When 'all is permitted' in the fight against terror, a counter-terrorist starts to become indistinguishable from the initial terrorist. - Tzvetan Todorov

When we examine, not the language of the propaganda, but the witness of the combatants themselves, religion does not occupy the first place. Their motivations are more often secular: they mention their sympathy for a population reduced to poverty, the victims of the whim of ruling classes that live in luxury and corruption- rulers able to maintain themselves in power thanks only to the support of the American government ( as in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt). They speak of the members of their families or their local communities who have suffered or died by the fault of these governments ( and thus of their protectors); and they want to avenge them. The thirst for vengeance did not wait for Islam to appear in the world, and the appeal to the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is universal.

Dans la vie du héros, certaines qualités humaines sont plus prisées que d’autres. La première, peut-être, est la fidélité à un idéal – fidélité que l’on apprécie en elle-même, indépendamment de la nature de cet idéal (c’est pourquoi on peut admirer un ennemi-héros). Le héros est, en ce sens, le contraire du traître : il ne trahit jamais, quelles que soient les circonstances (cela

"Every human being needs a set of norms and rules, traditions and customs, transmitted from the older to the younger; without those norms, the individual would never achieve the fullness of his humanity, but would be reduced to the condition of the 'Wild Child", condemned to anomie, in other words to the absence of all law and all order- an absence that can create severe disturbances.