[extropy-chat] Poverty of Dignity

[Damien Sullivan]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 07:45:52AM -0700, Olga Bourlin wrote:
> "But virtually all suicide bombers, of late, have been Sunni Muslims. There 
> are a lot of angry people in the world. Angry Mexicans. Angry Africans. 
> Angry Norwegians. But the only ones who seem to feel entitled and motivated 
> to kill themselves and totally innocent people, including other Muslims, 
> over their anger are young Sunni radicals. What is going on?  ... Clearly, 

Except that he's wrong.  Suicide bombing as a modern tactic was pioneered by
the Tamil Tigers, a secular group of Hindu origins.

http://cfrterrorism.org/groups/tamiltigers.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2098657.stm 

An article on the motivations of suicide bombins: military logic, not
religion:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/06/30/schuster.column/

   start quote What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common
   is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies
   to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists
   consider to be their homeland. end quote
   -- Robert Pape

Scott Atran has been writing about the psychology of suicide terrorism; here's
one sample:
http://www.discover.com/issues/oct-03/departments/featdialogue/

"Nasra Hassan, who is a Pakistani relief worker working in Gaza for a number
of years, interviewed about 250 family members, recruiters, and survivors,
completely independently. She was not aware of Merari's work, and she found
exactly the same thing. Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton University,
has done long-term studies with Hezbollah and Hamas. His research shows that
not only are suicide terrorists significantly more educated than their
peers, they are also significantly better off. According to Krueger, although
one-third of Palestinians live in poverty, only 13 percent of Palestinian
suicide bombers do; 57 percent of bombers have education beyond high school
versus 15 percent of the population of comparable age. "

"How on earth does anyone sane work up the gumption to blow himself up,
together with what is often hundreds of bystanders?  A: Exactly the same way
that you get soldiers on the front line of an army to sacrifice themselves for
their buddies. What these cells do is very similar to what our military, or
any modern military, does. They form small groups of intimately involved
"brothers" who literally sacrifice themselves for one another, the way a
mother would do for her child. They do it by manipulating universal heartfelt
human sentiments that I think are probably innate and part of biological
evolution."

There's also some unrelated stuff at the end on religion and environmental
protection.

-xx- Damien X-)