George Packer Quotes

Since 9/11 we have somehow come to accept the 'radicalization' narrative, which basically holds that people become terrorists through a series of consecutive, traceable steps laid out for them by large international Islamic organizations. Reality is messier, and also smaller.

We must be certain that we all realize that our enemy is not an enemy that is located in one single place. There are terrorist cells all around the globe.

We all know the epicentre of terrorism in the world today is Pakistan. The world community has to come to grips with this harsh reality.

It is the thing that keeps me up at night - the notion that you have individuals in the United States who are looking at computer screens and who are becoming radicalized.

Terrorists, in ungoverned spaces, disseminate poisonous propaganda and training materials to attract troubled souls around the world to their cause.

Al Qaeda has significance beyond its numbers, frankly. And so for us, our 24-hour-a-day objective is to seek out those al Qaeda cells. And, as we seek them out, to target them and eliminate them. And we're doing that 24 hours a day.

You're always going to have terrorism.

... lemmings with suicide vests.

The entire world is the front line for terrorism.

Especially dangerous is crime disguised under political and pseudo-religious motives, such as terrorism and the like.

The War on Terror is a religious war … We are dealing with a set of ideas that kill.

The Chattanooga killer was inspired by a foreign terror organization. It's hard to entangle which particular source... there are lots of competing poisons out there.

The fault lines are shifting from the boundaries of nations into the web of our societies and the streets of our cities. And, terrorism and extremism are a global force that are larger than their changing names, groups, territories and targets.

I think we should be very worried because, with technology, Boko Haram and other terrorists have become very mobile in all continents, not only in Africa but also in Europe, America, and Asia.

What I'm concerned about are two things. I think one that John Miller talked about, and that's the radicalization over the Internet that ISIS is very adept at doing. The other one is a foreign fighter threat.

ISIL does something al-Qaida would never imagine: they test people by tasking them.

I think these al Qaeda franchise groups have clearly evolved into a much more dangerous strain.

ISIL is inspiring groups that already exist to rebrand themselves, but in rebranding themselves into a more radical ideology. That's what makes it dangerous.

Islamist terrorism has declared war against us, against France, Europe, the entire world.

Look at ISIS - without the Internet, they wouldn't exist in the same form. The Internet didn't create them, but the Internet facilitates them. And as we know from history, the facilitation is more dangerous than the cause, because the cause can be dealt with, but the facilitation is elusive.

Yes, ISIS is a threat. It's more than a nuisance. It's also in many respects criminal violence. But it isn't, in my view, a central strategic issue facing humanity.

There is no doubt something has happened that is lasting in terms of attractiveness of the nightmare that is the Islamic State.

No one is born a terrorist, but the route to become one is surprisingly easy. We need to listen to those who have been there, and those who have made their way back, if we want to stop others from taking their first steps down this same path into darkness.

One of the scariest things about ISIS is their ability to leverage social media to inspire individuals who have never been to Syria and Iraq.

Nobody knows what self-radicalized means, and that's one of the weird things about the way that we talk about terrorism. We talk about radicalization as though it were a thing, as though you could sort of track it and identify it, and that's not the case.