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In fact many of the alienated youths who join radical underground groups in Western democracies lack any coherent ideological or political goals. Violence is the attraction—the end, not the means. Notes Brian Jenkins, an associate director at Rand Corp.: "The act of terror itself is an ideology." Harvey Schlossberg, a psychiatrist who trains the New York City Police Department's anti-terrorist unit, contends that many urban terrorists are compensating for inadequate personalities. "If they cry and stamp their feet, no one pays attention. But by taking hostages, in a matter of minutes the whole world is watching. This helps overcome their ego deficit." What motivates many terrorists, observes University of Munich Political Scientist Kurt Sontheimer, is "a deep hatred of present society. They talk vaguely of socialism, but they offer no political theory. Nobody really knows what kind of society they envision."
The young urban terrorist, in Europe at least, claims to speak for the working class. In fact his background is most often middle or upper middle class, and the common man is as frightened of his methods as is the millionaire. Franco Ferracuti, a forensic psychiatrist at Rome University, interviewed several members of Italy's notorious Red Brigade. He found that most of them came from well-to-do, churchgoing families and had attended universities, majoring in the social sciences. All had witnessed, and many had participated in, the Europe-wide May revolution of students in 1968; the Red Brigade terrorists seemed unable to accept its failure. A number of the 16 suspects wanted by Bonn for Schleyer's murder fit Ferracuti's profile. Christian Klar, for example, studied history and political science at the University of Heidelberg and once belonged to the Young Democrats, the youth branch of West Germany's relatively conservative Free Democrats. His father was archetypically middle class—a high-ranking school administrator and riding club president. It was at Heidelberg that young Klar's "overdrawn sense of social justice and idealism" (as his father describes it) apparently drew him into the maelstrom of ultra-radical circles.
Many experts draw a careful line between the ordinary criminal and the terrorist. Explains Rand's Jenkins: "Terrorism is violence aimed at [those] people watching. Fear is the intended effect, not the byproduct. That distinguishes terrorist tactics from muggings and other forms of violent crime."
By simply thrusting their way into public consciousness, some terrorists have achieved their primary goal—attention. No faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization has ever successfully attacked a military target in Israel; furthermore, the P.L.O. was utterly humiliated by Jordan's King Hussein when he threw them out of his country in the "Black September" of 1970. But subsequent terrorist acts contributed to the P.L.O.'s high profile and credibility, at least within the Arab world, as an anti-Zionist fighting unit. Other nationalist terrorist organizations have gained recognition in much the same way.