I missed a central point when writing about Robert Pape’s theory about suicide terrorism yesterday. Pape says that an essential aspect of the practice is that suicide terrorists are venerated by their societies. They are martyrs, and are assured of being martyrs before they act. Streets are named after them.
Of course this is what neocons and Zionists and at times the New York Times also point out: Suicide terrorists are exalted by Muslim/Palestinian society. Their pictures are garlanded. And there is the famous case of Palestinians dancing on rooftops when they saw the TV images of 9/11. The neocons say that this shows the degradation of Muslim society. "Why aren’t Palestinian leaders doing anything to stop these people beyond hollow condemnations?" Sam Harris would say that this shows that Islam is a backward religion.
Pape explains it a different way. He says that suicide terrorism–self-destruction and the murder of random innocents–so violates the norms of religion, all religions, that it must gain a social blessing from a different source. That source is a religious nationalism: the enraged feelings that are engendered in an occupied people when the occupier is of a different religion. So even though not every youth is a suicide bomber, the society broadly supports the bombers in their choice, for that society feels itself to be threatened.
The point here is that suicide bombing involves the demonization of another people: Christian Americans, Jewish Israelis. And nationalism, combined with religious difference, allows that process to occur. The occupier is seen as so alien and malignant that the most extreme methods are considered honorable. I return to my question of yesterday: If it were purely Iraqi against Iraqi (without occupation, without religious difference, but yes, sectarian difference) would suicide terrorism occur? Or would social mechanisms then clamp down on it, the religious and authoritative enforcers of norms?
"The occupier is seen as so alien and malignant that the most extreme methods are considered honorable."
But this sort of dehumanization is routine in war, even 4th generation war. How else could we firebomb Dresden, nuke Hiroshima, napalm Vietnam, without having first dehumanized the enemy? Thus the importance of propaganda, to help realize in the public's mind the "true reality" of the dread foe. Propaganda is of vital importance, to overcome religious / ethical constraints.
Suicide bombing would stop immediately, in my estimation, after the "antigen," the Westerner, were removed (although, as I noted yesterday, sectarian violence would persist until crushed by a strongman or until polital lines were redrawn: probably the strongman path is less bloody, in the end. Most unlikely would be a Czechoslovakian scenario, a peaceful parting of Shiite and Sunni).
Go research the Iran-Iraq war, Phil, and see if there were instances of suicide bombing during that bloody conflict.
According to Raphael Medoff in Militant Zionism in America, Jabotinsky recommended suicide attacks on German Nazis shortly before his death in 1939 even though the mass murders had not yet started and even though German Nazi anti-Jewish policy at that point in time was not much different from today's Zionist program with respect to Palestinians.
According to Nachman Ben-Yehuda in The Masada Myth, secular Zionists from either socialist nationalist or Jabotinskian factions undertook suicide attacks in Palestine during the period from 1945-7.
Religion is not required to support suicide attacks. The Cuban Revolution of Fidel Castro inspired suicide attackers. (They were immortalized in The Godfather.)
I truly believe that under circumstances comparable to those of Palestinias, Americans would resort to suicide attacks.
We have the history of John Brown, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, and their was definitely something suicidal in all terrorism and violent resistence to Southern Slavery, which was an evil comparable to Zionism. (It is in fact a root of Zionism because there is a direct intellectual chain of transmission from Calhoun's Defense of Slavery to Max Nordau's and general Zionist eugenics theory.)
When I was working in the Occupied Territories from 1993-2002, I concluded it is important to confront the Hollywood Zionist indoctrination of the American public directly. I got to know some of the Palestinian film community and suggested that they make films to target an American instead of an Arab audience.
I have family connection to Hollywood and did a lot of work for Industrial Light and Magic in the early 1980s. I think I know my way around a Hollywood movie script.
