Manchester Attack

Long article but a good read here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-your-child-is-a-psychopath/524502/

It discusses psychopaths and their key attributes being a complete lack of empathy and callousness.

I suspect terror cells, either intuitively or deliberately, end up recruiting people like this because they can easily be molded to do things that the rest of us find incomprehensible.

Yeah for sure.  And when someone like that is an adult and *knows*, intellectually, that what they are doing is wrong, but still feels pleasure from doing it -- that can lead them to suicidal thoughts.  Which just adds to the recipe for disaster.

While I  agree with President Trump's basic message that the Muslims need to be the solution to the problems of radical Islam, I have zero faith that it will happen.  The Middle East is much too complicated and broke for that.  Here is a good, albeit depressing, article that summarizes the problems in the Muslim world--Barbarians within Our Gates.  The Muslim world is essentially in a civil war between the Shia (Iran/Syria) and the Sunni (Saudi Arabia/ISIS/Al Qaeda).  Although, right now it might seem that Saudi Arabia is the best side to be on, I think that is misguided thinking at best.  No way I support arming Saudi Arabia with $100 billion worth of weapons. 

There are really two forms of Islam and they interpret the Quran drastically different.  The Quran does instruct quite clearly that followers are to murder any nonbelievers.  ISIS and many followers of Islam believe this and obviously there are many who practice it.

We then have what I called "westernized Islam" where believers take the more militant terms as abstract stories and not literal instructions to follow.  This is the Islam that the vast majority of us see every day in the West.  I have several friends who are very vocal supporters of Islam because the form of Islam they know and practice is not violent in any way.  I too support them.

As was mentioned earlier one potential fix is to educate the more literal followers of Islam to the point of eradicating the belief of Jihad being the way to eternal paradise.  It sounds easy on the surface, but it quite literally involves teaching people that the Quran is wrong and that's not an easy task.  An equivalent argument for Christianity would be the movement to soften the Biblical laws to allow for sexual immorality and other such acts because in our day and age we're more "enlightened" than those of thousands of years ago.  That's going over like a pregnant pole vaulter in the the Christian church and it likely would be the same in the literal believing Muslim churches.

As for people blowing themselves up, they truly believe they're doing the will of God and sacrificing their life for the faith.  I wish I could excuse it away as mental illness, but many of these people are very intelligent and educated people.  They, are just sucked into a religion that's convinced them that martyrdom is the best path to eternal glory.  
I wish I could find it, but there was a picture of a FB live feed from a terrorist attack last year on Al Jazira and it was almost 90% hearts and likes which was pretty telling about how that part of the world feels about Jihad and martyrdom.  There is a small percentage of folks blowing themselves up, but there's a much bigger support structure than I think any of us realize. 

You can be any combination of those or all three.  I wasn't trying to say that the mental aspect is the only cause, just at a higher level trying to point out to Rog that there are folks out there for which logic (to us) does not apply.

On the religious aspect, I think Islam is probably heading towards a reformation much like Christianity had in the 15-1600s.  With Islam, it might've already been done if there wasn't such a large amount of outside intervention from superpowers.