jawfish

Are Suicide Bombers Religious or Political?
john posted in politics & culture on October 8th, 2006

I tripped over an interesting article followed by many intelligent comments a while ago. It’s by Robert Pape, author of a new book, Dying to Win: Why Suicide Terrorists Do It, on the biographies of suicide bombers.

Picture of her son, the bomber.

I can’t offer any answers here, just more questions…

Here is an excerpt:

…Researching my book, which covered all 462 suicide bombings around the globe, I had colleagues scour Lebanese sources to collect martyr videos, pictures and testimonials and biographies of the Hizbollah bombers. Of the 41, we identified the names, birth places and other personal data for 38. We were shocked to find that only eight were Islamic fundamentalists; 27 were from leftist political groups such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union; three were Christians, including a female secondary school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon.

What these suicide attackers - and their heirs today - shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation. Nearly two decades of Israeli military presence did not root out Hizbollah. The only thing that has proven to end suicide attacks, in Lebanon and elsewhere, is withdrawal by the occupying force.

Previous analyses of suicide terrorism have not had the benefit of a complete survey of all suicide terrorist attacks worldwide. The lack of complete data, together with the fact that many such attacks, including all those against Americans, have been committed by Muslims, has led many in the US to assume that Islamic fundamentalism must be the underlying main cause. This, in turn, has fuelled (sic) a belief that anti-American terrorism can be stopped only by wholesale transformation of Muslim societies, which helped create public support of the invasion of Iraq. But study of the phenomenon of suicide terrorism shows that the presumed connection to Islamic fundamentalism is misleading.

There is not the close connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism that many people think. Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.

Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective. Most often, it is a response to foreign occupation….

The whole article is worth reading, and many of the comments are too. I’ll summarize a few:

Resisting foreign occupation is a political act.

Suicide attacks are not as alien to us as they may seem at first, soldiers frequently make suicide assaults and go on suicide missions. The incredible casualty rate of our own Civil War is a case in point. Men regularly charged up hill into fierce fire on open ground, with horrendous results.

Many suicide bombers did undergo intensive religious training just before their attack.

Many suicide bombers have deep psychological problems like repressed homosexuality, grief, insecurity, women who are victims of public humiliation, etc.

The real source of the problem is the militant organizations behind the bombers.

Suicide is just a weapon of last resort, if the attack could be made otherwise it would be.

Anyone who commits suicide while killing civilians is insane. But then what about killing civilians as a matter of policy with airstrikes?

Suicide bombing, Iraq	Airstrike damage, Beirut

Let’s turn the argument around and ask who is it that tells us that the bombers are irrational, fanatical religious nut cases?
Well the US, British, Russian and Israeli governments do. What then is their stake in the distinction? If the attackers in Chechnya, or Lebanon, or Manhattan are actually guerrillas opposed to the policies of the target state, then those policies may be open to a more public critique. But if they are just religious nuts, then all we can do is erase their breeding ground, as we would do with any pest. But President Bush declared a War on Terror in 2001 not a police action against wacko terrorists. A war can only be fought against a government, yet our government tell us these are religious nuts egged on by governments in Syria and Iran. But we aren’t fighting Syria and Iran. Not yet. And many Sunni terrorists come from Egypt, Saudi, and Pakistan. So are we in a war or a police action or something else? Who is defining the situation, Western governments bent on using the situation to hold on to power, or the terrorists?

A bomber’s martrydom portrait

What about Al Queda and Bin Laden? Are they religious or political? It is unclear to me how important or cohesive an organization Al Queda is, yet we do have considerable knowledge of Bin Laden. He is a wealthy heir and a businessman, who was trained by religious fundamentalists in school. He didn’t become engaged in fighting until he joined the enthusiastic, but amateur brigade of jihadists in Afghanistan fighting the Russians. He didn’t switch to making a target of America until long afterward. He may be fanatical, or dedicated, and even religious, but he also shows every sign of a high level of skill at propaganda, so his actual feelings may be cloaked beneath the pious image. When he and the jihadis were fighting with the CIA, no one thought a jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan was irrational.

But what about the 9/11 bombers? They were educated, had lived in the West, had wives, had a social life in the West, and they weren’t malleable young men either. How could people like that attack innocent civilians with such ferocity? Maybe it’s easier when you yourself are to die. Maybe it’s easier when you can’t see the results. What about all this talk of martyrdom and going to heaven with so many virgins? Well translated literally, it’s weird yet no stranger than eating the body and blood of Christ, or being reborn as an animal. Arab poetry and political/religious talk are full of flowery, ornate exaggeration that sounds childish translated into prosaic English. Perhaps the heavenly virgins are a conventional saying like “blood of the lamb” and aren’t understood literally.

So where does this speculation leave us? Islamic scholars do not agree, any more than Christian scholars do. Secular information on Arabia is sketchy and cliche-ridden. Perhaps it is hard to get westerners interested in finding out more, because Arab culture and Islam aren’t attractive to the West unlike say, Zen or Hindu mysticism. Suicide missions seem quixotic in the extreme, and yet it is easy to find Western or Japanese equivalents. Religion plays a part, and yet an outsider might have thought British sailors in the Napoleonic wars were somehow Anglican warriors ( singing Onward Christian Soldiers for instance). Our own government has given us no reason to trust their motives or judgement. Our ally in the region, Israel, is itself torn and confused. It is more able to mount a massive PR campaign in America than a successful military one next door in Lebanon.

Maybe we should take terrorists straight up, as dedicated amateur fighters against America, Israel and the West? Maybe if you are from Damascus, or Cairo, or Karachi it seems sensible to attack Americans. Maybe if you work in Washington it seems sensible to attack Baghdad and Beirut.

by Stavro

What if they are political suicide attacks and not irrational religious gestures? What then will make them stop? Are they effective? The leaders say they want the destruction of Israel, yet the Israelis are wealthy and educated, protected by the West, and most important have nuclear weapons. They obviously will never succeed, so why do they keep trying? Why offer your death for a hopeless cause? Why re-enlist in the Marines and return to Iraq? Why volunteer to fight in Viet Nam? Why allow your son to go to Iraq?

We are truly a strange species.