Engineers are overrepresented as terrorists- what?

[Battlehymn Republic]

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/bruce- ... rists-4080

“The Idea Lab” page in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine had an interesting article titled “Engineering Terror: Why are so many extremists from a single profession?” by David Berreby. It explained, much to the chagrin of the former president of the National Academy of Engineering, that “in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented.”


The article cited the research of sociologist Diego Gambetta and political scientist Steffen Hertog whose databases of terrorism perpetrators evidences this trend. “For their recent study,” Berreby reported,

the two men collected records on 404 men who belonged to violent Islamist groups active over the past few decades (some in jail, some not). Had those groups reflected the working-age populations of their countries, engineers would have made up about 3.5 percent of the membership. Instead, nearly 20 percent of the militants had engineering degrees. When Gambetta and Hertog looked at only the militants whose education was known for certain to have gone beyond high school, close to half (44 percent) had trained in engineering.

Terrorism, it must be said, has always been an individual avocation. The reasons why someone picks up a gun or throws a bomb represent an ineluctably personal choice born variously of grievance and frustration; religious piety or the desire for systemic socio-economic change; irredentist conviction or commitment to revolution.


Joining an organization in pursuit of these aims is meant to give collective meaning and equally importantly cumulative power to this commitment. The forces that impel individuals to become terrorists and insurgents are thus timeless—and, in fact, have less to do with one’s chosen profession than perhaps with other factors.

For terrorists to survive, much less thrive, in today’s globalized, technologically savvy and interconnected world, the preeminent terrorism expert, Walter Laqueur has argued, they have to be

educated, have some technical competence and be able to move without attracting attention in alien societies. In brief, such a person will have to have an education that cannot be found among the poor in Pakistani or Egyptian villages or Palestinian refugee camps, only among relatively well-off town folk.

Because engineering is often the most prestigious vocation in developing countries, it makes sense that this new generation of well-educated terrorists would disproportionately come from that profession.


This was in fact the conclusion also reached by Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey in their 2006 study of madrassas (Islamic schools) and lack of education as a putative terrorist incubator. Using a database of some 79 jihadis who were responsible for the five most serious terrorist incidents between 1993 and 2005, they found that the most popular subjects amongst those jihadi terrorists who attended university was engineering followed by medicine.


Bergen and Pandey further observed that 54 percent of the perpetrators either attended university or had obtained a university degree. The terrorists they studied “thus appear, on average, to be as well educated as many Americans—given that 52 percent of Americans have attended university.


Finally, they observed that two-thirds of the 25 terrorists involved in the planning and hijacking of the four aircraft on September 11th 2001 had attended university and that two of the 79 had earned PhD degrees while two others were enrolled in doctoral programs.


The popularity of medicine as a terrorist vocation most recently surfaced in connection with the botched attempt to bomb a nightclub in central London and the dramatic, but largely ineffectual, attack on Glasgow’s International Airport in June 2007. Six of the eight persons arrested were either doctors or medical students; the seventh person was employed as a technician in a hospital laboratory; and the eighth member of the conspiracy was neither a medical doctor nor in health care, but instead had earned a doctorate in design and technology.


Medical doctors becoming terrorists is hardly new, either. George Habash, the founder and leader of a prominent 1960s-era Palestinian terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was a medical doctor. As was the PFLP’s head of special operations, Wadi Haddad.


Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s chief strategist and bin Laden’s deputy, is a trained surgeon. Orlando Bosch, who was active in the militant Miami, Florida-based anti-Castro movement and was charged with the inflight bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight in 1976 that killed 73 persons, practiced as a pediatrician.


The more salient point may be that, contrary to the common place belief that poverty and lack of education breeds terrorism, to a large extent, those historically attracted to terrorism have in fact tended to be reasonably well, if not, highly educated; financially comfortable and, in some cases, quite well off; and, often gainfully employed.

Peter Hart in his seminar work, The IRA and Its Enemies found that IRA Volunteers in West Cork circa 1920 were “more likely to have jobs, trades, and an education than was typical of their peers.”


This was also true in the Jewish terrorism campaigns that occurred in pre-independence Israel. Menachem Begin, the leader of one underground movement, for instance, received his law degree from Warsaw University in 1935. David Raziel, a predecessor, was the son of an elementary school teacher and himself studied mathematics and philosophy at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.

