Word: zealotism
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...been brainwashed. What other reason could there possibly be for a man to take up arms for the Taliban? “Brainwashed” is a tricky word, and in this case an Orwellian semantic ploy to rename aggressors as victims. By their sort of logic, every Islamic zealot captured in Afghanistan is a victim of brainwashing. Not surprisingly, the U.S. government doesn’t seem inclined to accept an insanity defense for al-Qaeda fanatics...
...visits the Michigan Militia, Republican political rallies, an abortion clinic and the execution of Texas’s prettiest psychopath, Karla Faye Tucker. He is typically Canadian in his incredulity at the American right wing, particularly at its overt courtship of fundamentalist Christians. He mocks the diminutive Christian zealot Gary Bauer, who ran for president in 2000. Executions are rejected as illogical and bloodthirsty; the militia leader is simply psychotic. And he points out a few nonpolitical neuroses: the American compulsion, for example, to eat fatty foods, grow monstrously obese and lust after material goods...
...West had developed a fairly well-defined profile of the typical suicidal terrorist. That man would be young, 18 to 24, born in poverty, a victim of some personal tragedy, a despairing zealot with nothing to lose. He would be fanatic in behavior and belief: stern, moralistic, teetotaling. The status of shahid, or holy martyr, would solve his earthly issues in paradise, and someone would give money to his family on earth. If he hailed from the rebel training camps of Afghanistan, where the cult of jihad gets its earthly gunmen, he would be fundamentalist in his faith, ignorant...
...leaves the initiative in the hands of the naysayers. Although the truce is surviving one day at a time despite a steady daily death toll in minor clashes, all it would take to rekindle the blaze would be one suicide bombing in a crowded Israeli marketplace, or one settler zealot emptying his weapon into a crowd of Palestinians. And that's a serious concern, since there are substantial militant constituencies on both sides who have no interest in seeing the cease-fire hold...
...Middle East is moving beyond the stone stage. An "administration official" quoted by the New York Times uses the phrase "August, 1914." Is this tiny place about to reconfirm the twentieth century's logic of disastrous disproportions, whereby a seemingly miniscule cause (a Serb zealot at Sarajevo; an atom of uranium; an obscure housepainter in Vienna) brings on apocalyptic effects...