individualization in dominant American society. Thus, both the cause and the solution to terrorism, from a human rights perspective, are events of individualization. Both the terrorists as people in need of intervention, and the people from whose midst terrorists are framed in dominant discourse, suffer from the characterization, in human rights discourses, as always already participant of worlds of the primacy of the individual over the group, tradition, culture, particular histories. This is particularly the case when forms of representation are essentialist. Terrorism, American Neo-Liberalism and Nationalism American nationalism and its links to Christianity need to be scrutinized, for it begs the question of just how secular-like or prone to secularism the American state acts. (Asad, 2003). American nationalism links it values to freedom, which in practice has meant specific versions of free trade, democracy, secularism (Asad, 2003). Talal Asad shows how there is no total separation between state and religion, how secularism is a discourse used for political reasons, and became synonymous with freedom and against evil. In American discourses on terrorism today, this has been meaning freedom from the evil of Other religions different from Christianity, particularly Islam (Asad, 2007). Religion is tied to private belief, through a Christian interpretation of Islam, and the terrorists are then reduced to an outward projection of deeply-held beliefs, which are claimed to be Islamic. The individual is pathologized for being internally malfunctional, and so is Islam, which is taken as belief. Religion understood as a private matter obfuscates the fact that it is always mediated by politics, culture, history, and particular forms of religious language, it is an open field, always already in particular social relations that have as outcomes actions that are not only religious. As a contestation of secularism as an ongoing process in the country is that religious views are activated ever more loudly by minorities which occupy high ranks. It is also important to note how the discourse on terrorism relates to liberalism, and on this Talal Asad (2007) brings a strong contribution. Talal Asad opens the book On Suicide Bombing with the assertion that September 11 started a long period of anxiety for many Muslims living in the United States (p.1), a period in which they have been associated with terrorism. Many non-Muslim Americans have since then associated Islam with a culture of death (Dershowitz, 2004 apud Asad, 2007). The book is marked by a critical analysis of culturalist and essentialist assumptions of terrorism as belonging to a culture or religion. Asad addresses the clash of civilizations1 theory, showing how it is an anti-Islamic discourse, at the same time that it purports to deal with an Islam enclosed upon itself, with fixed values. He shows how terrorism is also an integral part of liberal subjectivities although in liberal political culture terror itself is dismissed as being essentially part of a nonmodern, nonliberal culture (p.3). Asad questions the explanations of terrorism as being driven by motives, and shows how they have been regarded as truths that can be easily accessed. To the question of Why did he do it?