Understanding Your Enemy

From a very interesting article in the Boston Globe entitled "The Truth about Suicide Bombers":

The traditional view of suicide bombers is well established, and backed by the scholars who study them. The bombers are, in the post-9/11 age, often young, ideologically driven men and women who hate the laissez-faire norms of the West — or at least the occupations and wars of the United States — because they contradict the fundamentalist interpretations that animate the bombers’ worldview. Their deaths are a statement, then, as much as they are the final act of one’s faith; and as a statement they have been quite effective. They propagate future deaths, as terrorist organizers use a bomber’s martyrdom as propaganda for still more suicide terrorism.

But Williams is among a small cadre of scholars from across the world pushing the rather contentious idea that some suicide bombers may in fact be suicidal.

Here is an example that supports the depression interpretation:

Qari Sami did something strange the day he killed himself. The university student from Kabul had long since grown a bushy, Taliban-style beard and favored the baggy tunics and trousers of the terrorists he idolized. He had even talked of waging jihad. But on the day in 2005 that he strapped the bomb to his chest and walked into the crowded Kabul Internet cafe, Sami kept walking — between the rows of tables, beyond the crowd, along the back wall, until he was in the bathroom, with the door closed.

And that is where, alone, he set off his bomb.

The blast killed a customer and a United Nations worker, and injured five more. But the carnage could have been far worse. Brian Williams, an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, was in Afghanistan at the time. One day after the attack, he stood before the cafe’s hollowed-out wreckage and wondered why any suicide bomber would do what Sami had done: deliberately walk away from the target before setting off the explosives. “[Sami] was the one that got me thinking about the state of mind of these guys,” Williams said.

Eventually a fuller portrait emerged. Sami was a young man who kept to himself, a brooder. He was upset by the US forces’ ouster of the Taliban in the months following 9/11 — but mostly Sami was just upset. He took antidepressants daily. One of Sami’s few friends told the media he was “depressed.”

There are enough crazed suicides already in the West, i.e. people who decide to "go down in a blaze of glory" and kill innocent people by the score in their final desperate suicidal act. It seems to be a modern disease.

What I don't understand is the viciousness of it all. I can understand being depressed. I can understand killing yourself. What I can't understand is taking innocent lives with you. It requires a perverse mind, a vicious person, to decide to multiply your own unhappiness by spreading it to others. Bizarre. Rather than seek help and try to find joy, you decide to spread misery and hate. What a wildly counter-productive, miserable thing to do.

To decide to go out in a "blaze of glory" requires a perverted mind:

Islam forbids suicide. Of the world’s three Abrahamic faiths, “The Koran has the only scriptural prohibition against it,” said Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who specializes in the causes of suicide terrorism. The phrase suicide bomber itself is a Western conception, and a pretty foul one at that: an egregious misnomer in the eyes of Muslims, especially from the Middle East. For the Koran distinguishes between suicide and, as the book says, “the type of man who gives his life to earn the pleasure of Allah.” The latter is a courageous Fedayeen — a martyr. Suicide is a problem, but martyrdom is not.

A decent person, an honest person, a kind person would crawl in a corner and die quietly rather than spread misery.

But the modern world is awash in deluded people, both non-religious and religious, who can talk themselves into horrifying deeds:

In 2002, he approached a group of 15 would-be suicide bombers — Palestinians arrested and detained moments before their attacks — and asked if he could interview them. Remarkably, they agreed. “Nobody” — no scholar — “had ever been able to do something like this,” Merari said. He also approached 14 detained terrorist organizers. Some of the organizers had university degrees and were intrigued by the fact that Merari wanted to understand them. They, too, agreed to be interviewed. Merari was ecstatic.

Fifty-three percent of the would-be bombers showed “depressive tendencies” — melancholy, low energy, tearfulness, the study found — whereas 21 percent of the organizers exhibited the same. Furthermore, 40 percent of the would-be suicide bombers expressed suicidal tendencies; one talked openly of slitting his wrists after his father died. But the study found that none of the terrorist organizers were suicidal.

The paper was published last year in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence. Adam Lankford read it in his office at the University of Alabama. The results confirmed what he’d been thinking. The criminal justice professor had published a book, “Human Killing Machines,” about the indoctrination of ordinary people as agents for terrorism or genocide. Merari’s paper touched on themes he’d explored in his book, but the paper also gave weight to the airy speculation Lankford had heard a few years earlier in Washington, D.C., while he was earning his PhD from American University. There, Lankford had helped coordinate antiterrorism forums with the State Department for high-ranking military and security personnel. And it was at these forums, from Third World-country delegates, that Lankford first began to hear accounts of suicide bombers who may have had more than martyrdom on their minds. “That’s what sparked my interest,” he said.

This helps explain the spate of terrorist suicide bombings. And it helps explain the modern spate of mass killings. These are people who in less "media saavy" times would have gone into the back room and cut their wrists or hung themselves, decide to get their "moment of glory" by making life miserable for so many, many others.

And, of course, in the hands of fanatics like al Qaeda, this manipulation of a suicidal tendency gives them a wonderful tool to create "martyrs":

Lankford writes of al Qaeda-backed terrorists in Iraq who would target and rape local women, and then see to it that the victims were sent to Samira Ahmed Jassim. Jassim would convince these traumatized women that the only way to escape public scorn was martyrdom. She was so successful she became known as the Mother of Believers. “If you just needed true believers, you wouldn’t need them to be raped first,” Lankford said in an interview.

This is simply a crime dressed up as "religion" and turned into a horror to create more horror.