The terrorists who crashed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon last Sept. 11 served only to strengthen the global resolve against such violent acts, a West Virginia University sociologist says.
Terrorist attacks aimed at undermining rules perceived as too rigid often produce the opposite results, said Larry Nichols, an associate professor of sociology and interim chair of the Division of Sociology and Anthropology.
"Sociologists often point out that violations of social rules have the effect of strengthening those rules," Nichols said. "This kind of attack can actually solidify -- as it has -- sentiment against terrorists. It has a bit of a boomerang effect and ends up discrediting itself."
He likened the Sept. 11 attacks to the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The bombing, he said, slowed the momentum of right-wing extremist groups whose collective views gave rise to the attack.
Nichols has been teaching a course on international terrorism at WVU since the late 1980s. The course explores the roots behind terrorist acts around the world, with the objective of finding nonviolent resolutions to conflicts.
In the case of the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans do not understand the consequences of U.S. policy and actions in the Middle East, particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nichols noted.
"We're seen by many in the region as interfering in domestic affairs of other nations," he said. "Terrorism is a violent message aimed at compelling a superpower to change its policies. From that point of view, it's quite rational to fly planes into buildings."
Overall, the Bush administration has responded appropriately to the attacks, Nichols said.
"Certainly, the success of the administration in creating a kind of coalition to combat terrorism was one of the most effective aspects of it," he said.
Nichols questions, however, why the government was caught off-guard, given that terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. Six people died in that attack, compared to the estimated 2,800 fatalities Sept. 11.
"Why wasn't February 1993 the wake-up call?" he said. "The embarrassment to us is to realize we had that kind of warning and didn't respond effectively."
Nichols has been a member of WVU's sociology faculty since 1985 and earned his doctorate from Boston College. Besides teaching a course on terrorism, he is conducting research on terrorism and mass media, analyzing the coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath.
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