ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an alarming portrait of modern terrorists. The political world changed a great deal in the last decade of the twentieth and the beginning years of the twenty-first century. These political changes influenced the type of persons more likely to be recruited into terrorist groups. Just as not all violence is terrorism and not all revolutionaries are terrorists, not all persons who commit acts of terrorism are alike. Frederick Hacker suggests three categories of persons who commit terrorism: crazies, criminals, and crusaders. The distinction between criminals and crusaders with respect to terrorism needs some clarification. Criminals can be offered sufficient personal gains or security provisions to induce them to release the hostages. Crusaders are far less likely to be talked out of carrying out their threats by inducements of personal gains, since to do so they would have to betray, in some sense, that higher cause for which they are committing the action.
