I know this might come as a shock, but terrorists are people too...

I'd like to begin this blog post with a quote I found on Frontline, in an article titled, 'Al Qaeda Today':

"It turns out that the terrorists are very much like us," he says. "They're not really all that different." In a 2004 speech, Sageman explained, "Most people think that terrorism comes from poverty, broken families, ignorance, immaturity, lack of family or occupational responsibilities, weak minds susceptible to brainwashing -- the sociopath, the criminals, the religious fanatic, or, in this country, some believe they're just plain evil."

But Sageman found that three quarters of his sample came from the upper or middle class. The vast majority -- 90 percent -- came from caring, intact families. 63 percent had gone to college, as compared with the five to six percent typical in the third world. "These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways," he says.

The terrorists he studied were not, for example, "the Palestinian 14-year-olds we see on the news," but they joined the jihad at an average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi-professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, his right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri is a physician, and the 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta was an architect."

John Updike's The Terrorist, purported to depict how "terrorists" are created, does no such thing, and, in fact, only creates what Americans think makes a terrorist. The protagonist grows up in an insulated, religious environment, as if to put the blame for his terrorism on Islam itself, and if that weren't bad enough, he actively rejects Western values, until the day is saved by the irreligious Jack Levy, who steers him back onto the right path, as though terrorism were like drugs or alcohol, a bad life choice that kids would use to childishly rebel from their parents.

True, this is a better explanation for terrorism than the throwaway line that one always hears in the context of terrorist attacks: "They're just crazy." Well, that depends upon your definition of crazy. If you are talking about mental illness, then no, not necessarily. True, extremist groups may attract such personalities, but pretending terrorists are necessarily mentally-ill undermines the very real political conflict that often drives them to such acts. Terrorist groups are political factions, composed of people using a form of warfare relying upon intimidation and attacks upon civilians. Cold. Yes. Effective. Yes. Crazy? No.

So what about the stereotype purported by The Terrorist, that these are just troubled kids hanging out with the wrong crowd? Well, let's put it this way. Before the Boston Marathon attacks, nobody would have thought Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was any kind of terrorist. We are shocked by how "normal" he and his brother looked. People online have posted pictures of him from their elementary school year books, and others posted pictures of him they found as some girl's prom date. There was no indication that he was troubled, that he hated the West, or anything like that. The fact of the matter is, he's a person. But of course, Americans jumped on the chance to blame it on his background, some Americans even mixing up Chechnya and the Czech Republic, prompting the Ambassador of the Czech Republic to clarify that they are completely different places. But these men were essentially American, and one journalist said that, essentially, blaming Tsarnaev's actions on his Chechen heritage makes as much sense as blaming Timothy McVeigh's (the Oklahoma City Bomber) actions on his Irish heritage.

The point is, if we go about trying to figure out what kind of person a terrorist is, we create a mentality that they are a special type of person, a species of villain separate from "normal" people like you and I. Any one person can become a terrorist, for many different reasons. Even one of us, in this class, could one day decide to make some kind of political statement gone wrong. It's not that farfetched an idea. A terrorist is a person who commits terrorism, end of story, and reading anything more into it is a recipe for disaster.