Posted on 02/28/2010 7:31:22 AM PST by Ready4Freddy
Intelligence agencies tasked with profiling the terrorist mind, and figuring out where future extremists might be found, have begun focusing on a surprising target: science students. As it turns out, many recruits in extremist groups such as Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbullah, and Hamas have backgrounds in medicine, engineering, and other hard sciences. In one study by Oxford sociologists -Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, who will be publishing a book on the subject next year, out of 178 terrorists with higher education, almost half studied math or science. And the phenomenon is not limited to Islamists--strong links to science and engineering studies have been found among neo-Nazis, too, and engineers disproportionately supported Hitler and Mussolini during World War II.
With an eye on such statistics, Western and Israeli intelligence agencies are now ramping up their monitoring of hard--sciences departments in universities across the Middle East, says Claude Moniquet, a former French intelligence operative and current head of the -Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center, which advises foreign intel agencies. U.S. officials are also apt to give visa requests from engineering students extra scrutiny, says Juan Zarate, deputy national-security adviser for counterterrorism under former president George W. Bush.
So why do geeks disproportionately turn to terror? According to personality experts, engineers are more likely than humanities students to view society like a big machine. And when that machine breaks down, engineers often tend to think it can be fixed by eliminating the so-called bad parts and replacing them with good ones. This clear distinction between right and wrong, good and bad, broken and fixed, appeals to scientific minds, which are more likely to be troubled by the idea that life might have messy moral gray -areas. /.../
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.newsweek.com ...
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