In love with death

In love with death
Suicide bombing is advocated by privileged elites
Alan Dershowitz
Friday June 4, 2004
The Guardian

As suicide bombings increase in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia and in Israel, more and more people have come to believe that this tactic is a result of desperation. They see a direct link between oppression, occupation, poverty and humiliation on the one hand, and a willingness to blow oneself up for the cause on the other. It follows from this that the remedy for suicide bombing is to address its root cause - namely, our oppression of the terrorists.

But the underlying premise is false: there is no such link. Suicide bombing is a tactic that is selected by privileged, educated people because it has proven successful. Some of the suicide bombers themselves defy the stereotype of the impoverished victims driven to desperate measures. Remember the 9/11 bombers, several of whom were university students and none of whom was oppressed by the US. They were dispatched by a Saudi millionaire named Osama bin Laden, who has now become the hero of many other upper-class Saudis who are volunteering to become shahids (martyrs).

Majid al-Enezi, a Saudi student training to become a computer technician, recently changed career plans; he crossed over into Iraq, where he died. His brother Abdullah celebrated that decision. "People are calling all the time to congratulate us, crying from happiness and envy."

Why do these overprivileged young people support this culture of death, while impoverished and oppressed Tibetans continue to celebrate life despite their occupation by China?

Historically, why have other oppressed people not resorted to suicide bombings and terrorism? The answer lies in differences among the elite leadership of various causes. The leaders of Islamist radical causes, especially the Wahhabis, incite suicide terrorism, while the leaders of other causes advocate different means. Recall Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, who advocated non-violent means of resistance.

The bombers accept death because they have been incited by imams preaching "Kill the infidels". Sheikh Muhammad Sayed Tantawi, the leading Islamic scholar at the elite al-Azhar University in Cairo, has declared that martyrdom operations - ie suicide bombings - are the highest form of jihad.

Occupation makes it more difficult to launch successful terrorist attacks. This is not to argue for occupation; it is to separate the arguments regarding occupation from the claim that it is the fact of occupation that causes suicide bombing. Indeed, were Israel to end its occupation of Gaza and most of the West Bank (as I have long believed it should), it is likely that terrorism would increase. The same might be true in Iraq, if the US were to pick up and run.

The time has come to address the real root cause of suicide bombing: incitement by certain religious and political leaders who are creating a culture of death and exploiting the ambiguous teachings of an important religion. Islamist young people are in love with death, claim some imams; but it is these leaders who are arranging the marriages between the children and the bomb belts.