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Posted on 06/09/2007 5:14:06 PM PDT by Baladas
n the wake of Sept. 11, Robert Pape, a professor in international security affairs at The University of Chicago, speculated on TV news shows on the causes of suicide terrorism.
“Like everyone else, I jumped to the conclusion that it was radical Islam,” he says. “I even bought a Koran to see what’s wrong with Islam.”
After searching for data on suicide terrorism and finding that the government did not begin to track such attacks until 2000, Pape began to collect his own information. He compiled data on 462 suicide bombings from 1980 to 2004 and later updated his findings to 2006. His book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism was published in 2005.
Contrary to his initial impression, Pape discovered that half of the 462 suicide attacks were by people who were secular or even anti-religious. The world leaders in suicide bombings were members of the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, a Marxist and Hindu group.
Over 30% of Muslim suicide bombers were not Islamic fundamentalists, Pape learned. For instance, some belonged to an anti-religious extremist Marxist group in Turkey, the Kurdish Workers Party or PKK.
“Over 95% of all suicide attacks are not religious,” Pape says. Rather, they are driven by the political goal of compelling foreign combat forces, with their tanks and fighter aircraft, to leave territory “the terrorists consider their homeland or they prize greatly.”
Only 5% are random, isolated attacks, the products of any ideology, religion included, Pape adds.
“Every suicide campaign since 1980 has been carried out by groups seeking self-determination for territory,” he says.
Pape spoke to the CJN before addressing the annual banquet and fundraiser of the Cleveland chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The following day, he spoke to the counter-terrorism task force of the Cleveland field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In the Jewish state, Pape says, 75% of suicide bombings are in Israel proper, directed against targets such as bus stops and pizzerias. Suicide terrorists avoid what he calls “hard” targets, such as railroad stations and even shopping malls, which are too well defended.
At settler outposts in the West Bank, Pape says terrorists will attack and run away so they can do it again and again before getting shot. “Inside Israel proper, they know it’s highly likely the best way to achieve killing is through suicide attacks.”
If suicide bombers were motivated solely to become martyrs and go to heaven, they would stand in front of Israeli tanks. “No,” he insists. “The motivation is to kill the largest number of people. It’s not about how to die.”
Suicide bombers are typically walk-in volunteers from blue-collar and middle-class backgrounds with no experi- ence in killing. Of the 462 he studied, 232 were Arabs. They are not being brainwashed in madrassas, he says. “They are already perfectly willing to die.” They are then taught the mechanics of how to commit suicide bombings.
Only 10% are poor. “These are not individuals who have nothing to lose,” Pape says. “They would have led productive lives.”
They are also highly educated, with 54% having some college education, compared with 12% in the surrounding society.
The common denominator “driving suicide attacks” in the Jewish state is anger at the Israeli occupation, says Pape. “Deep anger is the critical circumstance. When you mix it with personal motives of revenge and social prestige, you trigger the suicide terrorist.”
When Israel withdrew from Gaza and allowed Hamas to win a parliamentary election, the “second intifada came to a halt,” he maintains.
In his 2003 article in American Political Science Review that profiled suicide bombers, Pape advised Israel on how to stop the second intifada.
“Israel should unilaterally withdraw from Gaza and areas of the West Bank and build a security fence,” he suggested. “Israel did about 70% of what I said. I would have moved the fence to the Green Line. Suicide attacks since summer 2004 are down 90%.”
Hamas is still an Islamic fundamentalist organization, he points out. If religion motivated suicide attacks in Israel, they would be continuing.
The Defense Department has been funding Pape’s studies, and he has spoken in Washington to the CIA, Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, the FBI and members of Congress. Before the 3rd Infantry Division was sent to Iraq as part of President Bush’s surge of 21,500 combat troops, Pape addressed about 150 of its officers.
The recent surge of American troops in Iraq will make a bad situation worse, Pape says. “If we remove our troops, there will be a substantial decline in the number of suicide terrorist attacks.”