A fellow Hebrew University student was Abraham Stern, who founded a rival militant group. Fluent both in Greek and Latin, Stern majored in classics, was a protégé of the university’s first chancellor and later president, Rabbi Judah Magnes, and won a prestigious scholarship to study in Florence, Italy.

Engineering, it must also be said, is not exclusive to the current terrorist generation. Yasir Arafat, the founder and leader of the Palestinian terrorist group, al-Fatah, and later Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and President of the Palestinian Authority, was employed by the Kuwaiti Public Works Department as an engineer when he founded al-Fatah, having graduated from Cairo’s Fouad the First University (now Cairo University).


While it is certainly true that the rank-and-file Palestinian fighters of the 1960s and 1970s were likely to be from considerably less comfortable socio-economic backgrounds, it is nonetheless clear that the Palestinian movement’s leadership did not conform to the stereotype of the poor, uneducated, jobless fighter much like their terrorist counterparts today.


Little needs to be said about the socio-economic strata of the American university and graduate students who in the 1960s joined the radical political movement, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), before gravitating to the anti-establishment terrorism of the Weather Underground group. Many of its most prominent leaders—including Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Kathy Boudin, Diana Oughton, David Gilbert and Susan Stern—were all the progeny of wealthy, well-connected families (utility company presidents, bankers, toy manufacturers, and lawyers); while most of the others were of families anchored solidly in the middle-class (e.g. Jane Alpert).

The same is true of their radical Muslim counterparts in Britain today. The father of Shahzad Tanweer, one of July 2005 London suicide bombers, was a prominent local businessman and, indeed, the archetype of the successful, hardworking immigrant owning a string of commercial interests as diverse as a slaughterhouse, a convenience store and fish-and-chips shops. Tanweer was a graduate of Leeds Metropolitan University where he obtained a degree in sports science.


The cell’s ringleader, Mohammad Siddique Khan, who was age 30 at the time of the bombings, had a business studies degree from the same university and was gainfully employed as a community worker. Although the third and youngest member of the cell, Hasib Hussain, had an undistinguished academic record and never completed his college course in business studies, according to the official Parliamentary inquiry’s report of the attacks, his family’s socio-economic background, like that of Tanweer and Khan, “was not poor by the standards of the area.” The fourth bomber, Jermaine Lindsay, perhaps conformed better to the terrorist stereotype of a poor, underprivileged, and only occasionally employed carpet fitter who never completed secondary school.


But Omar Khyam, the mastermind behind a 2004 bombing plot of London that Scotland Yard code-named “Operation Crevice,” was also the son of a wealthy businessman and grew up in a comfortable, upper-middle-class environment.


Similarly, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who orchestrated the 2002 kidnapping and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, also enjoyed a very similar upbringing and attended an exclusive—and expensive—private school. He later was admitted to the world-renowned London School of Economics (LSE), where he studied applied mathematics statistical theory, economics, and social psychological. Described as “handsome, tall and muscular, very bright and charming,” his parents expected he would be knighted some day and not now languishing in prison awaiting execution.


Omar Khan Sharif who, with a fellow British Muslim named Asif Hanif, staged a suicide bomb attack on a Tel Aviv seaside bar in 2003 also studied mathematics at a similarly prestigious British university—King’s College, London.

As Ed Hussain, the former British Islamic extremist recounts in his memoir, The Islamist: Why I Became an Islamic Fundamentalist, What I Saw Inside, and Why I Left “Interestingly, neither Asif Hanif nor Omar Sharif Khan came from an unemployed, disenchanted inner-city Muslim community; both had middle-class backgrounds.”


Similarly, Abdullah Ahmed Ali, the then-27 year old who was one of the ringleaders of the August 2006 plot to bomb simultaneously U.S. and Canadian passenger airliners departing from London’s Heathrow Airport, hardly conformed to the stereotype of the wild-eyed, fanatical, homicidal suicide bomber. A husband and father of a two-year-old son, Ali held a bachelors of science degree in computer systems engineering from a respectable British university. For all intents and purposes, he appeared to be a solidly middle-class product of a successful first generation immigrant family.


Perhaps the seminal scholarly work to debunk the conventional wisdom that links poverty and lack of education to terrorism and insurgency is [url=http://www.google.com/search?client=saf ... oe=UTF-8-8]the 2003 article, “Education, poverty and terrorism: Is there a causal connection,” by Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger and his Australian colleague, Jitka Malecková. Surveying American white supremacists, members of the contemporary Israeli (right-wing) underground, Hezbollah fighters, and Palestinian suicide bombers, and using a variety of data and different methodological approaches, they concluded that not only is there little evidence for this causality but in fact persons with higher incomes and more education are more, not less, likely to join terrorist and insurgent groups.


