Suicide Terrorism: It’s Not About Virgins, It’s About Occupation

[BridgeTheGap]

Foreign occupation, not religious extremism, is the main driver behind suicide bombings, two political scientists argue. The University of Chicago Magazine reports that Robert Pape and James Feldman studied 30 years of suicide attacks worldwide to reach the eye-opening conclusion detailed in their new book Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It (University of Chicago Press, 2010). Here’s how Pape summed up their findings at a recent conference:

“What over 95 percent of all suicide attacks since 1980s have had in common is not religion but a specific strategic objective: to compel a democratic state to withdraw combat forces from territory the terrorists consider their homeland or prize greatly.”

Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, crunched data from more than 2,000 incidents, and he probed the bombers’ motivations by researching personal details of their lives, including their religious affiliations, their socioeconomic status, and recordings they left behind.

“Suicide terrorists are the ultimate smart bomb,” Pape writes in the introduction to Cutting the Fuse. The September 11, 2001, attacks showed how a small number of perpetrators could kill a large number of people, but looking at the larger picture of suicide attacks in places from Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Iraq, the magazine reports, “seldom have the attackers been seeking religious martyrdom.”

Putting a finer point on it, Pape writes in the book’s introduction:

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Spirituality/Suicide-Terrorism-It%E2%80%99s-Not-About-Virgins-It%E2%80%99s-About-Occupation.aspx#ixzz18whm83kt

[knowbody0]

1. how to create a terrorist?

kill his parents, burn down his village, sit him upon a baren rock with a neon green package of pickled potatoes dropped from the smoking sky for a humanitarian photo op.

[randr]

2. And this took how long to figure out?

This was the exact reason bin Ladin gave for the 9/11 attacks.
Just because he claimed that military bases were built on "holy" land the issue of occupation became muddled with religious rhetoric.
The bases in question, as I recall, were rather expediently removed by bush and co. without much fanfare.
And who thinks the Palestinians are fighting a "holy war"?
Being honest about the suspected motivations of terrorists the world over will only help in the fight to stop the senseless killing.

[BridgeTheGap]

3. It's much easier to justify the killing of "terrorists." War, itself, is nothing more than

organized terrorism. Curtis LeMay, the USAF general who wanted to nuke North Vietnam, was asked during WWII about the "morality" of fire bombing Japan, resulting in the deaths of thousands of "non-combatants" aka civilians. He responded: "War is immoral."

[randr]

4. If only we as humans had as much revulsion toward war

as we display toward other humans.
War should be thought of as the ultimate sin by any civilized or religious peoples.

[MisterP]

6. the Salvadoran oligarchs also thought that the FMLN was a tiny terrorist group with no support

that was hurting everybody's chances to progress

the oligarchs blamed religion, too

[DCKit]

5. An investment in our future. Funding the MICC, always a good choice. nt

[mix]

7. K&R nt