{"id":87741,"date":"2019-04-26T22:54:07","date_gmt":"2019-04-27T04:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=87741"},"modified":"2019-04-26T15:19:28","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T22:19:28","slug":"why-do-educated-youth-join-extremist-terrorist-movements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/04\/26\/why-do-educated-youth-join-extremist-terrorist-movements\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do “educated” youth join extremist terrorist movements?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chandre Dharmawardana<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

It is often\nasked  why educated youth  coming from good homes\u201d join extremist\norganizations.  Simple  references to \nbrain washing\u201d, or the stupidity of the young are no explanations.\nThere is no scientifically recognized  \nprocess called brain washing\u201d.  \nIt is also  naive to assume that  educated youth  join the IS (Islamic state)  to go to heaven and get their 21 virgins!\nMany youth radicalized in British Universities ended up fighting for the ISIS.\nAt least one of the Sri Lankan Muslim Kamikazi had a British training, had four\nchildren, a flourishing business and \nlived in a million dollar home in Colombo. A British education  in a narrow subject like information technology\u201d\nnot touching any  broad scientific or\ncultural  subjects, given in a British\nred Brick\u201d university can have no effect on already acquired belief systems.\nDon’t our most educated\u201d ministers go to Tirupathi, India,  at the drop of a pin? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These radicals are\nno different from the young intellectuals of an earlier generation who believed\nin a simplistic theory of capitalists versus the workers, and how the workers\nwould unite to bring down the capitalists and create a classless society where\neven state power has disappeared!  They\nbelieved that “THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS” –  so we \nhad  Stalin, Mao Tse Tung,   Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, countless\nLeft-Terrorist Maoist-Guevarist-Naxalite groups, and  Wijeweera’s JVP in Sri Lanka  killing innocents to achieve their\n“objective”.  This objective is\ngiven a historical destiny by dialectical materialism formulated as historical\nmaterialism\u201d. Contrary to the predictions of historical materialism, these\nmovements have only produced ghoulish Gulags. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, these\nbrain-washed\u201d young Muslims are educated in the Islamic fundamentalist view of\nthe world consisting of Muslims (good), and infidels (bad).   Many educated Arabs do not believe that the\n9\/11 World Trade Center attack was done by Arab Kamikazes. They think it was a\nput-up job by Jewish groups and the Bush government to give them an excuse to\nattack the Oil Rich Middle Eastern countries on the economic front, and to\nrelaunch  the Crusades against Islam.\nThis is the rationale for the \ncounter-attack on luxury hotels frequented by Westerners, and on\nChristian Churches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as\nDialectical materialism calls  for a\nrevolution leading to a  necessary final\nstate which is an article of faith of Marxists, Islam defines that history must\nnecessarily lead to the Islamic state after a Jihadic step. The “holy\nwar” replaces the revolution of the Red Comrade. The historical destiny\ntaught to young Muslims by impassioned Arabic Teachers who have come from the\nMiddle East is as simple and clear as the JVP five lessons. Their role is to\nestablish the Islamic State, with everyone practicing the Sharia law which\nencompasses not only morality, but economic activity as well \u2013 a complete\nideology is sold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as  many Sri Lankans, or even ministers are\nover-whelmed enough to readily accept ideas cooked up  in the West, because they are from the\nWest,  these young people are also\nover-whelmed by “renowned” and fiery teachers from the Middle East\nwho paint a glorious picture of the old Caliphate.  The idealistic young Muslim has a clear\njihadist mission, taught to him by these fundamentalist “international\nteachers”. Achieving  this\ndesignated  noble cause,  the Islamic Caliphate  in the name of Allah becomes their mission.\nAchieving this  END is justified by ANY\nmeans whatever. It is a sacrifice that they make, in much the same way as  “rathu sahodarayas” (red comrades)\nare ready to fight the capitalist army and die in the process of the\nrevolutionary capture of the state by the “working class”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The young\nuniversity students who readily absorbed the “five lessons” of the\nJVP, although almost stupid in content, attempted to overthrow the legitimate\ngovernment because the message fitted in with their pre-conceived notions.  