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Originally Posted by FSETH
The problem with that though is that there many many innocent kids being trained and brainwashed from an early age to hate Americans and everything we stand for based on the hatred that their parents have in their hearts. There will always be another generation of terrorists. Plus many other adults are forced into it. Not really a fair arguement.
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The same can be said for the KKK. Kids of KKK members often joined themselves. Racism in general is usually passed down from parents to kids. And so is political ideology. Kids of liberals are usually liberal, and kids of conservatives are usually conservative. There are some excpetions, but yes -- even though we hate to admit it, we are often much like our parents.
But none of this changes what the effective solution is. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix. But fighting terror with terror simply does not work. It didn't work with the KKK. It didn't work for the British in their fight against the IRA. It hasn't worked for the Israelis in their fight against Hezbollah or Hamas. And it won't work against al-Queda.
For some reason, none of you wants to ask the magic questions, which is "what causes extremists groups to become powerful?"
Every society has extremist groups. Even here in the United States, we have some extremist groups. But they are not powerful. They are very small fringe groups that do not really provide any significant threat to society. Why is it that our extremist groups are small and insignificant, but extremist groups in many third world regions are much more powerful and do provide a threat?
The answer is "living conditions". When people live in places with lousy living conditions, poverty, hunger, war, violence, etc. -- they are more likely to be desperate and to listen to extremists. If you look at history, you will see that in every country where extremists came to power, it was always following a period of terrible living conditions.
1920s Germany had a terrible depression following their defeat in the most destrictive war mankind had ever seen up to that point. So desperate people were more willing to put their faith in the Nazis, who were indeed seen as extremists, but promised all sorts of things to the people.
The KKK formed after the Confederacy was defeated in the Civil War, and the South was in economic ruins.
And now we have Al-Queda, which was formed in Afghanistan during the 1980s when people were starving to death and Afghanistan was in middle of a civil war. Not hard at all to understand their appeal to the average starving and unemployed person, when they promised to defeat the godless invaders (the Russians), and restore peace and religion to the country. And now we see them spreading to Iraq, another war-torn country with terrible economic conditions, over 30% unemployment, and an occupation by a foreign army. No big surprise there.
The question is how to get rid of the terrorist group. And the answer is quite simple. Have a policy which gets rid of the lousy living conditions, which attempts to rebuild the country, and gets rid of the occupying army. Will the problem go away overnight? No. It will take years. But at least we will be moving in the right direction.
Remember.....happy people do not become terrorists.