Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant terrorist viewed as the founder of Isis, was killed in a US airstrike in Baghdad in 2006.
"Enhancing long term national security requires that we have a clear-eyed view of radical Islamic terrorism without ascribing radical Islamic terrorist views to all Muslims".
For their part, the Israeli soldiers, brainwashed to suspect every passenger as a potential "terrorist", viewed the rebellion against accepting the occupier-occupied paradigm as enough proof that the rebellious person must be a terrorist.
Perhaps trying not to overload a Pakistani government that has shown itself to be overwhelmed by daily political and terrorist attacks, Mr. Obama made only oblique mention of a concern voiced frequently inside the White House: That Al Qaeda and other terrorists view Pakistan's arsenal of 60 to 100 weapons as the ultimate goal of a campaign to destabilize that government.
"The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland," Robert Papes, the pre-eminent US expert on suicidal terrorists, told The American Conservative Magazine in 2005.
So while that is how the terrorists view it and that is the rhetoric, we have to be careful not to reinforce that rhetoric".
Regarding "When it pays to talk to terrorists" (Views, Sept. 4): Paul Thomas Chamberlin pays homage to the worst atrocity ever to afflict the Olympic Games: the murder of 11 Israeli athletes 40 years ago in Munich.
But it surely behoves a voice as influential as his to make some assessment of how representative the terrorists' views are.Without this, there is a grave danger of exaggerating the civilisational conflict between Islam and the West.
Georg Martel, Zurich Root causes of terrorism Olivier Roy ("Recruiting terrorists," Views, Jan . 11 helps break a significant myth widely incorporated into the "war on terrorism": that Al Qaeda's objective is to destroy the so-called Western way of life and replace it with a caliphate.