Lebanon exemplifies his conclusions, Pape claims. Hezbollah was born in July 1982, created by the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.
When Israel finally withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah did not follow Israeli soldiers to Tel Aviv, Pape notes. “The suicide attacks stopped completely. To this day, there’s not been another suicide attack by Hezbollah.”
If Israel would completely withdraw from the West Bank, Pape predicts that Hamas would end its suicide attacks.
He acknowledges that Hamas keeps saying they want to run Jews out of Israel proper. But Pape says they aren’t doing this through suicide bombings. While it’s possible that Hamas would some day adopt this strategy, he says governments do not build policies on things that are purely hypothetical.
As for Iraq, the U.S. has an interest in a stable Persian Gulf region and maintaining access to oil. We “don’t cut and run,” Pape says. “But our policy can’t be to stay and die.”
The U.S. needs a third way that begins with our core interest, access to oil, which is integral to our economy, Pape says. “Offshore balancing” is what he recommends. “Military forces are poised (outside of Iraq), ready to intervene if necessary. We wouldn’t go to war to spread democracy at the barrel of a gun.”
Pape insists he is all for humanitarian intervention but not at serious risk to American lives. “Our current policy is increasing the risk of another 9/11. It’s creating so much hatred.”
Unlike Vietnam, where America simply pulled out its troops with minimal repercussions, immediate withdrawal is not possible in Iraq, he believes. In Vietnam, the U.S. had no real interests. But leaving Iraq abruptly would damage U.S. interest in Persian Gulf oil and hurt the world’s economy.
Instead, Pape suggests a phased withdrawal beginning this year and taking place over the next three or four years. It took Al Qaeda six years after its first terrorist attacks in 1995 to come to the U.S. for 9/11, he notes.
“This, unfortunately, is the reality of Iraq.” Occupying Iraq has been “just foolish. It’s a tragedy that leaves us in the worst of all possible worlds. It’s time to change policies.”
This guy is a moron, but he has one thing right. Communism and anarchism have always been associated with suicide bombings, and it’s one of the reason why the leftists feel so much at home with the Muslims—they both are full of rage at anyone who doesn’t think as they do and do what they say, and they both have a fondness for killing.
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot killed more than a hundred million people, mainly because they liked the idea of ideological killings.
It has little or nothing to do with occupation, the other thesis this guy raises. Muslims and Communists just feel a righteous enjoyment in killing people.
Islam may prove to be the worst enemy of all. It has certainly been around for a long time, causing misery. But Communism did a pretty good job killing people in the twentieth century.
So I am occupied by lying liberals and I need to tie explosives around me and go blow someone up.
NOT LIKELY. My religion is a religion of peace and though I have a hard time living up to it, I will only kill in self defense.
How can ANY occupying force “drive” a suicide attack?
If the objective is to get the occupying conquerer to depart, suicide attacks would seem to be totally counterintuitive. The suicide attacks are not, for the most part, directed against the army of liberation, but against the civilian population, or the local native police power, not the foreign army.
In fact, the suicide attacks are clear proof that the situation is still subject to oversight, and CANNOT be left to its own fate.
How come Saddam was paying $25,000 or so to all families of homicide bombers in Israel? Why did they leave videos that said they were following the word of Allah? Why do they clean up and make sure they are clean for their meeting with their 72? All this and he says they are not Islamic fundamentalist. Something is wrong with this fellow or is it that he is just another left winger who like all left wingers wants Israel and the United States to be destroyed?
Just Stunning !!
Suicidal stupid jew alert.
Just as the US is in peril because of its enemies within, so is the State of Israel.
Quite a fatuous argument: the 7/7 Tube attacks in London are blamed on British occupation of what?
If it were occupation, rather than some gloss on Islam, the Basques and Catalans, the Germans and Japanese in 1946, and all the peoples of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, would have resorted to suicide bombing.
