Reformatting Terrorist Hard Drives http://www.juancole.com/

Juan Cole, a blogger and history professor at the University of Michigan, has a very good post on how terrorists come to be (and I don't say that only because he uses a computer analogy.) The gist:

You have to think about terrorists as units of hardware, on which software has been installed....The terrorists don't have a social background in common...The terrorists don't have an ethnicity in common...What then do they have in common? They got the software installed in their minds. Why? Because they met the installer, and were susceptible to his worldview. That's all they have in common.