Boston Marathon bombing – Engaging Peace

Terrorism: weapon of the power elite?

Posted on June 24, 2013June 19, 2013 by kathiemm

Terrorism is defined as the “systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective…. Although usually thought of as a means of destabilizing or overthrowing existing political institutions, terror also has been employed by governments against their own people to suppress dissent.” (Merriam-Webster online dictionary)

You are already aware that in contrast with most other “mass murderers,” the accused Boston Marathon bombers were triumphantly identified as Muslims and gleefully labeled as terrorists.

Now, for the first time in history, a woman–Assata Olugbala Shakur, whom the FBI calls by her former married name, Joanne Chesimard–has been put on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, with a $2 million bounty offered for her capture.

Does it surprise you to learn that Assata Olugbala Shakur is black?

Here, in brief, is her story. After graduating from City College of New York in 1973, Shakur became a member of the Black Panther Party and then the Black Liberation Army. She was arrested several times but was acquitted or had charges dropped before she was involved in an armed shootout with police on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973.

Based on some dubious and inconsistent testimony, she was found guilty of murder and imprisoned in several facilities, including Riker’s Island Correctional Institution for Women where she was kept in solitary confinement for nearly two years and Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey from which she escaped in 1979. She was granted asylum by Fidel Castro and has lived in Cuba ever since.

More details can be found in this article, but we recommend that you listen to Shakur tell her own story, and then decide who or what is the terrorist in her case.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

When to call it a weapon of mass destruction (WMD)?

Posted on May 16, 2013May 15, 2013 by kathiemm

In its Criminal Complaint against accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the FBI charged him with “unlawfully using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction (namely, an improvised explosive device).” That is, the FBI labeled the pressure cooker device that killed two people and injured more than 200 others a WMD.

Boston Marathon bombing site. Photo by Aaron Tang used under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Glen Greenwald, in the Guardian, wrote a powerful essay entitled “Why is Boston ‘terrorism’ but not Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine?” Reminder:

In Aurora, 12 people were killed and 58 others wounded with multiple weapons, including a semiautomatic rifle.
In Sandy Hook, 20 school children and six adults were murdered with a semiautomatic assault rifle.
In Tuscon, six people were killed and 14 (including Gabrielle Giffords) were wounded by a semiautomatic pistol.
In Columbine, 12 students and one teacher were killed and 24 others were injured by several weapons, including a semiautomatic pistol.

So, here’s another question: When can a weapon or weapon system be called a weapon of mass destruction? Choose one or more of the following answers:

When it falls into the category of nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC) weapons.
When its sale and use does not profit the weapons industry.
When it can result in as many fatalities over time as nuclear weapons systems.
When it serves the purposes of the military-industrial-corporate media complex.

Let’s consider these possibilities in relation to the Tsarnaev brothers’ pressure cooker devices.

The most common definition of WMD has been NBC weapons. Pressure cooker bombs do not fall into this category.
The pressure cooker bomb does not profit the weapons industry, although semiautomatic weapons do.
Since World War II, pressure cooker bombs have accounted for a miniscule portion of fatalities. In contrast, as reported (opens in PDF) by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, “small arms” have killed as many people as all other weapons combined.
You decide: in what ways can frequent use of the term “weapons of mass destruction” play into the hands of the military-industrial corporate media complex that Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned our country to beware?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Creating young martyrs: What leads young people to resort to violence?

Posted on May 9, 2013March 11, 2021 by kathiemm

By guest author Alice LoCicero

The accused Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, grew up in my home town of Cambridge and went to the high school my kids attended. They look like kids my children would have gone to school with, and their friends and family describe them in ways that make them seem normal and good.

How could young folks we might easily have known and loved act intentionally to create carnage, terror, and radical disruption of lives and psyches? As President Obama asked: What would lead them “to resort to violence”?

Dr. Samuel (Justin) Sinclair and I set out to answer an eerily similar question when we researched kids at risk of recruitment to the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist organization (now defeated) in Sri Lanka. We wrote about this research in our 2008 book, Creating young martyrs: Conditions that make dying in a terrorist attack seem like a good idea. Our findings help explain this apparent contradiction.

What we learned, both from reviewing others’ research and combing through our own findings, is that many kids who engage in terrorist actions, or who aspire to do so, think that their actions are going to bring attention to the grievances of their people, which they perceive–rightly or wrongly–as legitimate, and to begin to address a highly asymmetrical distribution of power, a distribution that disadvantages the group they identify with. The ultimate goal then, the “end” that for them justifies the means, is to help their peoples’ cause. Aware that they will die in the attack or soon thereafter, they see their actions as dutiful or, in Western terms, altruistic.

I realize that this idea–that young people who do things that result in killing, maiming, and disruption, do so with altruistic intent–is highly counter-intuitive, but it comes to my attention over and over again in our own and others’ data and in the words of family members of kids engaged in terrorism.

In the award-winning documentary film, “My Daughter the Terrorist,” in which filmmaker Morten Daae and director Beate Arnestad follow two Tamil girls, trained to be Black Tigers, who are prepared to blow themselves up in a terrorist action, the mother of one of the girls speaks about her daughter, saying, “She was different. She dreamt of becoming a nun.”

Alice Locicero is Past President and Co-Founder of the Society of Terrorism Research, as well as Chair of Social Sciences at Endicott College. She is a certified Clinical Psychologist, and has been a faculty member at the Center for Multicultural Training and Boston Medical Center, as well as at Suffolk University. In earlier roles, LoCicero served as Senior Psychologist working with families at Children’s Hospital, Boston, and as Clinical Instructor at Harvard Medical School. A member of the Massachusetts Behavioral Health Disaster Responders, she provides mental health services to family members of victims of terrorism and other man-made and natural disasters. She traveled to Sri Lanka in May and June of 2007 to learn about conditions that make terrorism an appealing idea to some youths.

(This post was originally published in the ABC-CLIO blog.)