These notions were about  the need to change the economic framework by\n“hook or crook”,   hammered\ninto the Sri Lankan youth by the LSSP and CP politicians who came prior to the\nJVP.  The tremendous disparity between\ntheir power and state power seemed irrelevant to a just cause. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The early Marxists\nin Sri Lanka  had fomented  the trade unions to rise in militant\n“hartals”,  hoping to capture\npower. They were sure of being the “Bolsheviks” who will  replace the “Menshevick”  government of Bandaranaike. So, the LSSP, a\nrevolutionary party  did not worry about  popularity at the polls.   Dr. Osmond Jayaratne, and Engineer C. B.\nWijedoru, both central committee members of the LSSP assured me that Language\nParity  was a policy strategically crafted\nto the revolution using unions with more than 50% Tamils, and not designed for\nelections. When they abandoned the “revolution” and joined Mrs.\nBandaranaike, they jettisoned  parity and\nembraced  the majority language, as one\nlanguage is more efficient for the classless, divisionless, unethnic  communist state. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the case of the\nradicalized young Muslims, they too hope to change what they see is an utterly\nimmoral world. The world must conform to the draconian morality taught to them\nby the fundamentalist Arab teachers. Martin Luther had found such a moralistic\nmessage xplosively successful in an earlier era. These young people find an\noutlet to their moral and idealistic energy, and an identity  thorough these extremist organizations.  Their parent’s  society has failed to provide them with valid\nidealistic objectives suitable to the 21st<\/sup> century, and allowed  extremist teachers to infect them with a new\npassion. This process is not brain washing\u201d, but more analogous to the spread\nof an infection of virulent memes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ilanaki Tamize\nArasu Kadchi (ITAK) declared in 1949 that the Ceylon Tamils \u2013  a mere 10% of the population \u2013 must have an\nexclusive homeland\u201d in Ceylon, and that their struggle is to establish their\nown Raj where they will manage their own affairs\u201d.  The leaders were wealthy  upper-caste\u201d \nland owners of the North, but living in Southern Ceylon, and in the best\nparts of  Colombo. They blamed the\nsouthern politicians (them excluded) for all the problems of the North. This\nwas an an inflammatory, racist and exclusive ideology crafted to attract the\nfervour of the youth, with some of its leaders identifying with the Chola\nempire.  The move towards Swabasha with\nthe cry of Sinhala ONLY became fuel for further \npolarization.  By a strange twist\nof history, Vaddukkoddai, a town named \n‘Batakotte’  till the dawn of the\n20th<\/sup> century because it was a Sinhalese garrison town  against Chola invasions,  was the venu of the Vaddukoddai resolution.\nIt called for  separatist  armed struggles to achieve  Eelam\u201d, the ethnically exclusive Tamil\nhomeland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Educated Tamil\nparents with liberal values could not \nunderstand why their well educated children joined violent Eelamist\nracist movements.  In the end the parents\nthemselves were infected by the same bug, when \nthe majority reaction  erupted\ninto a  horrific pogrom in 1983, and escalated\ninto  brutal war.  Notably, Jeyaratnam Wilson’s political\nwritings had evolved from its empirical approach to a separatist stance  within a dozen years, moving to support a\nview of Sri Lankan history about Tamil homelands that he would have vehemently\nrejected in an earlier decade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same\nphenomenon exists in the highly literate world of Judaism. The young\nfundamentalist Jews in Israel fight and kill to build Zion. They too are driven\nby an utterly medieval, jingoist Judaism \nthat underpins  Likud  ideology. \nThe moral right\u201d of the Zion or the Caliphate, the dialectical\nnecessity of the communist state, or the rights of an  Eelamist \nhistorical claim, these  \novershadow  mere human rights or,\nsay,  Palestinian claims to existence.\nLeaders of Zionist terror organizations like the IRGUN, e.g., Menachem Begin\nand Benjamin Natanyahu, became prime minsters with US support.  