Send the nitwit a copy of the writings of Sayyed Qutb. As one level the good professor is right: classical Islam, while having a perverse notion of martyrdom that includes death in battle, contains strong prohibitions against suicide. However, the importation of existenstialist ideas into Qu’ranic intepretation by Qutb has been used to override the Qu’ranic prohibition on suicide.
Maybe someone tell the assorted imams, mullahs and muftis who advocate suicide attacks that existentialism, with its notion of ‘absolute commitment’ as the source of a meaningful life (or death), is a kufir philosophy,and that following Qutb’s reading of the Qu’ran is not pure Islam.
Rice: Palestinians deserve to live free of ‘occupation’[at an event of pro-Palestinian group]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1717847/posts
US Supplies Fatah With Arms, Rice Decries “Occupation”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1718348/posts
“Quite a fatuous argument: the 7/7 Tube attacks in London are blamed on British occupation of what?”
Well, gotta be a few offices in Arabia plus once in a while some street footage...
The lefties were such a problem in the 1920s the US government was forced to adopt design standards for post offices so that when (not if) the bombers decided to blow one up, few people would be hurt or killed, and the building would not be put out of operation.
For the most part those design standards are still used. Check out how close you can park to the main mail processing area deep within the inside of a MPC (Mail Processing Center) next time.
When Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah federal building, the US Post office across the street was barely damaged, and then not in any critical areas.
Does this maroon think I give a crap that suicide bombings in Israel have been replaced by random mortar and rocket attacks. The evil ones have just replaced one failing tactic with a new tactic.
I see. They were trying to drive the occupying forces out of New York City, which of course, belongs to them.
“Every suicide campaign since 1980 has been carried out by groups seeking self-determination for territory,” he says.
I got about this far and it all clicked.
Muslims want territory. As a religious group, they want Israel!
The rest is just appologies.
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It was all so much blather but this was the iceing on the cake for me.
“Unlike Vietnam, where America simply pulled out its troops with minimal repercussions...”
The repercussions were certainly minimal behind the ivy’d walls of acadamia as for the South Vietnamese people and then the Cambodians ,well that was another story.
Bravo Sierra.
Suicide attacks serve other purposes besides inflicting damage. First, they generate the maximum amount of publicity for the cause, and second, they force outside intervention. The emergence of 24-hour global news networks such as CNN and the explosive growth of the internet have enabled virtual global awareness.
Ideological support of suicide bombings in the Middle East is not hard to come by. While the Qur’an in Surah an-Nisaa (Chapter: ‘The Women’), verse 29 seems specifically to forbid suicide, the chapter’s 75th verse enjoins that fighting oppression is commendable. This ambiguity extends to the clergy. In 1997, Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti Ekrima Sabri, Imam of the al-Aqsa Mosque and Palestine’s most important religious figure, commented in an interview: “The person who sacrifices his life as a Muslim will know if God accepts it and whether it is for the right reason. God in the end will judge him and whether he did that for a good reason or not. We cannot judge. The measure is whether the person is doing that for his own purposes, or for Islam.” The ideological debate is whether the bombing is in fact a suicide or related to a jihad against oppression.
The Islamic jurist Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi had labelled such attacks “among the greatest forms of holy struggle against oppression.” On 1 August, according to the UK’s Sunday Times, the High Islamic Council in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa encouraging Palestinian women to become suicide bombers. [Source: Janes.com - Suicide bombing: no warning, and no total solution]
Islam is so schizophrenic and self-contradictory, it needs to be completely marginalized and rejected.
“Ohhh, he even bought a copy of the Koran before this “professor” started making making excuses for suicide bombers this time!”
Your reaction, and that of others here, to this man’s work displays more emotion than thought.
Perhaps you should have a look at this:
http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/kamikaze/
Often people have taken a stand, against impossible odds, to protect something they valued. Sometimes the odds were such that their action would be deemed “suicidal” by most people who were not in their situation.
Yeah, and our occupation of Europe during WWII caused the concentration camps......
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