Nelson Mandela’s passing away has caused a firestorm of news activity. Headlines like “Hero Now, Hated for Years” abound in the U.S. Reagan is on record vetoing bills related to South Africa. Dick Cheney called Mandela a terrorist. That got me thinking about ways to create a terrorist.

Here are, in my opinion, surefire ways to create a terrorist:

1. Subjugate an entire people, a race, based on origin and color of skin, to menial jobs, no rights, including no voting rights, and put the inevitable yoke of poverty on those millions of people, for decades. Subject them to humiliation, brutality by the authorities, rape their females at will without consequence, imprison individuals for decades, and you have a good chance that some terrorists come out of that population.

2. Imprison, without charge of any crime, young men that were in the wrong place at the wrong time sometime at the end of 2001 and beginning of 2002 in the Middle East. Throw them in with legitimate, known, experienced and battle-hardened actual terrorists as their only friends and support. Keep them in an illegitimate prison on a Caribbean island, locked up for ten years or more, without hearings, charges, or trials, and without means of communications to the outside world. Give them no hope and no way out.  My guess is that any young man, who may have been completely innocent other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, will come out a cunning, committed, creative and motivated terrorist at the end.

3. Fly robotic killer machines over foreign countries and use rocket weapons to blow up houses, vehicles and facilities. Occasionally a bad guy gets hit and killed. Occasionally innocent children get killed or maimed, civilians get slaughtered, hard-earned property gets destroyed without any recourse for the victims. Do that in a consistent campaign in multiple countries around the world for years, and you have yourself dedicated terrorists that will fervently hate your country and all it represents.

There are people today that have the audacity to call Nelson Mandela a terrorist. Hmmm.