Understanding what moves radicals in less than 5 minutes.

People always get shock when I say that the terrorist groups have very little to do with religion. Every revolutionary movement in history had what I call “a pretext ideology”. That means an ideology the group uses publicly to recruit people however, that’s never what originally moves neither the leadership nor the recruits. That can be seen with the French Revolution when the people stormed palaces killing the nobles and even the Royal Family under the pretext of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”. That resulted in one of the most arbitrary regimes ever seen even in the absolutist reign of Luis XIV. A police reactionary State which executed all its main leaders and brought Napoleon to power. Another recent example is the Bolshevik movement that created the extinct USSR. In the beginning, people didn’t even know what they were fighting for. In the end, all the party’s elite was living in luxury and splendor while the proletariat – the main pretext of the whole communist delusion – was still living under extreme poverty.

Therefore, we can conclude that the reason that moves all the revolutionary movements is political power and what comes with it. For the terrorist groups is not different. What moves the recruit is many things but religion: valor, adventure, the sense of being part of something greater than yourself, the current situation of their homelands, the complete lack of purpose in their lives, absence of opportunities, prejudice, etc. Many of the authors and participants of the latest attacks in Europe where discovered buying the books “Islam for dummies” and “Koran for dummies”. So, they were not even serious Muslims before the recruitment. We know that after many videos of them drinking and partying have surfaced on social media.

Hence, the problem is social, economical and political, religion being a pretext. People used Christianity and even Atheism as a pretext so many times for achieving their spurious agendas.

I highly encourage you to watch this 5 minutes’ excerpt of the today’s episode of CNN’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria where experts from the CIA, FBI and NYPD corroborate the above.