Are suicide bombers similar to others who commit suicide? Do they derive their motivations from the same sources?
The more than four suicide bombings just last Monday to mark Cheney's visit to Iraq, keep this question alive every day we walk down the street. A woman entered a mosque in Karbala, killing dozens and wounding another hundred. What drove her to this?
When Mahmoud Marmash, a young bachelor, blew himself up near Tel Aviv, in 2001, he took several Jews with him, perhaps to the same afterworld, or maybe not. “I want to avenge the blood of the Palestinians.” From a poor community-- he grew up where many people despair in poverty and hopelessness-- Mahmoud’s act is difficult for many of us to understand. We wonder what would push a person to such extremes?
An examination of suicide, though, uncovers that politically-based suicide is nothing new. It appears more than seven times in the Old Testament. Remember Samson in Judges 16:29-30? As an escape from the despair of Roman oppression, martyrdom is common in the New Testament.
Many of the same motivations for political suicide drive other types of suicide victims. Most infamously, many “experts” on TV News discussed the case of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attack, as a well-established professional with a doctorate in architecture.
What most people fail to mention is that he never fit into the German culture where he studied and thus, lonely, frequented a mosque that indoctrinated him to fundamentalism of an extreme flavor. Like most such suicide cases, Atta was alienated and woefully under- or un-employed most of the time.
Contrary to many current assertions, a careful gander into this subject teaches us that the suicide bomber draws motivation from the same wellspring as other types of suicide victims.
As civilized people, we should be able to do much better than the Bush-Cheney approach: throw our hands up and say, "Nothing to do but kill them all. "Bomb the hell out of the entire Middle East! That'll fix it. Sweep it all up." The last sentence is an actual quote by Rumsfield.
Little wonder that terrorism has only increased greatly since the US Supreme Court elected the neocons into the Executive Branch.
We can diagnose this sickness and identify its causes in order to reduce them, and thus avoid so much violence.
Suicide at the Foundation of Sociology
In the early 20th century, sociologist, Emile Durkheim studied and categorized the reasons for suicide. Emile Durkheim lived during the peak of the industrial revolution, what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age, when wealth was extremely concentrated among the ownership class and labor movements incited violent riots, including terrorist bombings.
This was a time of great social and economic upheaval. Perhaps this explains both Durkheim’s theories of suicide and his interest in the subject. After careful analysis, Durkheim found it was the individual’s bonding to society that could determine whether or not he was likely to commit suicide, and he described four different types of these bonds:
Altruistic: Durkheim explained that too much social integration leads to self-sacrifice for society, patriotism, honor; the altruist, such as the WWII kamikaze pilots, commits himself to a goal beyond himself and considers this world an obstacle and burden.
Egotism: Too little social integration leads to alienation, loneliness; the egoist sees no goal to which he might commit himself, and thus feels useless and without purpose.
Anomic: Whenever an economy is not regulated enough, conditions such as unemployment or iniquitous distribution of wealth arise. Unlike the Neoconservative's preference for Milton Friedman's unbrindled "free market economy," Durkheim believed that it is the role of society to regulate the economy, and he sees a relationship between a society’s suicide rate and the way it performs this important regulative function.
Fatalistic: When society sets economic expectations too high, individuals who fail to meet these standards can lose all sense of self-worth.
Cultural beliefs can directly influence each of these types of suicide. Durkheim’s last three types of suicide seem to apply variously to most any culture, including American society.
Suicide in America
America’s culture and economic system often creates huge financial inequities and hardships leading to suicides. In volume of suicides, the U.S. ranks among the top forty among all countries in the world and 9th among industrialized countries.
Why would the so-called "wealthiest country in the world” rank so high above most third world countries?
The vicissitudes of America’s economy leave a vast majority of individuals to despair from unemployment and iniquitous distribution of wealth. In such situations, individuals are exposed to at least two of Durkheim’s motives for suicide: anomic and fatalistic.
Studies in the U.S. during the 1980’s found that every one percent increase in unemployment related to suicide increases of 360 per year. The U.S. offers hardly any social infrastructure to the unemployed. This often leads to the anomic and fatalistic suicide motives, as well as higher rates of crime and gang activity.
At the same time, consumer advertising promotes the expectations that everyone can take a piece of the pie if they work hard and "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps." When a culture raises expectations high and some individuals do not prosper, hopelessness can overtake even the brightest individual, including the soldiers returning from extended combat missions, struggling to readapt to civilian life.
Sometimes our own political leaders contribute to the feelings of economic disparity. G.W. Bush’s administration recently promoted the U.S. as the beacon of free-market prosperity, a privileged nation, God-chosen to spread democratic wealth.
Bush used this image, as his most frequent among many ploys, to justify the preemptive attack in Iraq. However, compared to the world’s democratic nations, the U.S. currently grows one of the largest gaps between rich and poor: one percent of the population relishes in 40 percent of the wealth while 50 percent of the population struggles with 3 percent of the wealth.
The poor get poorer, the rich, richer. Fatalistic despair and broken expectations increase among those who fall behind, while the winners in the economic cycles sometimes suffer the emptiness of their egotistic drives to success. These economic gaps intensify the social hardships and represent causes for suicide in America, Durkheim’s last three motives: anomic, fatalistic, and egotistic.