I wrote two example scripts to show how such films would work.
http://members.aol.com/thorsprovoni/NewTwoWeddings.pdf — I moved the story from Jerusalem to Boston to make it more accessible to an American audience.
http://members.aol.com/thorsprovoni/twoweeks.pdf
I try explain suicide attacks from an American POV on pp. 40-42 of the second script.
Note that Black Sunday (1978) is the first ideologically Neocon film, and we have had almost 3 decades of indoctrination since then. The plot of Black Sunday is constructed around a particularly spectacular suicide attack even though at the time that Harris wrote Black Sunday there was no significant number of suicide attacks that were taking place in the Arab or Muslim world.
Here is a brief analysis that I wrote of Black Sunday in another context.
Michael Lander is a disgraced US Airforce pilot that plots with the help of Black September to kill 80,000 people and the president of the United States at a Superbowl football game by crashing an explosive laden blimp into the stadium. Because of the similarity of the movie’s terrorist operation to the WTC attack, it is worth mention that that no Palestinian group was involved in the September 11 atrocity and that the perpetrators were members of an extremist group very loosely associated with breakaway factions of the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood, which has its own distinct and often legitimate grievances against the USA. Such complaints, as Palestinians and other Arabs can make against the USA, do not interest Harris, who focuses mostly on the psychopathology of the killer. Palestinians, the Middle East conflict and Black September are mostly props in his book.
Both the movie and the book are somewhat unique in that they begin with murders of Arabs by an Israeli death squad. Normally, Israeli terror squads are portrayed as retaliating for some on-screen act of violence, but Harris’ lack of interest in Middle East issues may have immunized him to some extent to the common Zionist attitudes that most Americans have adopted.[50] Nevertheless, the terrorist act itself corresponds far more to Zionist mythology than to actual Palestinian operations at the time, which generally confined themselves to the seizure of hostages or airplanes to secure the release of prisoners that were held by Israelis under torture and the threat of (extra-judicial) execution at any time.
The director and the scripter went beyond the book to explore motivations and the cause of the conflict. In the movie Major Kabokov, the Israeli protagonist, suffers from the usual Zionist "whack ‘em and weep syndrome." The scenes of the auditing of the Black September post-attack tape and of the identification of the Dahlia Iyad by Egyptian security are worth reviewing. The message that Iyad reads is far more powerful in the movie than in the book while the identification scene was created for the movie.
One can only speculate why it was necessary in the movie to identify Iyad as an Arab of German Palestinian extraction. Perhaps after showing some sympathy with Palestinian suffering, the director might have felt an obligation to pander Zionist myth of the Arab German link in the opposition to Zionism. Or perhaps, the director just needed explain the portrayal of a Palestinian woman by an actress of German extraction.
I also have to wonder whether the director was reluctant from the start to portray Arabs as relentlessly negative as Harris wrote in the book or whether there might have been some last minute editing of the film in response to Sadat’s peace initiative. The movie’s ending differs significantly from that of the book. While Harris’ book is rather flawed, his ending applied to the movie would have provide a far superior climax to the story.
In any case, the message of the movie can be summarized as follows. Palestinians are psychopathetic killers, who will use any tactic to enmesh mentally damaged Americans in murderous actions. Whatever legitimate grievances Palestinians might have, Americans should pay no attention. Instead Americans should abandon wimpy legalistic tactics, ally themselves completely with the State of Israel, and use zero tolerance Israeli methods against Arabs and their allies.
The Neocons whether in politics or in Hollywood have not changed their song and dance for decades.
The Palestinians seem to have no compunction killing each other in extreme violent fashion. Witness the throwing people off roofs by both Fatah and Hamas just last month. If Fatah had actually put up a fight, how long would it have been before the first suicide bomber?
