Was it aggressive policing that turned John Dillinger into a bank robber or was he just looking for thrills? Was he tired of getting beat up by cops for driving five miles over the speed limit in a stolen Model A or had knocking over mom and pop grocery stores become boring? Perhaps. Leaping over the counter in some small town bank, scooping up the cash and departing in a hail of gunfire…wow, what a rush!

Sociologists said Dillinger turned to crime and violence because he was born in poverty, had to eat puffed rice on toast three times a day, couldn’t afford a Stutz Bearcat and had it in for the coppers. We created John Dillinger said the Sociologists.

But Dillinger was just being cool—like Billy the Kid and Vincent Mad Dog Coll. Sure, that’s what it was. It isn’t poverty that causes crime—it’s aggressive policing and the thrill-seeking instinct that lurks just beneath the surface of every Tom, Dick and Harry…and, of course, every Mohammed, Abdul and Mahmoud. Aggressive policing or thrill seeking…sure, take your pick.

Dr. Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer, medical doctor and forensic psychiatrist says the new wave of Jihadists blasting their way across the Middle East and the dar al-Harb are thrill seekers. “It’s about youth culture,” he says, “…about being cool—Jihad cool. It’s more about hero worship than about religion”

It could be. Dillinger was cool and he had Jesse James for a role model and the Kid—oh, how he could fandango! Billy had the Clantons and the McLowrys to light his way and the new Jihadists have Mohammed Atta and Hani Hanjour and an incredibly flash of heat to usher them into an everlasting coolness.

“They are looking for glory…thrills, and a sense of belonging to a group,” says Sageman. He should know what he is talking about, he has written two books on terrorism (Understanding Terror Networks and Leaderless Jihad: Terrorist Networks) and he has testified before the 9/11 Commission.

Waleed Aly is a lawyer and a member of the Global Terrorism Research Center at Monash University in Australia. There are no naturally born terrorists, he says. It is aggressive police action that turns normal Muslim youths into Jihadists. Waleed would bridge Australia’s growing cultural chasm with kindness, smother it with Islamic serendipity. The police are alienating young Muslims, turning them toward radical groups. Tough policing might work on Crocodile Dundee but arresting and detaining sensitive Muslim children…do they know how humiliating that can be?

Waleed may not have heard of Bull Connor but if he isn’t aware of the antics of Saudi Arabia’s religious police, the mutaween, the Committee for Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, he should turn in his Qur’an for a copy of Dianetics.

Waleed believes a community-based approach to law enforcement would be more effective. (It should be pointed out—just for the record—that Waleed opposed a ban on the sale of violent pro-Jihad books and was foremost among those who accused two Christian preachers of bigotry and hate speech for quoting accurately from the Qur’an during a debate. The preachers were convicted of hate speech and sentenced to jail.)

The best way to deal with the new breed Jihadists says Dr. Sageman is to take the glory out of terrorism. Stop with the “Wanted: Dead or Alive” posters, act like the terrorists don’t exist, put the bombings and mass killings on the back pages of the newspapers, on the 2 AM news, misspell their names, or better yet, credit their crimes to some obscure Christian religious sect. If that doesn’t turn them into skydivers or bungee jumpers, nothing will. Of course, something will have to be done about the families of the victims. Perhaps a National survivors fund can be established. Sure, that’s the way to go. Ignore the law and order nuts thirsting for revenge. There can’t be more than three or four thousand Charles Bronsons in the entire world, and after fifty years or so no one will pay any attention to mass murders because no one will know they are taking place, sort of like what happened in Ruanda and Sudan.

As for Waleed Aly, the Qur’an has absolved him on the need to tell the truth. If he were a Christian dog or an atheist—or just about anything else—he would be called a hypocrite. It isn’t better treatment at the hands of law enforcement authorities that will turn Australia’s Muslim youth to law and order—it will take the conversion of Crocodile Dundee to Islam.

“It seems that we’ve entered a period where violence is dangerously cyclical,” says Waleed. “There’s a terrorist attack, we respond (Who? Waleed? The only attack Walled ever responded to was an Israeli attack on Hamas!)…”

“We respond with counter-terrorism measures,” said Waleed, “whether it be through military invasion, increased police powers or whatever and those counter-terror measures very often end up having a radicalizing effect that further exacerbates the problem…No one really at this point is prepared to break this cycle. It’s actually very much in the interest of terrorists to keep that cycle going because it aids them with recruitment and so on. It’s certainly not in the interest of Western governments to keep it going. But because we see this as a war, because we’re bound by this conventional form of thinking, we often find ourselves caught in this cycle of violence and we don’t really know how to get out of it.”

Yes, we do. We can terrorize the terrorists, the thing Waleed fears the most—the one thing the West has not done. Would it work? No one knows but it did settle Hitler’s hash. But pacifist that he is, Waleed wants the West to break the cycle by not responding to the terrorist attacks. That would be madness. It didn’t work for William Jefferson Clinton and it won’t work against Hamas and al-Qaeda and Waleed knows it.

The Qur’an says 8:39 “So, fight them till all opposition ends and the only religion is Islam.”

Sageman may be right, the new breed of Jihadists could well be thrill seekers, but whether thrill seekers or not they are Muslims and unlike the Communists and the Nazis, the one thing they are not seeking is Heaven on earth and that makes them a far greater threat than the comrades and supermen of the hammer and cycle and the twisted cross. It would be better if they were Abolitionist—at least they might serve some useful purpose. Anybody remember John Brown? No. Not in the Middle East.

In the meantime a professor at the University of California Los Angeles says it is oil and not Islam that is responsible for the oppression of women in the Middle East! And everybody thought it was Dick Cheney!