I think you've skewed my point almost entirely. Islamic martyrs detonating their vest-bombs in a crowded street of innocents, is in no way comparable to a soldier fighting in a war.
If your politics involve murdering innocents, you're not mentally sane, and I'm not going to dance around the subject.
Why not? You think there would be no American citizen/soldier capable doing that, if let us say
the US suffered from a Soviet invasion and occupation?
Those people are not more 'insane' than the Tokkotai, the japanese fighter planes that crashed their jabos into US ships. Everyone knew that it was hopeless. Everyone knew that it was a waste of resources. Yet generals ordered it. And soldiers did it. So have the Germans on some rare occasions. And many US veterans said they would have probably done the same, given the situation was reversed. Suicide attacks, have a long tradition in warefare and human history. Not so much from a military point of view, but from a morale point of view. An enemy that is willing to do literaly everything and the natural fear of dieing isn't effective. That's a pretty damn powerfull message for it self! And that is why terrorism can't be beaten with conventional military tactics.
What we're talking about here, is ideology and indoctrination. Once we get to the bottom of it, we might actually find solutions that work.
Not to mention that as someone who has had serious mental issues in the past my self, I am not very happy with simply 'classyfing' all those fuckers as just 'mentally insane/unstable'. I hope you know what I mean. As someone who is working as child carer and I really love my job, I have to constantly be carefull with whom I talk about it, simply because of that stigma that some have in their head, that mental issues = Killernutjob!. I certainly meet people that think like that.
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(...)The point being that there is something worrisome about people making automatic associations between mental illness and murder and terrorism. To be clear, the majority of people with mental illness, whether or not they have depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, or schizophrenia, for example, never harm anyone. In fact, most of the time, they are the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators. It is a travesty that people who are already labeled and face terrible stigma must then be lumped into the same group as those who commit such brutal and terrible crimes against humanity.
That said, how do we understand the minds of this particular brand of killers? We have spent years studying the minds of psychopaths and serial killers in prison after capture, but how many terrorists have been studied? Why does it matter, you might ask? Well, how do we prevent future generations of terrorists if we don’t begin to figure out what draws them into the life?
I don't see what we could potentially gain, buy just declaring them all as more or less mentally instable. I am pretty sure that this can be said about some cases out there. The type of nutjobs sitting in their cabbin, building a bomb or fondling their scoped rifle, with the intention to hopefully 'kill some feds!' one day. Yeah. They exist. But I feel they are the minority among the extremists/lunatics, not the majority.
I am someone who likes to find explanations, that hopefully lead to solutions. But I feel that most people today, are not interested in that and just want to be done with, and the faster the better. But if you're only tool is a hammer, every issues starts to look like a nail.