I'm reminded of the two Israeli reserves that were literally ripped apart from limb to limb by the Palestinian mob that then paraded around with their hands drenched in blood. While I'm not saying the Palestinians don't have what to be upset about, these displays of graphic violence and the insidious glorification of violence in Palestinian society is not lost on Americans. Most of us see Israel as a fact and the next step is a two state solution with an independent Palestinian state. Watching babies draped in suicide vests and holding toy M-16s and glorifying killing pregnant women does not make us believe that the Palestinians are serious about living in peace. Just think of the support there would be for pressuring for a return of the settlements if there wasn't this nihilistic violence associated with the Palestinians.
Similarly, Iraq has showed us that Muslims are willing to do great evil to one another in the name of religion. Many Americans sit and wonder – if they do that to each other, what the hell are they going to do to me? And suddenly Rudy Guliani looks more electable than John Edwards. Not in my book, but in many books around the USA.
OPP–which shows how ignorant the U.S. public is and how much the media is responsible by not airing multiple perspectives on suicide terrorism. Also, the entire discourse of "evil" turns history and politics into metaphysics, a favorite U.S. pasttime under the Bush administration.
Yes freespeechlover – our's is a lazy group of news consumers. Of course if you were to air views that were considered taboo in the Muslim world, what do you imagine the outcome would be?
Warriors are venerated in every culture, so I’m somewhat baffled by why this particular form of warfare — as reprehensible, ugly and cowardly as it is — should be considered any differently. The disconnect seems to in the “playing by the rules” aspect (which, Geneva Convention notwithstanding, seems always to be an oxymoron once a war becomes hot). In the Napoleonic Wars, flying a false flag at sea was just not cricket—unless of course you pulled out your true colors at the last minute. The Germans at the Battle of the Bulge were scoundrels because they dressed in American uniforms.
Kamikaze pilots, another group heralded (at least at home) as ultimate heroes for knowingly laying down their lives to inflict carnage on the enemy, are perhaps only slightly more palatable because they were clearly marked and dealt in military targets.
But think of the airborne bomber crews of WWII — German, American and British — the majority good Christian boys, dropping payload after indiscriminate payload, incinerating thousands of innocent civilians. True, some were “suicide missions,” but many survived to tell the tale. We have pictures of them standing next to their planes. Smiling. We revere them. Brave boys. Jimmy Stewart, George McGovern.
Even Robert McNamara said if roles had been reversed he and LeMay would’ve been tried for war crimes for the bombing of Japan.
I by no means defend the action of the suicide bomber, but why is it so outside the bounds of the comprehension while the more technically advanced bombing, and the swath of death and mutilation and misery it cuts, is somehow “cricket” and acceptable within the bounds of Judeo/Christian society?
Good point Peter,
I can understand the anger that unloaded here on Germany.
But if I read the jokes or see the cartoons with bombs catapulted out of camel's or mules behinds, I can't deny that this feels distinctively racist to me and utterly arrogant. That's an attack poodle specialty, it seems.
…
Read today in the Australian newspaper The Age:
"The Dutch Government has warned a Rotterdam company to stop supplying construction equipment for Israel's 700-kilometre Palestinian separation barrier, a new turn in the international campaign to boycott Israel.
According to news reports, the Dutch Foreign Minister, Maxime Verhagen, recently told the company that its contract to supply cranes was "undesirable", in light of the International Court of Justice's ruling, three years ago this month, that the project broke international law."
This kind of thing becoming more widespread might do more than suicide bombs.The same Court ruled years ago that the settlements (not just the so-called 'illegal' settlements but ALL the settlements in occupied territory)contravened international law.
Since then the usual suspects have cast aspersions on the integrity of that Court.
Peter V. is absolutely correct. The Palestinians are waging war with the most effective weapons they have at hand. The IDF weaponry comes from Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, SAIC and other American contractors- all funded with US tax dollars.
As for Palestinians dancing on rooftops, a less famous (actually suppressed) image related to 9/11 is one of Israeli's dancing in celebration after the Trade Center collapses:
Rewards for Suicide Bombers?
If the Saddams and Khameneis leave the Palestinians alone, there would be peace.
Remember the rewards. If it is a national Palestinian liberation, who needs rewards?
