Religious Terrorism: Asymmetric Warfare and Its Use by Religious Based Terrorist Organizations

By

Table of contents

CHAPTER 04: THE EFFECT OF THE INFORMATION AGE ON MODERN TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS1

Religious Terrorism1

Targeting of Attacks by Terrorists6

Success of Using Media to Further Agenda9

Economical Warfare11

Reasons for Success13

ENDNOTES19

CHAPTER 04: THE EFFECT OF THE INFORMATION AGE ON MODERN TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS

Religious Terrorism

Enders, states that religion is the single most defining characteristic of terrorist organizations. He also argues that religion is the reason for the exponential increase in lethality of terrorist acts. According to Hoffman, it no longer seems to be the focus of terrorists to have the large audience watching. Their concern has now become creating more damage and destruction than in the past, and a lesser focus on sending a message to the community. He suggests this is also why the new era of terrorists has more of a tendency to threaten with the use of weapons of mass destruction. The development of this type of destructive warfare points to an increase in fatalities by terrorist acts. Hoffman states that religious terrorists contend that, “violence is first and foremost a sacramental act or divine duty executed in direct response to some theological demand or imperative” (p. 2). Essentially, this is stating that the acts of violence committed by terrorists are perpetrated in response to some religious obligation or demand. That is, religion, in this instance, is most certainly a motivating factor in the perpetration of terrorist acts.

Research has supported Hoffman's arguments about the increased lethality of terrorist attacks. For instance, Enders and Sandler (2000) used the ITERATE database to determine the current and potential threat of terrorist attacks across nations and discovered that although the overall number of terrorist attacks has declined since the Cold-War era, there is a 17% higher chance of death or injury in each terrorist attack committed. Moreover, they attribute that the events associated with the Iranian Revolution in 1979 to be contributed to the lethality of these terrorist attacks.

Furthermore, it seems from other research that religious motivations behind terrorist attacks do not apply explicitly to those of Islamic backgrounds. Juergensmeyer (2000) states that terrorist attacks around the world are perpetrated with religion as a driving factor and it cannot be pinpointed to a specific country of origin. Some of the examples he gave were the Jewish assassins of Israel, the Buddhist terrorist sect in Japan, radical Hindus and Sikhs in India, and the Christian militants in the United States. It is clear that each and every religion is potentially subject to the manipulations of terrorists in order to create a justification for their heinous crimes.

It has also been argued that the only way to understand why these acts of religious terrorism are occurring is to have a firm grasp of eschatology.

The primary concept behind eschatology is the battle between good and evil. These groups believe that there is a cosmic war waging on among countries and their religions. White sums up the concept of eschatology in the following statement, “on a cosmic battlefield, Armageddon's warrior needs ...