Internationally, the U.S. government commands enormous influence over countries whose regimes it protects through military support. We call such countries “client states” such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait...and so on.
In these countries, the U.S. supports autocratic rulers, such as the former shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, the Royal Family of Saud, and even the early years of Saddam Hussein--before he made his fatal decision to nationalize Iraqi oil--among others. These autocratic states maintain much higher levels of economic gaps between the ruling elite and the working classes than those in the U.S.
The tough, autocratic Islamic cultures exacerbate the gap between the wealthy ownership class, such as the Royal Family of Saud, and the poor. They create environments of great social, economic, and political crisis. They push some groups to extreme behavior such as suicide bombing. This explains why 15 of the 19 highjackers of 9/11 were Saudi.
This crisis was long in the making through Muslim social and economic failures over generations. The list of humiliations goes on today through American military dominance in Muslim territories and unconditional support for Israel, not to mention decades of European colonization breaking up the Ottoman Empire.
The Middle East -- A Hotbed of Suicide Bombers
In many Muslim countries, unemployment runs high and the wealth generated by oil revenues trickles down like water in the Sinai. “Poverty and unemployment among Arabs are fundamental reasons for the spread of terrorism, an unsually enlightened Saudi prince said at the opening of a conference,” according to an AP report.
Saudi Arabia remains in the third world in terms of poverty even though its oil revenues provide a per capita GDP much higher than that in, say, Texas. The private owners of the oil wealth distribute it among the royal family members (19,000) while the population of Saudi Arabia, like Iraq, equals that of Texas (23 million).
“The very production of oil," says an AP report, "in otherwise underdeveloped societies often skews the local economy -- funneling vast wealth to a few and thus intensifying the preexisting antagonism between the haves and the have-nots.”
While Durkheim’s last three motives abound in the Middle East, fundamentalist religion adds a fanatic ‘altruistic’ motive to the mix, creating an apocalyptic cocktail in some Islamic societies.
In Muslim countries we find the suicide bomber for whom all four of Durkheim’s motives seem to work simultaneously.
National Public Radio reporter, Christopher Joyce, quotes a Palestinian psychiatrist as saying, “most of them [suicide bombers] are very nice, timid, introvert, have had a problem with power in their childhood, …personal experience with serious traumatic events in their lives…witnessing the helplessness of their fathers.” Joyce notes that terrorists groups use religious rites to create a sort of ritual bonding among bombers.
In USA Today, reporter Jack Kelley characterized suicide bombers from Jordan as young, sexually frustrated and “frustrated by the economic and political duress...”
Muslims are alienated and detached from their culture if they do not participate in mosques. Families sometimes support martyrdom as a successful fulfillment of the faith.
Thus, by altruistic martyrdom, terrorists win in many ways: they fulfill a perceived benefit for the entire community, gratify their own eternal salvation as well as sexual satisfaction with the promised 72 virgins they expect to meet in heaven--something the Prophet Muhammad promised after the Battle of Badr in the 7th century.
They find revenge in the injustices that they believe the infidels caused throughout history, such as American military presence, or European colonization. They attain notoriety in their community, all great improvements from their desperate poverty.
A defensive Jihad is legitimate and, for many, it is the duty of every Muslim when infidels encroach upon the Islamic territories, as the 7th century fundamentalist Khawarijites emphasized in the convoluted, confusing verses of the Koran.
In the Middle East, Muslim cultures often create all four of Durkheim’s motives simultaneously. Iniquitous distribution of wealth causing frequent high rates of unemployment, coupled with fundamentalist schools, these elements alone create a culture that encourages suicide bombing and aggression against any Western, infidel intrusion into Islamic territories.
In fact many people in the regions of Saudi Arabia hold burning resentment against the tyrannical monarchy which the US supports and defends for their petroleum partnership. In many ways, it's easier to attack the US or Europe than to attack a well fortified small group of Arab royalty.
Terrorism is a tactic of guerrilla warfare. It's a stateless enemy of insurent revolt against a tyranny. As we now well know, it has nothing to do with a nation like Iraq. Only after the US invasion did suicide bombing become especially widespread and kamikaze in style.
Peaceful Solutions
Through its fundamentalism, some Muslim cultures tend to intensify all of Durkheim’s motives for suicide to create the Muslim martyrs. By understanding the suicide bomber’s motives, economic, social, and religious, we learn its causes. By looking closely at the causes, we gain insight into how to eliminate them in order to solve the problem at its roots in a peaceful way.
Until now, the U.S. has supported oppressive, fascist regimes in its “client states” of the Middle East. We must change this economic and political situation in order to eliminate the terrorist’s martyrdom.
Though changing the economic and policital situation is no simple task. It's run by elite owners of wealth and vested power.
We can also take lessons from these causes for suicide as reasons for the high levels of suicide and crime within our own country.
In the Old Testament, Samson committed an act of suicide terrorism when he brought down the Philistine temple and killed thousands of his oppressors. He was in an extremely helpless situation.
In the New Testament, Christ, along with thousands of other Jews, willingly went into a martyr’s crucifixion as a form of defiance against the Roman Empire’s oppression. They had few alternatives. Likewise, in the Middle East, economic and social despair lead people to this terrorist’s martyrdom because they are left without even a glimmer of hope to live with dignity and respect.
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