America is a grateful nation. We cannot allow anything or anyone to get any way of that. The words veteran and backlog should not appear in the same sentence. Lets make that our mission. Thank you. God bless those who served. God bless the United States of america. Discussion about the reasons behind terrorism. Then representatives from the National BasketballAssociation Talk about sports and diplomacy. Then we talked about the backlog backlog of veterans claims. Are desperate a book on the topic and previously taught at a military base in belgium. His research was cited by the supreme court. Groupim Civil Liberties asked to cancel the event. This is one hour 20 minutes. Good evening from the campus of embry riddle aeronautical university, welcome to the president s speaker series. On behalf of the president , i am marc bernier, the moderator for tonights event. Tonight, the 15 reasons for terrorism. We will talk to an expert on this subject and the author of the new book, and then we will talk to the audience about the 15 points he brings up. It is my pleasure to introduce our speaker, the author on the same topic, ladies and gentlemen, dr. Jonathan matusitz. [applause] thank you, thank you. A little bit of background for those who perhaps have not heard you or seen you before. What led you to write and speak about this subject . Most books on terrorism are in criminal justice. Very few are in communication. There was no big book mixing both fields. I took the opportunity to write a book and sage, the social Sciences Publishers said yes, we will publish it. We will go through the 15 points. I am asking him to outline where and why this happens. We just came off the olympics. What was the number one worry for the participants and the visitors with their bridge terrorism there . Sochi is located where caspians used to live. They were in Ethnic Minority Group and in 1864, february of 1864 if you do the math, exactly 150 years before the olympics. They were discriminated and many were killed by the russians. The fact that the russians were holding the olympics there were a good way for them to wreak revenge. The main concern was terrorism as a form of retaliation. There were no major incidences there was a war happening just outside the perimeter. Were you surprised there were no acts of terrorism . The Russian Secret Police was very good at foiling these attacks. Your ground is you are from belgium . That is correct. I was born and raised in belgium. How many languages do you speak . Three. French, dutch, and english. What brought you here . The land of opportunity. I wanted to come to america. I got here in 2000. I have been living here for 14 years. From belgium to hear . No. Uc of hired me and the summer of 2006. I have lived here for seven and a half years. He reminded me it was about two years ago he was in the audience and came up and gave me his card and i started watching the classes you were teaching in the events you were doing and then when we were putting the series together, the topic of Homeland Security here at embry riddle, we thought we should do this. That is how we came to do this tonight. It is good to see a lot of adults and a lot of young people. I give a lot of talks like this. Here there are a lot of young people. Thank you for being here. Lets talk about the 15 points. Lets go through them one at a time to read where in the world are these reasons for being employed . Im going to do religion at the end, i will just tell you. It is huge and opens up for other things. But you list a question. Give us an example please. The best example from the 1990s to today, oppression leads to revenge. A lot of the chechen terrorists say the russian army oppresses them. And a lot of chechen men get killed by the russians. A lot of the wives, the widows to come suicide bombers. We call them the black widows, like the spider. Its a colorful metaphor. The chechen black widows feel oppressed and seek revenge against the russians. Most of the suicide bombers in chechnya are actually female. Historical grievances. This is interesting. It can take on all kinds of life. Pfister urkel grievances refers to a wrong that needs to be repaired, needs to be restored. It is a group of people that need to get even with the enemy, even though the wrong was committed 1000 years ago. For example, the Basque Terrorist Group eta. They want to regain their territory and they want to have their own independent state, and they say france and spain stole their territory. We have the palestinians as an example of historical grievances. We have the ira. They want to get back six counties from northern ireland. Their main slogan is brits out. A few years ago we would hear about terrorism in ireland. We do not hear that so much now. The ira is very active today. In fact some of them have become members of the british are limited. They were bigger in the 1960s and 1970s. I was reading weeks ago, several weeks ago in american history. There were terrorist acts from mexico into the United States. There was resentment, i guess, of the territorial status and i think it was black back blackjack pershing. Absolutely. The mexican drug lords are joining forces with groups like has a lot hezbollah. Stay with that. Dont they know how dangerous these folks can be . They operate on the principle of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the common enemy for hezbollah and mexican drug lords is america. They will have a common denominator. In this case, it is america. Moving right along the 15 reasons violations of international laws. That is the perception that countries did not fulfill the promises. For example Great Britain promised palestinians that the palestinians would have a lot of rights and the Palestinian People feel that britain betrayed them. That is an example thomas the one that you mentioned. During the treaty of her sigh her sigh versailles, they made promises to arab countries and those thomass were not fulfilled. The bosnian conflicts, does that fall under the International War