Question about the suicde bombers

[Island Son]

If this is such a glorious way to support your cause, then why don't you ever hear of the leaders of these groups strapping explosives to themselves and blowing themselves up?

Could it be that young adults are more easily manipulated and controlled? Maybe they just don't have the guts to do what they send others to do?

I'm asking because I want to understand the thinking behind this. I'm not condeming one religion or another, I just don't understand why someone would die for their religion.


Please keep this debate about the subject and don't use it to bash Arabs or Muslims. If it turns into a thread bashing either group I will delete it.

Thank you.

Ever hear of the Pope going on one of the Crusades? How about a US General strapping on an assault rifle? The Commander-in-Chief hopping into a fighter jet? Politicians taking pay cuts?
It is NOT a religious issue. No-one does it. Ever.

 

[Island Son]

As for why anyone would be a suicide bomber, check the latest Time mag online for why we blow ourselves up . Lots of propaganda rhetoric IMHO but still interesting.

Big4 you can also read the review of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman on the steps used to make people willing to kill.

If you want a longer one check out them against fire , one of the best written essays I've ever seen. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing, especially the last paragraph and then look at the date.

Here's a few quotes:
Interviewing retired U.S. Army General Norman Schwarzkopf a few days after the bombing, self-styled hardballer Chris Matthews demanded to know whether it really made sense to paint a yellow stripe down the back of a man who could willfully sacrifice his own life for a cause — particularly in light of the fact, testified to by eyewitnesses, that the bombers had greeted death while standing at the position of attention. Schwarzkopf took the question with an avuncular chuckle, and allowed as to how it probably depended, ho ho, on which side you're on.
....
Gerasim Romanenko, a crotchety far-right contemporary of Lenin and Co., argued that terrorism was — as summarized by the writer Walter Laqueur — "not only effective, it was humanitarian. It cost infinitely fewer victims than a mass struggle... The blows of terrorism were directed against the main culprits." Compared to the wholesale slaughter of Iwo Jima or Gettysburg or Verdun, then, terrorists see their own attacks as "cost-effective."
....
Most significantly, terrorists don't often see themselves as practitioners of an underhanded art. If someone oppresses you politically and overmatches you in the ability to apply force, they've historically argued, does that mean you simply shrug and surrender to fate? American anarchists and socialists were, once upon a time, especially fond of this argument; one of the accused in the Haymarket affair, Albert Parsons, cheerfully described dynamite as a democratic tool. "As force was the law of the universe," Laqueur writes, "dynamite made all men equal and therefore free."
....
And so if you face an enemy who possesses billion-dollar warships — and you can't afford that kind of luxury yourself — you cook up a batch of explosives in a rented apartment and drive them into sort-of-battle on the back of a zodiac. War is politics by other means, and terrorism is nothing more interesting than war by other means; it falls at a different point on the same line that everybody else walks.

 

[the nature boy]

good stuff island son.

hardcore islamists that blow themselves up have nothing to begin with, and come from a place where life has no value, surrounded by poverty and death. going to heaven for the cause is really a no brainer for them. They have nothing to lose, plus their families get some sort of payment for their work.

Those with money and education really don't commit such acts.

 

[casavant]

If this is such a glorious way to support your cause, then why don't you ever hear of the leaders of these groups strapping explosives to themselves and blowing themselves up?

I saw an interview recently with the father of a suicide bomber and he felt the same way.

 

[manny78]

Re: Re: Question about the suicde bombers

Ever hear of the Pope going on one of the Crusades? How about a US General strapping on an assault rifle? The Commander-in-Chief hopping into a fighter jet? Politicians taking pay cuts?
It is NOT a religious issue. No-one does it. Ever.

agree.