Another terrorist group, LEHI,  proclaimed that the Armed struggle is the\nduty of all Israel; every Jew has to be a warrior. Religion … raises the\narmed struggle to a ritual above any other facet of human endeavour. Hallelujah\nwith machine guns\u201d! The Zionist terror, at first directed against the British,\nwas later directed against the Palestinians who suffer  enormous aggression but remain protected from\nthe UNHRC by the Western powers. A more just British policy could have produced\nco-existence between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Palestinians have\nmounted equally horrific counter-terror \ngroups like the Hezbollah who are funded by the Arab states. All these\nterror organizations easily recruit their educated youth to engage in terror. A\nleader of the LEHI, Yitzhak Shamir served as a prime minister of Israel. The\nend  justifies the use of violent means\nfor those in the faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Zionist\nterrorist movements against the British arose during a time when Nazism with\nits credo of violence  arose in Europe,\nmisrepresenting  Drawinian evolution and\nusing it as a theoretical underpinning. This misrepresentation of Darwin, initiated\nby literary men like Tenyson who pictured nature as  being red in Tooth and Claw\u201d, is\nscientifically incorrect. Darwinian evolution works when a large number of\ngenes and cells  COOPERATE to take\nadvantage of fitness landscapes, and not when acting by competition.  I have discussed this at length in my book A\nPhysicist’s  view of Matter and Mind\n(World Scientific), Chapter 3\u201d and elsewhere in that book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Jane Russell,\nin her ever topical, sadly no longer available \nbook  Communal Politics Under the\nDonoughmore Constitution, 1931-1947 (Tisara Publishers) \u201d writes that  nationalist leaders like SWRD Bandaranaike\nand GG Ponnambalam were glowingly referred to as pocket Hitlers\u201d by their\nrespective  admirers in the two ethnic\ncamps. Prabhakaran with his Child soldiers wearing Cyanide capsules graduating\ninto  Kamikaza cadre was the final\nproduct of one such nationalism. Its Hindu ideology,  nourished in ultra-conservative Jaffna\nChristianity makes Shiva into a \ndestroyer and the Christian God into a partisan Shiva.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Societies that\nfail to provide for the idealism and rebelliousness of  youth through opportunity  in adventure, in the  arts, sciences and professions become the\ntheater of extremist ideologies. Just as \nyoung plants need protection against insects, weeds and extremes of\nweather during their early growth, young nations need  protection. Even flourishing open societies\u201d\ncannot allow subversive forces supported by external money  to crush the traditional structures in their\nsocieties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sri Lanka had\nevolved a compassionate society that gave refuge to all faiths since Asokan\ntimes, with near equality to women and lower castes\u201d,  when compared with other ancient societies.  No heretics were burnt. The END, however\ndesirable, could  not justify  THE MEANS used to achieve the end, since the\nrighteous path was the essential element of Buddhist and Jain doctrines, and in\nforms of  Hinduism that evolved under\nteachers like Nagarjuna.  Lanka’s  rulers \ngave asylum to Catholics and Muslims in the face of Dutch-Lutheran\nrepression. More recently, the nation’s ancient \nwholesome  values were\njettisoned  in favour of virulent  doctrines coming from the political left, and\nfrom the political right which uses religion to anchor  its claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Irish and\nTamil diaspora fed and fomented  the\nIrish and LTTE violence. The US and its NGOs feed and foment disaster\ncapitalism in young nations and interfere with their elections by propping up\nUS favorites. In such operations, the \n‘manifest destiny of the US’  overshadows\nall human rights.  Similarly, the\nfundamentalist oil sheiks build Mosques, Madarassis and push fundamentalist\nagendas causing dissension in Myanmar, Sri Lanka or elsewhere, while heaping\nthe blame on the  intolerance\u201d of the\nmajority community.  These\nideologies   reject dissent and  open discussion. They  threaten \nto eliminate the other by force.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But many\npoliticians, tempted by money and \ninfluence,  allow the camel into\nthe tent,  and then it is too late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chandre Dharmawardana , chandre.dharma@yahoo.ca<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chandre Dharmawardana It is often asked  why educated youth  coming from good homes\u201d join extremist organizations.  Simple  references to  brain washing\u201d, or the stupidity of the young are no explanations. There is no scientifically recognized   process called brain washing\u201d.   It is also  naive to assume that  educated youth  join the IS (Islamic state)  to go […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chandre-dharmawardana"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}