historical grievances. The bosniaks are bosnian muslims. Bosnian muslims and Bosnian Serbs have never gotten along. The Bosnian Serbs killed a lot of bosniaks and raped a lot of women. A war that killed 100,000 people. Wow. Relative deprivation is code for poverty. Their life on earth, as you can imagine is miserable. Because they live in abject misery, they will join suicide commandos in martyrdom operations. Which is code for suicide operations. When you join the suicide commandos, your family is from us 2000 and tuition for your children. The hijackers came from saudi arabia and the main leader was 33. He came from egypt. There is not always a correlation between poverty and terrorism. There is some correlation. When you discuss these points in your classrooms, what is the reaction from your students . I saw channel nine report about your class, and they came out and they were all very supportive, but do they understand the information you are giving them . This is a tough subject. I teach to mutation. Of communication. They take culture, interpersonal communication. This class is about terrorism. That is a heck of a switch. Some of them get taken back. Wow. We talk about beheadings and war rapes. Some of them are not offended by what i say. I should have asked you this upfront. How do you define terrorism . Before i define terrorism, let me tell you where the word comes from. The word is 220 years old. At the end of the french revolution in 179317 94, the guillotine was being used on anyone who did not agree with the government. What was the government called . The government of terror. The leaders of the government of terror were called terrorists. The word was used the first time by the people themselves we are the terrorists. The first and sense of the use in english was 7098. The end of the 1790 eight. The end of the 18th century. It has different meanings. For some of the chinese, the monks from tibet are terrorists. They call themselves Freedom Fighters. We call them suicide bombers. They call themselves martyrs, heroes. Two young muslims from holland looked at all the definitions. They said they would look at the commonalities. Based on that, in 83. 5 of all definitions, the word violence appeared and and 65 of all definitions the words Political Goals appeared and and 51 of all of these definitions causing fear and terror appeared. Finally 25 years ago, we a definition that was comprehensive, and that most governments would agree on and that division that definition was that terrorism is the use of fear and terror in order to reach Political Goals. Were americans in our history ever accused of terrorism against each other . I think of acts against native americans, the klan . What are examples of terrorism within our own country . Definitely the kkk. The lynchings. They have the special knife called the bowie knife. They would slash peoples throats. You have the aryan nation, and the aryan nation is a neonazi group. Very racist against blacks and jews. The oklahoma bombing it was only 26 years old when he committed that horrifying act. I got my doctorate close to the Oklahoma City bombing. In 2002, i went to the site and its really in the boondocks. Timothy mcveigh chose a building he chose a building in the boondocks because he knew he would receive the attention from anybody. When i lived in belgium, i did not know what oklahoma was. Is that a new band . Finally oklahoma was on the map. It took a sad terrorist act to put oklahoma on the map. Simply to stay with that is there something happening in this country that is making people act out more in terrorist fashion . I would say the Law Enforcement in the u. S. Have gotten better at foiling terrorist attacks. They have decreased sharply. There is an inverted relationship between the number of terror attempts and the number of successful terrorist attacks. Do the people who are the terrorists somehow think, maybe i will not be the one who was caught . In some cases the terrorist does not think about that. I am going to fulfill my mission. That is how they operate. They want to reach their goals. Something you wrote called hatred toward global hegemony hegemony is the scientific term for power. It is an antiwestern sentiment, and antiamerican, imperialism sentiment. It is a hatred of the west, a word used by the grand ayatollah khomeini. So, it is a terrorist sentiment against the world trade organization, against mcdonalds, a lot of the kfc restaurants up and blown up in pakistan. They do not like the idea of parking lots in some countries. Barbie dolls in some countries. They see it as cultural invasion and they are against it. You outline one of the reasons is the financial reward. How often does that happen . That does not happen very often. Most terrorist do not get paid for what they do. I gave you the example of the suicide bombers. They do not get a financial gain. They know their families, most of whom live in poverty, get some financial rewards. In south america there is a group in columbia colombia, and they are notorious for abducting people for ransom. They will adopt political figures. Abduct political figures. Stopping for a moment. All terrorism is not acts of violence. Sometimes its internet terrorism, banking terrorism, other things to put fear and suppression to people. Is this going to become a new wave of terrorism that is much more common, striking through the internet and financial communities . Cyber terrorism happens on an hourly basis. The pentagon gets hacked 5000 times a year by a chinese group, but of course, our side of things is really good at foiling any cyber terrorist attacks. If they succeed delving into computer networks, they can cause millions of dollars of damage. That does not happen very often. Can you talk about an emt as an emp as a method of terrorism . It stands for electromagnetic pulse. It is launched like this, and as it flows up in the air, what it does is, it shuts down anything under its umbrella. Anything that works on electricity, on waves, like your pacemaker, your