International Journal on Criminology Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 2016 | Page 40

International Journal on Criminology
Absurd or Scandalous Foreign Invasions, a Godsend for Terrorists
The entire world watched with dismay the senseless interventions of the
invaders of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya: bombardment of civilians, extrajudicial
incarceration and torture (Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons), and more.
Without forgetting a hostility toward Islam aimed in general at Muslim populations.
Later becoming criminogenic, all of these factors allowed the barbarian “Emirs” and
preachers to intensify their propaganda and recruit. Globalized, terrorist recruitment
even reached Western countries, where volunteers calling themselves “jihadists”
joined the “Islamic state.” A phenomenon that confirmed my hypothesis that the
feeling of injustice acted with no distinction of race, religion, or geographic location.
Rooted in the personal history of each person, this feeling represented the perfect
unifying element of the aggressive tendencies of beings weakened by living conditions
close to psychological misery. Due to its universality, this unavoidable data authorize
criminologists to use the concept of induction as a common fact.
Algeria: Salafism, Terrorism, and Mass Crimes
Killers of so many innocents around the world, the Khmer Rouge, Aum
Shinrikyo, the Taliban, the Red Brigades, El Qaïda, Daesh, the Armed Islamic Group
(GIA), the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), and others: they all
follow a simplistic ideology that promotes a better life and legitimizes and glorifies
criminal acts by incriminating the target or possible victims. Whether the ideology
is Marxist or Islamist, the process is the same. However, the propagation of pseudoreligious
indoctrination interests me here. Today, the most virulent terrorist groups
adhere to a Salafism that fascinates believers and atheists from all backgrounds. My
knowledge of the Algerian terrorist groups will help expose the meanders of this
Manichean thought that has made so many young people into the reserve army of
terror.
El Qaïda received media attention for its dramatic actions, but the atrocity of
the acts committed by the GIA and the GSPC marked the history of Islamist extremism.
The atrocities committed by these groups—slicing the throats of children, mutilation,
habitual rape—must lead researchers to turn their attention to the processes that
allowed these exactions. If one asked a normally constituted person whether he or she
would prefer to die suddenly in an airplane crash against a building or to suffer hours
or even days of abuse and mutilation before having his or her throat cut, the response
would be clear.
21
We can read these condemnations in issues 10, 12, and 13 of El Djamaa, a subversive document
edited by the GIA starting in 1995. “
22
This descriptive means “Algerianists,” those who wanted to nationalize the Islamist cause by opting
for an Algerian-style reformism in Algeria first, and it appeared in the early 1980s when the Islamist
movement began to emerge in the University of Algiers.
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