A dangerous view of terrorism....

Ahh...they're really good people underneath the terror...a really nice column from Barbara Kay in today's National Post...

The other news item announced the appointment of the aforementioned Louise Richardson — an Irish-born, Harvard professor of government — as the new principal and vice-chancellor of Scotland’s 700-year-old St. Andrews University (Prince William’s alma mater).

Richardson, a terrorism specialist who has consulted to military and intelligence bodies and testified before the U.S. Senate, is not a household name. But she should be, and not in a positive way, for she is the source, symbolically if not literally, of Justice Rutherford’s insouciance regarding an almost certain future national security threat to Canada.

Richardson’s claim to fame rests largely on her dramatic turnaround from ardent adolescent support for IRA violence to the conviction that violence is never the answer to political grievance. Her conversion launched a lifelong commitment to exploring the roots and management of terrorism. It is her accumulated “wisdom” on the subject, best encapsulated in her 2006 book, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat, that has made Richardson the apple of liberal academia’s eye.

We must resist “simplistic formulas of good and evil,” according to Ms Richardson. As she patiently explains to us, terrorists are neither amoral nor irrational.

As evidence, for example, that “Al-Qaeda does have a code that imposes restraints on its actions,” she cites Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a ruthless mastermind of 9/11 who once declared: “In killing Americans who are ordinarily off limits, Muslims should not exceed 4-million non-combatants, or render more than 10-million of them homeless.” Some code! Some restraints!

And given her status as an “expert” on terror, the following statement from her book simply boggles the imagination: “The 3,000 casualties inflicted by al-Qaeda, while enormous, pale in comparison to the … 42,000 Americans who died [in 2001] in car crashes — 17,500 of them alcohol-related fatalities.” Ah yes, that old demon rum and terrorism attacks: as existential threats to a nation, like two peas in a pod!

As you may already have guessed, Richardson is no fan of the U.S. “war on terror.” She feels that if only the United States would take seriously al-Qaeda’s political demands linked to American policy in the Middle East, and of course commit to a massive economic development program to address the “underlying” causes of terrorism (even though poverty as a cause of terrorism has been thoroughly debunked), we would set the mood for “engagement.”