cell phone. It stops. If an emp is launched on top of kansas and the radius is 2000 miles, you can cause a lot of damage. It looks great on paper. If they launch an emp, we can launch one above it and it would shut down their emp. Oh, really . We have a method to shut one down . Lets hope it does not happen. It is cheap to make. It can be launched from cuba or venezuela. It looks good on paper. I doubt it will happen tomorrow. We know they want to do it. We know they want to do it, but there is the worry some developing countries that do not have the armament we do will launch one. They will accuse us of using Nuclear Weapons on them, even though it is not a nuclear weapon. That would be against the geneva conventions. Under the geneva conventions, you should use tanks and rifles, nothing like emps and Nuclear Weapons. Im going through this material kind of quickly to give those of you a symbol tier two after questions of jonathan. Another of the 15 reasons terrorists exist is racism. I saw a video on youtube of the texas aryan brotherhood . Yes, the texas aryan brotherhood is a neonazi group that formed in american prisons. There are neonazi groups that form. When they get out of prison, they have those cells that coalesce and lead to that group. It has been on the fbi list of terrorists for the past 20 to 30 years. Guilt by association . Guilt by association is when you strike a target that has nothing to do with your enemy directly. I give you an example. Madrid, so spain, 9 11. Al qaeda killed 200 people by bombing for trains at the madrid train station. Why . Why kill spanish people . Spanish tourists . Because spain had troops in a iraq. And people like Osama Bin Laden were upset the west was in iraq. They saw the spanish people as helping george bush in iraq. That would be guilt by association. It could also be an example whereby a leader in africa is considered the leader does not help his people, so the local people think the leader is on the same side as america, as Great Britain. That would be guilt by association. So you have rebellions against about leader. You see them in rwanda, in the congo, various african countries today. Supports of sympathizers. That is when you kill people to expand your support base. Until Osama Bin Laden killed 3000 people on 9 11, very few people knew him, even in the muslim world. Of course he became a household name after that event and his support increased. His support increased . Oh, yeah. Where were you on 9 11 . I was in alaska. Someone opened my door. America is under attack. It was probably 5 00 in the afternoon. I was shocked like everybody. Did you stay in alaska . I went to get my doctorate. During that time, did you feel that you needed to leave alaska . I was terrorized i was terrified, but i was not enough to leave the country. I was sad. Mortality of failures. This is not a concept we confront every day. It asks the question, how should i die . I imagine a lot of people would want to die as old as 150. In some cultures, people want to be recognized for who they are, be recognized as a martyr. And the palestinian territories, in the gaza strip, when a suicide bomber accomplishes his or her mission successfully, their face is shown on the street. His or her face is shown on the main street for weeks. For them it is like social status. But they are dead. They do this to be famous . Do you think they care . They dont care. They want to please their god. They want to please their culture. They sacrifice themselves . Absolutely. Some of these people in gaza do not think the same way. To us it is unconscionable, unimaginable. If you watch documentaries on Palestinian Suicide bombers, this is what they are going to say. We love death the way you love life. Wow. Narcissism . There are people who have a big ego, a largerthanlife ego. They need to make themselves known. The lead a terrorist group. Can you give me an example of that . An example of that would be better mine half, the Red Army Faction badder meinhoff. These were successful students. They had a bright future. I dont know, they were bored with life. They decided to create a terrorist movement, and anticapitalist movement, antivietnam. Now Everybody Knows who they were. That is a good example of narcissism. Sensation seeking. Sensation seeking follows the same train of thought. You have bungee jumping, skydiving. It is like the movie goodfellas. You teach someone to be a mafia guy. I guess it is fun. This is more like gangs that really act out. We have some of that here. I want to say there is a number with it 21 or there is a group that identifies with a number, and it is popping all over the hundred. And they do it out of sensation . The failure to achieve diplomacy. The death of statecraft. When diplomacy fails. When two entities meet and failed to reach an agreement. After a few years, possibly a few decades, no agreement has been reached. What do they do next . They use terrorism. Do people turn to terrorism when they cannot communicate or communication does not work . Cant work out your differences. When diplomacy fails, sometimes people resort to terrorism. The attack on pearl harbor that began world war ii for the United States. Of these 14 so far, what would you define that as . I would not call that terrorism. That was more of an act of war. It was definitely a surprise attack. It was the Japanese Imperial army basically dropping bombs on pearl harbor. I would not call it terrorism. More an act of war. A surprise attack. So, surprise attack is not defined not in a context. Here is the last one, the big one. Religion. Religion is the motivator for a lot of groups today to do what they do. You have islam. You have this is a group few people know, but it was a japanese terrorist group in the 1990s. It was a mixture of the eastern religions, buddhism, and new age. They said the whole world was wrong and only they knew the whole truth. So, they wanted to obliterate the entire world by using a special kind of toxic gas, and the plan did not go as planned fortunately.