20 Quotes by Loretta Napoleoni

I've always been very interested in political violence. When I finished high school, I did a small dissertation about political violence and fascism in Italy.

Now, I am not saying that there is one single type of individual who is a better type of terrorist than another. What I am saying is that the circumstances that push certain individuals over the edge, to become terrorists, are generally very, very similar.

Seventy percent of the fish we eat is black market, fished in violation of international laws. Our ignorance makes us unwilling partners in crime. Rogue economics is turning the global market into our worst nightmare.

The majority of the cocoa that we eat, it is actually produced by young kids which are being enslaved in the plantations of the Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast is the largest producer of cocoa.

I had failed the psychological profiling of a terrorist. The central committee of the Red Brigades had judged me too single-minded and too opinionated to become a good terrorist.

Contrary to what many people believe, terrorism is actually a very expensive business.

So I think if we want to turn the table around, more than thinking about how can we starve the Islamic State in terms of money, we should think about how can we maximise the amount of resources that we have in order to secure ourselves. For us, instead of bombing so much, which is extremely expensive, perhaps, you know, we should use some of that money in order to protect ourselves.

Europe has been in the grip of a very serious economic crisis for few years, so there have been major cuts to anti-terrorist funding, to intelligence funding. So we do not have the manpower to carry on this kind of monitoring.

Well, I think here there is some money gathered, especially in Europe, through the web, through connection to a network. I mean, imagine that in Brussels there is only one person, one single person, which is monitoring the traffic that goes on on the internet for the jihadist groups. In Strasbourg there are two people. So I mean you can imagine how easy it is to raise money through the net.