Here's an interesting article- I'm bolding one part, just in case you don't read it:
... the biggest falsehood is that suicide bombing is an exclusively Muslim phenomenon. In reality, two thirds of the suicide killings committed in the last two decades were not committed by Muslims. The pioneers and masters of contemporary suicide bombing, the Tamil Tigers, who have murdered a Sri Lankan president and an Indian prime minister, are Hindu ethnic nationalists seeking independence from Sri Lanka. Half of the suicide bombings in Lebanon since 1983 were secular communists opposing the Israeli occupation. And British men have been murdered by non-Muslim suicide killers in living memory: Kamikaze pilots were a key part of the Japanese war effort from 1943 onwards, and they were followers of Shintoism.
themercury.co.za
Suicide killing has been around for a long time
May 27, 2003
By Johann Hari
It's the same old story all over again! The occupation of Palestine has murderously enraged a gang of its victims, and a group of zealots have taken matters into their own hands. They have committed a series of suicide killings: more deaths on both sides, more weeping mothers, no progress.
You might have missed this particular story, though: their weapons were daggers (they slit their throats after killing scores of their occupiers) and the perpetrators were Jews resisting Roman occupation in the first century AD. This news is old enough, yet it is every day's news.
As suicide bombs incinerate victims from Chechnya to Jerusalem to Casablanca, our understanding of suicide bombing is still cluttered with myths and half-truths.
It is not new, for a start - but the biggest falsehood is that suicide bombing is an exclusively Muslim phenomenon. In reality, two thirds of the suicide killings committed in the last two decades were not committed by Muslims. The pioneers and masters of contemporary suicide bombing, the Tamil Tigers, who have murdered a Sri Lankan president and an Indian prime minister, are Hindu ethnic nationalists seeking independence from Sri Lanka. Half of the suicide bombings in Lebanon since 1983 were secular communists opposing the Israeli occupation. And British men have been murdered by non-Muslim suicide killers in living memory: Kamikaze pilots were a key part of the Japanese war effort from 1943 onwards, and they were followers of Shintoism.
So what is causing all this suicide bombing, if not Islam? Many people - especially on the US and Israeli right - are trying to claim that it is motivated purely by a sick Arab culture that venerates death. Suicide bombers, they say, are simply nihilists; one US columnist offers a typical view: "These people have no political agenda beyond the desire to bring death for its own sake. We are witnessing an outbreak of political insanity." This belief is comforting but untrue.
Like a battered wife who kills her husband, suicide bombers are reacting in an illegitimate way to legitimate grievances.
The Versailles Treaty and the injustices it imposed upon the German people gave rise to Nazism; the current miseries of the Arab world are giving rise to a strain of Islamofascism.
But we must be honest about this phenomenon: the suicide bombers we confront today are reacting to real problems, albeit horribly, and denying this fact obscures the situation we are all in.
Suicide bombing, far from nihilism, is a desperate attempt to effect political change. It is an act of hope, however perverted. Survivors of these attacks usually report that the bombers die with smiles on their faces - and this is not to do with the belief that they are going to paradise where 70 virgins await them.
Secular and Hindu bombers, who have no such notions, do the same thing.
The cause of these killings is not individual madness - something we Westerners can relate to - but collective despair in the Arab world, a phenomenon which is harder to understand.
This despair is induced by the tyrannies that have reduced the Arab peoples, once the most sophisticated alive, to living in a cultural, political and economic bog.
This tyranny is partly brought by Arab dictators, partly by Western governments who have backed them, and partly by a self-imposed, internal cultural tyranny that resists all change.
Suicide bombing is not an "inevitable" reaction to all this, nor is it justifiable, but it is a reality, and it will not go away spontaneously.
A group of senior Arab intellectuals investigated the problems of the Arab world for the United Nations last year, and its report is bleak.
"Arabs today feel monitored. (Their governments and peoples) show a lack of hospitality to anyone of free spirit, anyone who is a dissident, anyone who is different," explained Fouad Ajami, who was on the commission.
The extent to which the Arab world has sealed itself off from cultural interaction with the world is breathtaking: Spain translated in 2002 more works of literature than have been translated by Arabs in the thousand years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun. There is not yet a single functioning Arab democracy - and the biggest victims are Arabs themselves.
Israel has, in this sea of autocracies, become a sole unifying force, a helpful demon. Of course the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank - where 40% of Palestinian children are suffering from malnutrition, and the Israeli army is killing civilians at an intolerable rate - contributes to this, and it is legitimate for Palestinians to resist this with violence directed at the Israeli military (but not civilians).
Important though ending the occupation is, it is only a small aspect of the overall repression of Arabs. There are 280 million Arabs and only 2 million in the occupied territories. We need to provide all Arabs - not just Palestinians - with ways to influence politics short of blasting themselves to pieces.
The only long-term way to deal with suicide bombing - and this is work that will take generations - is to provide alternative, democratic outlets for Arab political anger.
Al-Qaida and Hamas don't want democracy - indeed, they loathe it - but the only remedy to the root of all this poison, the mass failure of the Arab world, is to ignore their mad visions of a continent-wide Taliban and proceed with democratisation. - Independent Foreign Service |