Similarly, according to Ronni Shaked, the Israeli journalist and former Shabak (Israel Security Agency or Shin-Bet) intelligence officer and expert on The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, best known by its acronym, Hamas, “All leaders of Hamas are university graduates, some with MA degrees. . . . It is not a movement of poor, miserable people, but the highly educated who are using poverty to make the periphery of movement more powerful.”


It would of course be wrong though to conclude that terrorist movements are populated exclusively by the financially comfortable and educated. Indeed, an inevitable bifurcation generally occurs across all terrorist movements whereby the top leadership and mid-level command strata are populated by the educated (or relatively well-educated) and financially well-off, while the majority of foot soldiers will be less educated and often from far more modest socio-economic backgrounds. A rule of thumb is thus that the larger the movement, the more diverse its members’ socio-economic and educational backgrounds.


Accordingly, the real importance and value of the New York Times Magazine story is less about what professions terrorists pursue than to present once again compelling evidence that poverty, lack of development, and stagnant economies are not the drivers or “root causes” of terrorism.


This is not to suggest that eliminating poverty, raising standards of living and education, and creating more employment opportunities may not contribute to reductions in the levels of terrorism by potentially draining the pool of would-be recruits; but rather that these measures in and of themselves cannot and will not on their own ever end terrorism.

[Mayabird]

You know all those studies that have been done and talked about before about how religious that people in different occupations are, and how engineers are consistently more religious than scientists? Similar kind of thing happening here. There's a self-selection process where these people will not attempt to enter certain professions or study certain subjects because of social stigma and beliefs, but medicine and engineering are considered safe and okay. Since they are generally more upper crust, it's expected that they'll go to college and so forth. Learning about how to calculate stress and strain will not challenge anyone's religious beliefs.

Also, frankly, the ones who get through school and get their engineering degrees are probably smarter than the average, and contrary to what a lot of people apparently believe, being smarter is no magic route to being more sane or rational - it just means that someone has more brain power to devote to whatever, which may very well include being completely batshit insane (you know all those crazy people who turn out to be, say, Mensa members?) or ridiculously devout. They can make themselves believe more strongly and more powerfully reinforce and support their views, plus more easily explain away or dismiss anything that they don't want to hear.

[Tiwaz]

Let's also notice part about captured and confessed terrorists.
As in, not in the ranks of those who buckled up and decided to go in a blaze of glory.

It is simple why terrorist organizations want engineers.


They need someone who knows how to make/plan stuff. Taking someone with PhD and telling them to design and build a carbomb is not necessarily quite successful route if guy does not have interesting hobbies. And terrorists commonly use homemade tools of trade. (Hamas rockets in Israel for example)

And learning through trial and error is not necessarily very smart option either.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

As has been said, engineers tend to be a highly religious and conservative lot, by and large. Their education tends to let them, as an old electronics professor of mine used to put it, "put the blinders on." You can be a religious fundamentalist and easily make it through the typical university engineering degree without ever having your preconceptions of the world challenged. They never have to take courses that encourage rational, critical thinking skills. You get courses in engineering ethics, of course, but all you get out of that is that not following procedures and process is bad because it causes things like the Challenger disaster. Sure, an engineer takes more science classes than the average MBA . . . but these courses are chemistry and physics . . . where you learn to regurgitate complex equations on-demand, and never have to deal with anything that might disturb a religious fundamentalist's world view, like evolution or cosmology. An engineering student never has to take a philosophy course, or an anthropology course (unless they take them as electives; though I'm made to understand universities have been trying to correct this shortcoming in the engineering curriculum in recent years.)

So, the end result is, you get engineers in the States who watch Faux Noise, guzzle the "Gubbermints r teh evulz" kool-aid, and attend teabagger rallies; and engineers in less-fortunate nations who detonate car bombs in the name of Allah.

[Broomstick]

Should it be that engineers are overrepresented as successful terrorists? If Joe Abdul blows himself in his basement due to incompetence, inability to follow instructions, and lack of critical thinking skills who the hell knows or cares? But if Joe Abdul has sufficient education to build shit that doesn't blow up until intended he becomes an effective terrorist.

