Peter Bergen Quotes

Terrorists

Come to the so-called caliphate and live the life of some sort of glory ...; and if you can't come, kill somebody where you are; kill somebody in uniform; kill anybody; if you can cut their head off, great; videotape it; do it; do it; do it.... Kill, kill, kill.

Terrorists aren’t states; they are martyrs with no address.

Notice that the leaders of Hamas do not send their own sons and daughters, and their own grandchildren, to blow themselves up …

The terrorists of today are not wild-eyed, illiterate fanatics who merely obey the orders of their evil leaders. They are educated, well-off, normal people with wives and families to love and look after. We cannot know they are terrorists until they have committed their horrible crimes.

The Islamic State has proven that terrorists can seize and deploy modern military equipment on lesser-armed opponents.

The weapon of suicide bombing is so desperate that you aren't even left with the possibility of taking revenge or punishing anyone; the terrorist is killed along with his victims, his blood mixing with theirs.

Suicidal terrorists may have short shelf lives.

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

If you are talking about terrorism, you need to sit down and understand what is making these people put dynamite around their waists and blow themselves up.

Terrorists convince thousands of people to kill themselves in the name of God. I can't convince two of my friends to help me move.

Head for jihad and have your guns ready.

Terrorism is a means/a tactic, not an ideological or defined physical enemy

Terrorists regard themselves as a vanguard. They're trying to mobilize others to their cause. I mean, every specialist on terrorism knows that.

Terrorists follow tried and tested tactics.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, straps a bomb on their body because they were recruited from the Internet. It takes an enormous amount of personal face-to-face contact and time in order to recruit a young person into the cause of jihad.

If it acts like a terrorist, if it walks like a terrorist, if it fights like a terrorist, it's a terrorist, right?

I've interviewed multiple people who know bin Laden... who tend to have a universal picture of what he's like, which is: modest, retiring, unassuming, kind of thoughtful - lots of things that don't fit with a mass murderer, which he is as well.

The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.

We've got to recognize that when we march into Iraq, we're setting up the card tables in front of every university in the Arab world, the Islamic world, to recruit for al-Qaida.

Staying in a very public fight with the U.S. is exactly what Al Qaeda wants.

We are familiar with terrorism. But indiscriminate, cross-border, religiously motivated terrorism is new.

I can in one week assemble five hundred faithful ready to throw themselves into suicide operations. No frontier will stop them.

Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.

I think ISIS is achieving the objectives that they have set out to achieve. I think that they feel probably very emboldened. They feel pretty good. Their resiliency is extraordinary.