273 Luis Miguel Sordo Estella Psychology of terrorism: brief notes citizens, unwelcome and socially unintegrated migrants in the host countries (having suffered experiences of uprooting and frustration) before joining the terrorist ranks39. Religion has been and is also a motivation or justification to join terrorist groups who, under the flag of social injustice and poverty, recruit idealist youngsters to join their ranks. That is the example of Islamist terrorism which does not believe in the nation-state. Islamists are not nationalists, they do not fight for a Nation-State, their struggle is moral (in addition to political), as a consequence of a religious commitment. The real enemy of religious terrorism is the infidel, the apostate, represented by the Western world; these are the adversaries that must be destroyed because they threaten Islam. Western values, represented by democracy, socialism, communism, united to a culture degenerated by concepts such as materialism, hedonism, homosexuality, etc., are considered an attack to the Sharia, a form of life based on divine law. At the beginning of the aughts, Boko Haram set their anti-western ideology, by considering Islamic values superior to any others, and that the Western models had provoked the backwardness and subordination of the Muslim populations to foreign interests and actors40. Islamist terrorists who act in Europe form a very heterogeneous group that has been introduced to radical Islamism by Jihadist recruiters. Initially, religion was not essential in their lives, neither in their place of birth nor in their Eu-ropean habitat. Although a single profile does not exist, the profile that seems to do-minate the Islamist terrorist is that of a young, well-educated person, with economic resources, belonging to the middle class, and who can undertake a higher education even in the West. Thus, it is not poverty, nor social injustice that leads them to violen-ce, but rather the radical interpretation of Islam41. Terrorists prefer being called soldiers or freedom fighters because the word terrorist is a product of the nature of a terrorist action. Due to its nature, terrorism acts in a premeditated way against the civilian population, but it also has victims among the police or the military, seeking as an end to instill terror among the civilian witnesses to the attack42. The terrorist act seeks to terrorize the audience, to intimidate the observer of the attack; it needs witnesses to its violent actions. 39 SETAS, Carlos, What do we mean when we speak of Al Qaeda?, Institute for Strategic Studies Magazine Nº 4, Madrid, September, 2014, pg.9. 40 NÚÑEZ, Jesús, op.cit., pg.35. 41 CANO, Miguel Ángel, «Author profiles of Islamic terrorism in Europe», Electronic Magazine of Penal Science and Criminology, Articles, 11-07 (2009), University of Granada, 2009, pg.9 and 13, avai-lable at <http://criminet.ugr.es/recpc/11/recpc11-07.pdf> last viewed: 10 February, 2016. The majority of the youngsters recruited by the Daesh are between 18 and 35 years old, from Muslim families or not, from cities or from rural areas, from the middle classes or from underprivileged envi-ronments, men, women, or entire families. TORRES, op. cit., pg.4. 42 According to the Foundation for the Victims of Terrorism, the terrorist organization ETA has killed 103 military personnel, 230 «Guardias Civiles», 183 National Police Officers, 30 Municipal Police Officers, and 14 Police Officers from Autonomies. See Foundation for the Victims of Terrorism, Statis- http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
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