The rewards are now down to $250.00. The recruiting agents are paid, too.
In Palestine, actually, it is a conflict between (Arab/Iranian?Russina) tyrants and a pretty decent enlightened Israel.
———————
The Iranians are not oppressed, but the junta still recruits kamikazes.
The problem is the mafia style rule in Iran. The corrupt wealthy clans will enjoy good profits while the junta oppresses the broad population.
The revolutionaries among you, have not gone on the barricades to protest against the Iranian junta's barbaric imprisoning of its dissidents.
————————–
Human beings deserve free societies.
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Let us call for an intellectual resistance against all oppressors.
DEAKIZATION!
The decency, I like, can be found in Adel Darwish:
http://www.adeldarwish.com/?p=10
To be decent, enlightened was the aim of Ferenc Deak who lived in the time of Abraham Lincoln.
Deakization is a proposal to behave like Ference Deak.
Gawd!
This so ridiculous….anyone think we don't also revere sucide and warriors?
What the hell do you think D-Day was besides the biggest sucide mission in history?
Ever culture worships deaths in the name of war. We do it everyday..everyone who dies in Iraq is a hero, Japan did in WWII….everybody loves the dead as long as they die in wars…we encourage it, pay homage to it etc,etc.
There is so much hypocrisy involved in explaining everything that it boggles the mind.
cooper
I think I know what you mean. I have had a hard time sleeping at night since I read the DEA art student report in conjunction with the commissions 9/11 terrorist timeline. I have no doubt that Mossad is now watching the next wave of attackers. The attack necessary to justify the strike against Iran. They will be sure no one gets in the way. Just like the last time. Israeli telecommunication firms are great aren’t they? This time I think it is those Israeli chicks selling cosmetics in shopping centers that are watching. The ones that sell that stuff from the Dead Sea. They are keeping an eye on terrorists. I have about $5oo of their products in my bathroom already. I've never used them. I love those girls. So will everyone else. I predict oil refineries, chemical plants next to large concentrations of people and nuclear plants, how about you?
Nice collection of nuts Phil.
American soldiers are suicide bombers.
http://newsbusters.org/node/14095
http://www.erichufschmid.net/Infiltrate/InfiltrationOrIncompetence.html
Please read this Philip Weiss
Try Talal Asad's book, On Suicide Bombing, for another explanation. He shows that the line between religious nationalism and secular modernity is not that easily drawn. Also, he makes a persuasive argument that "martyr" is an inaccurate translation of the Arabic word, shahid or shahada in the plural. On this I have to agree. Islamic martyrdom, as it is often used by Western commentators, is actually a projection of Christian notions of martyrdom onto Islam and onto suicide bombers.
I think its a pointless discussion.
People always did and always will sacrifice their lives for what they love.
In times when honor was still a value, as close to us as WWI, the enemies' courage and sacrifice was recognized and solemnly celebrated.
Now, when there is no place for honor in the world anymore, we carefully turn our enemies into monsters by our propaganda machines.
I believe that England was the first to do it in WWI. English soldiers and civilians who were indoctrinated by English press, when got into the hands of "Hunns" were prepared for the worst, but were very surprised to be treated with care and honor and left many records of that.
Russian officers in German POW camps during WWI were allowed to come and go outside the camps and visit local towns as they please and even travel, as long as they gave a word of honor to the camp Commander that they won't run away.
But creating monsters where there was none for one's political advantage is a very tricky business. They always come back to haunt the creator.
"And there is the famous case of Palestinians dancing on rooftops when they saw the TV images of 9/11."
Indeed, this is famous. However, it did not happen.
It reminds me of how Abba Eban went before the UN in 1967 and explained that Israel saw on the radar screens Egyptian fighter jets flying towards them. To this day, a great many people consider this fable to be part of history.
Liberal white boy, can you tell me why anyone who calls themselves liberal would think their skin colour and gender important enough to make into a name?