see an awful culmination now, as evidence in Tuesday's attacks points to the network of Osama bin Laden.

We wonder about the hatred that can turn them into kamikaze bombers. Siegelman calls them "soldiers of suggestion. You're messing with the most volatile explosive known to man. You're not dealing with state-sponsored terrorism, you're dealing with a state of mind."

It is a state of mind partly created by the same forces that now must seek to destroy bin Laden. For more than 20 years, using religious-political groups like his has been a tool of foreign policy.

Bin Laden's record dates from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The Saudi-born outcast millionaire joined the rebels - the mujahadeen, or "holy warriors" - working to free the country from outposts in Pakistan. As recently as a dozen years ago, they received more than $5 billion in arms and help from the United States, fighting a proxy battle in one of the last hot spots of the Cold War.

After the Soviets withdrew and collapsed, the mujahadeen felt abandoned by their erstwhile allies, but energized in a struggle fired in religious terms of Islamic fundamentalism.

"It's not religion at all," Siegelman said. "It's the use of religion to control a whole culture, by indirect means, for political ends." Even among "rank and file immigrants" in the New York area, he and Conway found "absolute fury at how we used those cultures to fight proxy wars." Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia, denouncing U.S. presence in the region during the Persian Gulf War as a pollution. He went on to support other "holy warriors," even as he declared "holy war" against America five years ago.

In hotbeds of religious fundamentalism, martyrs are made, not born. The death of one creates a thousand more, willing to die for a cause. Siegelman and Conway see their closed societies as living laboratories of mind control that evoke, more intensely, what nationalism, propaganda and religion did in Japan and Germany in World War II.

"It's the Achilles' heel of democracy," Conway said, "when faith turns to fanaticism and zealotry and becomes a weapon of control, manipulation and intimidation. How you deal with this on a global scale has yet to be determined. "

Bombing will only provoke more virulent reaction. A whole mindset will have to be countered by supporting moderate Islamic clerics and leaders bringing the real faith of the Koran to individuals and whole communities schooled in ideological extremism.

"It may seem pretty naive," Siegelman said, "but the only way you can fight a closed society is open, direct communication. And instruction that the world will not tolerate this."