[Pelranius]

It said captured terrorist. Seems to me that the more uneducated ones tend to get killed for a variety of reasons; they're the frontline grunts, law enforcement personnel shoot them instead of prioritizing them for capture, etc.

As an aside: 3.5 percent of the workers in Muslim countries have engineering degrees? Sounds pretty high to me, though it sort of makes sense since here in SoCal, especially Orange County, there are a boatload of Muslim engineers here.

[Cecelia5578]

As other's have said, studying engineering doesn't expose you to belief's that are antithetical to traditional religion, like evolution or astronomy.

As far as the Islamic world itself is concerned, I think that even many conservative Arab (they do tend to be Arab, at least as far as I can tell) Muslims tend to have no problem with sharia, keeping their wives veiled, etc and studying applied technology/engineering. Its a way to split the difference-to catch up to the West, while keeping a thin veneer of rationalism, all the while not having to apply critical thinking. There are an awful lot of people from Muslim countries that come to the West to study engineering/cs, but not too many who study in the pure sciences.

[Tiwaz]

As has been said, engineers tend to be a highly religious and conservative lot, by and large. Their education tends to let them, as an old electronics professor of mine used to put it, "put the blinders on." You can be a religious fundamentalist and easily make it through the typical university engineering degree without ever having your preconceptions of the world challenged. They never have to take courses that encourage rational, critical thinking skills. You get courses in engineering ethics, of course, but all you get out of that is that not following procedures and process is bad because it causes things like the Challenger disaster. Sure, an engineer takes more science classes than the average MBA . . . but these courses are chemistry and physics . . . where you learn to regurgitate complex equations on-demand, and never have to deal with anything that might disturb a religious fundamentalist's world view, like evolution or cosmology. An engineering student never has to take a philosophy course, or an anthropology course (unless they take them as electives; though I'm made to understand universities have been trying to correct this shortcoming in the engineering curriculum in recent years.)

So, the end result is, you get engineers in the States who watch Faux Noise, guzzle the "Gubbermints r teh evulz" kool-aid, and attend teabagger rallies; and engineers in less-fortunate nations who detonate car bombs in the name of Allah.

We should remember that engineering degrees have great deal of variety depending on nation.

I can't come up with single religious engineer I know in Finland. Quite the opposite, we tend to be bit along lines of sceptics.

But then again, our society is far less religious than say USA or ME. Compared to average Finn, average US citizen is pretty much frothing fundamentalist.

So we have to look at engineers through cultural lens, as they are not insulated from rest of society and raised in a bubble.
I recall USA having fundie scientists in variety of fields, including astronomy. They just use creative interpretation to adjust what they see to what they believe in.

I still stand behind my estimate that overrepresentation of engineers is due to our excellence and usefulness, not some odd habit of being religious.

After all, let's compare philosopher/astronomer/whatever to engineer in terms of tangible usefulness.

Engineers can design and build things which can be used to go boom or else produce useful effects. Best use for astronomer in terrorist organization is to have them drive the bomb engineer made to someplace and blow it up.

[Dave]

Slashdot had something along these lines yesterday, and one comment pointed out that terrorism requires engineering to be successful. Basically, the terrorists who build the bombs that get on the news have to be engineers to get things done.

The terrorists that build bombs is that group of terrorists who apply technology to solve (political) problems.

Last time I checked, applying technology to solve problems was basically the definition of engineering.

[Shaun]

I suppose us engineers have to take the good with the bad. We're sexier, better hung and less geeky (apart from electricals) than the science guys... but we're also more likely to be terrorists and blow things up. Meh. An engineering degree doesn't really challenge one's theological or moral beliefs, and it often leads to a secure, well paying job, so it's the obvious choice for religious psychos that are good with maths.

[Sea Skimmer]

Slashdot had something along these lines yesterday, and one comment pointed out that terrorism requires engineering to be successful. Basically, the terrorists who build the bombs that get on the news have to be engineers to get things done.

The terrorists that build bombs is that group of terrorists who apply technology to solve (political) problems.

Last time I checked, applying technology to solve problems was basically the definition of engineering.

Yes, and a perfect example of that would be the first attempt to bomb a US ship in Aden harbor in Yemen. The US didn't even knew the attack was attempted until we captured documents years later and long after a second bomb hit USS Cole, because the terrorist boat bomb was overloaded and sank as soon as they launched it! The terrorists were too dumb to check the weight of the bomb against the rating of the boat, pretty glaringly stupid oversight but its hardly the only time someone has been that plain dumb.

