Via Ninme, Queen of Links, comes this article --yet another bit of evidence that suicide bombers are usually not poor, war-ravaged and mentally unstable (as the article points out, mental instability is a disqualifier for any kind of secret mission). This guy closes out his column quoting an expert who says the bombers' big issue is getting Western nations to withdraw their troops from Muslim nations. I can't buy that, I'm afraid. It's true enough that's what they often claim they want, but when they get it, they simply shift their grievance. 9/11 was supposedly about the US base in Saudi Arabia, but Bush withdrew it, and I haven't noticed any cessation of hostilities, have you?
I am fascinated by this statement, however.
The most common stereotype of a suicide bomber is that of a young man or teenage boy who has no job, no education, no prospects and no hope," writes American academic Robert Pape in his new book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. "[But] in general, suicide attackers are rarely socially isolated, clinically insane or economically destitute individuals but are mostly educated, socially integrated and highly capable people who could be expected to have a good future.
"The profile of a suicide terrorist resembles that of a politically conscious individual who might join a grassroots movement more than it does the stereotypical murderer, religious cult member or everyday suicide.
It begins to seem, from mounting evidence, that suicide bombers are what the dissolute sons of wealthy secular Muslims become as they search to fill their existential emptiness. (There's gotta be more life than golden sinks and petty corruption). For Western corollaries think Patty Hearst (Symbionese Liberation Army), Bernadette Dohrn (founder of the Weather Underground --and incidentally, now a law prof. at Northwestern), the Mitford Sisters in an earlier time, and of course Johnny bin-Walker. Meanwhile, the vaunted "Muslim street" that actually is poor and uneducated turns out to be, like all human beings, capable of persuasion and of learning new things. Hence Osama's falling poll numbers and the increasing belief that democracy can work in their countries (scroll down for links to evidence).
Some things are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them, right? The "bitter-enders" as Rummy calls them resemble nothing so much as the liberation theologians of two decades ago. In the press they were the indigenous poor rising up, but in fact they were university-educated Marxists using the poor as the lab for their own theories and amibitions. Cardinal Ratzi described them thus at the time:
The theologians who started it are Europeans; the theologians who are promoting it in South America are Europeans or have been educated in European universities. . ..In a certain respect, therefore, it is a kind of cultural imperialism, even if it is portrayed as the spontaneous creation of the disenfranchised masses. It would be important to examine what real influence is in fact exercised over the people by those theologians who maintain that they represent them as their spokesmen.
Indeed it would. I begin to suspect that what I've always been told about the "Arab street" is as much a Leftist piety as the idea that Russians were a race prone to violence and the Poles could never be ready for democracy. I mean, it's interesting that the backwards peoples of Afghanistan & Iraq didn't elect mere Islamicist thugs to lead them, but rallied around two men who are more cultured and better educated than most of us (I don't say they couldn't still turn out to be corrupt, but on evidence so far. . . )I don't think Islam has found its Lincoln or its Francis of Assisi yet (I refer to his renewal of the Church, not the Zefferellied, PETA-fied Francis), but surely one is coming. Perhaps from Iran.
We shall see if this musing proves correct. At the very least, let us have no more of the claim that "religion" is a threat to freeedom and Christianity of a piece with Islamofascism. On the contrary, it is secularism that is the font of Wahabist terrorism and the culture of death actually has two fronts. Hey, which neatly brings us back to the first post of the morning and VDH's column. The circle of life, right here in this blog!
