Antagonise the Crime Not the Criminal

I used to think that this was just another piece of philosophical bullshit. The title is a literal translation of a saying in Hindi (India's national language) which goes like 'paap say ghrina karo, paapi say nahi'.

Then I started thinking,what is a crime? Basically, a crime is an act committed by a person. Any act by a person which causes harm and/or physical discomfort, pain, suffering to one or many persons which may or may not include the perpetrator of the act which if it satisfies some or all of the conditions mentioned above constitutes a crime. So what is the root cause of a crime? Let us exclude the criminally insane from the section of people we base this discussion on for they are a small minority of the human race.

A criminal act, or any act for that matter starts as a chain of thought processes in the mind. These processes are more often than not triggered by external stimuli, and if the stimulus is negative or painful the chain of thoughts is accompanied by a desire to cause pain/harm to the person or object which is percieved as the source of the stimulus. How often have you seen a person getting angry at an inanimate object just because he/she has either tripped over it or banged some body part against it?

Then there is the case of international terrorists who more often than not are perfectly sane people. But why do they do what they do? For some reason they feel wronged by the world in general and more often than not their claim is very legitimate. When an elephant steps on the tail of a mouse it the pachyderm might be completely oblivious of what it has trodden on, but the mouse is the one which might be in excruitiating pain. The same can be said about big countries and small. The big ones might not even notice that one or a few of its actions are detrimental to a smaller country, and even if it notices, it may consider the damage done to be insignificant, but the smaller country might have lost a lot in the deal. This is what spawns terrorists. They truly believe that they are fighting for a just cause. But the case is not so when we consider fanatics, whether religeous or otherwise.

So what we need to battle global terrorism is not a gargantuan military campaign, but a hell of a lot of understanding of why those who are doing what they are doing are doing it. Once we eliminate the reason for which people wish to make war with the rest of the world, there would not be any terrorists.

I hope I am right....lol...?!