Terrorists with Designer Clothing

Fouad Ajami looks at the “new boys of terror.” An excerpt:

Sociologists and terrorism experts have endlessly profiled those who have joined the brigades of terror. But the boys of terror now confound their profilers. The standard interpretation that attributes terror to poverty and deprivation has been dealt a deathblow by the biographical data of the new perpetrators of ruin. A young man of the Egyptian middle class, Mohamed Atta, led the death pilots of 9/11. He had not come from abject poverty; he had made his way to graduate education in Germany. Ziad Samir Jarrah, a boy of Lebanon's well-off communities, and a party boy at that, was at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into the field in Pennsylvania.

The very "normalcy" of the new terrorists is perhaps their most disturbing characteristic. An official inquiry for the House of Commons into the transit and bus bombings that hit London in July 2005 concedes the difficulty of "profiling" and of detection. The investigations uncovered little that was unusual about the four men who pulled off the deed. "The backgrounds of the four men appear largely unexceptional. Little distinguishes their formative experiences from those of many others of the same generation, ethnic origin, and social background ... ." The ringleader, Mohammed Sidique Khan, born in West Yorkshire, was something of a role model for younger people. "He was highly regarded by teachers and parents and had a real empathy with difficult children. He was not aggressive, extreme, or politicized in the way he spoke about religion to colleagues. He had spoken out against the 9/11 attacks at school." One of the four perpetrators of this operation, Shehzad Tanweer, also of West Yorkshire, appears to have led "a balanced life," the report observes. "He owned a red Mercedes, which his father had bought for him. He took care with his appearance, with fashionable hairstyles and designer clothing."