TERRORISM PSYCHOLOGY (PART2): KNOWING WHAT AND HOW TO FIX

This is my second post discussing the same topic: terrorism psychology in Komarudin Hidayat’s perspective. There are some worth noting points that Hidayat had proposed to tackle the thriving terrorism on the land of Indonesia. And these are some thoughts I managed to summarize:
GIVING LESS SPACE
The short term measure the police and people take now is probably cooperating with each other to give the culprits less space of movement. With less space of movement, it’s going to be easier for us to catch and detain them. This, however, isn’t quite effective as terrorism is about mindset and thought. Mindset and thought are sometimes well-concealed and blur. We cannot easily detect which people are terrorists and which are not ones. Even they perish physically, as long as the wrongly-interpreted belief is widespread, it is not really surprising to see the younger version of them in the future.
CREATING COUNTER-IDEOLOGY
Somehow the government, along with people, should show that Indonesia is a mostly -moslem-populated country so it’s extremely ridiculous and doesn’t make sense at all for the terrorists to demolish the country where many moslems -their compatriots- live their life and earn a living. Hurting Indonesia necessarily means hurting moslems as a whole, and humanity as a whole.
DEVISING A MORE-HUMANE AND FRIENDLY APPROACHING METHOD
It is undeniable that terrorism is the result of extreme poverty, lack of education, marginalization. As we can see, most of Indonesian suicide bombers are some poorly educated people. Nana (one of the recent suicide bombers) came from a poverty-stricken village, he quit school at 6 grade and never continued to high school. Such kind of people is like a sitting duck for our culprits.
DECONSTRUCTING AND REBUILDING THE WAY OUR YOUNG GENERATIONS ARE TAUGHT
The nation’s awareness has to be rebuilt and revised as our education system seems to ignore a lot of essential matters and at the same time pay too much attention on other trivial issues. Hidayat took an example, it’s ridiculous too see how busy this nation builds intelligence by getting their students prepared for National Examination held annually for 6th graders of elementary schools, 9th graders and 12th graders of high schools, while they’re ignoring the importance of building the children’s characters. What is worse is that no public officials or eve our presidential contenders managed to reveal their awareness, attention and seriousness pertaining to the nation’s character building. Character building is fundamental, yet tragically overlooked.
Next, Hidayat criticized the education values that our students keep absorbing. To Hidayat, a huge number of school text books particularly the faith-related ones needs major revision. Hidayat gave our neighboring Singapore’s icon, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, as a typical example of the success of education system reform. We can see now, in spite of its size (compare to Indonesia), Singapore has become a developed country and reached many astounding progresses as a young Asian nation. Indonesia gained its independence years before Singapore did, but Indonesia is left behind. So, what’s wrong with Indonesia?
FINDING THE BEST CONDUCTOR
Hidayat emphasized the vital role of a conductor for a choir. This is such an apt analogy for us. The nation, Hidayat added, had been ready to move on, move forward, but the problem is who can lead this nation so they have a common set of vision, concept, commitment, and action?? We’re ready, we’re strong, but can this nation find a distingushed leader who meets the requirements?