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Thursday, June 21, 2012

What makes a terrorist? Mindless cruelty to animals is an early indication of future criminality, War on Terror , NewAgeIslam.com

War on Terror
What makes a terrorist? Mindless cruelty to animals is an early indication of future criminality
By Hiranmay Karlekar

In a despatch headlined ‘Frustrated Strivers in Pakistan Turn to Jihad’, published in The New York Times of February 27, Sabrina Tavernise and Waqar Gillani dwell not only on the circumstances that spawn terrorists but the kind of youngsters who may become terrorists. They quote a Pakistani military psychiatrist, Brig Mowdat Hussain Rana, who has studied 24 young men who were involved in terrorist attacks in Pakistan, as saying, “He’s (the archetypal terrorist) that boy who is not in a rigorous system of rule setting. He becomes someone who drifts, who spends afternoons hitting stray dogs, and no one notices.”

This once again underlines the fact that mindless cruelty to animals is an early indication of future criminality. In their paper ‘From Animal Cruelty to Serial Murder: Applying the Graduation Hypothesis’, in The International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology (47.1), Jeremy Wright and Christopher Hensley write, “Since the late-1970s, the FBI has considered animal cruelty to be a possible indicator of future serial murder. The FBI documented the connection between cruelty to animals and serial murder following a study of 35 imprisoned serial murderers. The convicted murderers were asked questions regarding their childhood cruelty to animals. More than half of the serial murderers admitted to hurting or torturing animals as children or adolescents.”

In a paper titled ‘Childhood Cruelty to Animals and Subsequent Violence Against Humans’ in another issue of the same international journal, Linda Merz-Perez, Kathleen M Heide and Ira V Silverman, who interviewed 45 violent and 45 non-violent offenders in a maximum security facility at Sumter Country, Florida, write, “The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of cruelty to animals and later violence against humans. Cruelty to animals has long served as a red flag in law enforcement circles with respect to extremely violent offenders. For example, the expansive literature with respect to serial killers has often cited cruelty to animals as a precursor to the violence later targeted against human victims.”

http://newageislam.com/what-makes-a-terrorist?-mindless-cruelty-to-animals-is-an-early-indication-of-future-criminality/war-on-terror/d/2537


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