[Maj]

America Faces a New Threat!!!

There has been little acknowledgement given by the media to a new terrorist threat to our country’s security. In fact, federal and state governments are even hiring these people by the hundreds to perform critical functions like building our nation’s infrastructure and schools! These terrorists are actually government-sanctioned to be around our children!!

I don’t even see how President Obama can allow this to happen right under his nose. There is even a website dedicated to allowing these terrorists to get hired by our GOVERNMENT!!

http://tinyurl.com/terroristsgather

These new terrorists claim to believe in freedom and American values, but they are lying! According to Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, they are a “group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs.” Who are these people?

Engineers.

Don’t believe those ignorants who claim that engineering is an occupation that does no harm. It’s a FACT that engineers compose the most common occupation among terrorists.

Sociologist Diego Gambetta and the political scientist Steffen Hertog are composing a database to keep track of terrorist attacks or attempted attacks carried out by engineers.

See for yourself!

• Last December, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit, Michigan.
• In February, Joseph Andrew Stack, a software engineer, crashed his plane into I.R.S. offices in Austin, Tex.
• In March, John Patrick Bedell, an engineering grad student, opened fire at an entrance to the Pentagon.
• In early May, Faisal Shahzad was arrested at Kennedy Airport for a failed attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square.
• Also in May, Faiz Mohammad, a civil engineer, was caught at Karachi’s airport with batteries and an electrical circuit hidden in his shoes.
• Yasir Arafat, the founder and leader of the Palestinian terrorist group, al-Fatah, and later Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and President of the Palestinian Authority, was employed by the Kuwaiti Public Works Department as an engineer when he founded al-Fatah, having graduated from Cairo’s Fouad the First University (now Cairo University).
• Richard Girnt Butler was an American aerospace engineer for Lockheed who became the neo-Nazi leader of the Christian Identity white supremacist group Aryan Nations.

You can see from this list that this is a wider problem than just Islam. Stack was a white Catholic. Bedell was a white American Libertarian. Butler was Presbyterian.

In fact, engineers make up one fifth of all militant terrorists around the world! Despite what their profession claims to accomplish (building amazing structures for the future of society), engineers are almost exclusively involved in extremist groups that want to go BACKWARDS. And we let these people build our roads and bridges!!

But WHY??!!

Psychological research has shown that engineering – as both an area of study and career – has a tendency to attract people who are looking for certainty. These people subscribe to the notion that the world and its processes are mechanically determined and explicable according to the laws of chemistry and physics.

That means that engineers are far more likely to have an intolerance for uncertainty and unpredictability – just like both religious and secular extremists! On top of that, engineers want society to run “like clockwork,” which is a sneaky way of saying that they want absolute control. They don’t like democracy because it requires compromise.

This isn’t news, though! The media has been suppressing this information for YEARS! In fact, the phenomenon of engineers showing overt extremist tendencies was first observed by Bruce Salem nearly five years ago. He noticed that engineers tended to campaign for the theory of Creationism and against Evolution. In fact, in the UK, engineers have largely been the force behind the undermining of the school system with anti-evolutionist propaganda that has no reference or backing in science. So these people are building our schools, then undermining the learning process! How can the government be paying people to do this? What do we send our children to school for?

The evidence is there that this trend toward “minor” extremism can be extended to fundamentalism and terrorism. These people are taking our hard-earned money and using it to fund their extremist agenda to erode this country from the inside out. The next time you drive over a bumpy pothole-filled road or experience a power outage, just remember that it was ENGINEERS who built the system that failed!

References Used:

http://tinyurl.com/engineeringterror

http://wikipedia.org (Joseph Andrew Stack, John Patrick Bedell, Richard Girnt Butler)

http://tinyurl.com/whyengineers

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mechanism

http://tinyurl.com/anti-evolution

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis

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My dad worked as an electrical engineer with GE for 30 years and is constantly sending me eMails full of fear of various "-ists." After seeing this thread, I was inspired to write this satirical piece to make a point in a way that he could more directly relate to:

People - of all colors, shapes, and sizes - do bad stuff. At this point in time in our history, more than ever we need to stop letting fear rule our actions and accept that assholes are assholes. It's not about Muslims being assholes, or Republicans, or the President, or whomever. A = A and it's as simple as that.