virus: The Culture of Martyrdom

From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 17:06:30 MDT


                     The Culture of Martyrdom
                                  
       How suicide bombing became not just a means but an end
                                  
                          by David Brooks
                                  
                               .....
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=S"}

  uicide bombing is the crack cocaine of warfare. It doesn't just
 inflict death and terror on its victims; it intoxicates the people
 who sponsor it. It unleashes the deepest and most addictive human
passions”the thirst for vengeance, the desire for religious purity,
    the longing for earthly glory and eternal salvation. Suicide
   bombing isn't just a tactic in a larger war; it overwhelms the
 political goals it is meant to serve. It creates its own logic and
  transforms the culture of those who employ it. This is what has
  happened in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Over the past year suicide
    bombing has dramatically changed the nature of the conflict.
                                  
   Before 1983 there were few suicide bombings. The Koran forbids
    the taking of one's own life, and this prohibition was still
  generally observed. But when the United States stationed Marines
     in Beirut, the leaders of the Islamic resistance movement
   Hizbollah began to discuss turning to this ultimate terrorist
weapon. Religious authorities in Iran gave it their blessing, and a
   wave of suicide bombings began, starting with the attacks that
    killed about sixty U.S. embassy workers in April of 1983 and
     about 240 people in the Marine compound at the airport in
  October. The bombings proved so successful at driving the United
    States and, later, Israel out of Lebanon that most lingering
                religious concerns were set aside.
                                  
The tactic was introduced into Palestinian areas only gradually. In
 1988 Fathi Shiqaqi, the founder of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad,
wrote a set of guidelines (aimed at countering religious objections
  to the truck bombings of the 1980s) for the use of explosives in
   individual bombings; nevertheless, he characterized operations
  calling for martyrdom as "exceptional." But by the mid-1990s the
  group Hamas was using suicide bombers as a way of derailing the
  Oslo peace process. The assassination of the master Palestinian
     bomb maker Yahya Ayyash, presumably by Israeli agents, in
January of 1996, set off a series of suicide bombings in retaliation.
   Suicide bombings nonetheless remained relatively unusual until
two years ago, after the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat walked out
    of the peace conference at Camp David”a conference at which
 Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, had offered to return to the
 Palestinians parts of Jerusalem and almost all of the West Bank.
                                  
 At that point the psychology shifted. We will not see peace soon,
   many Palestinians concluded, but when it eventually comes, we
  will get everything we want. We will endure, we will fight, and
we will suffer for that final victory. From then on the struggle (at
   least from the Palestinian point of view) was no longer about
     negotiation and compromise”about who would get which piece
   of land, which road or river. The red passions of the bombers
    obliterated the grays of the peace process. Suicide bombing
     became the tactic of choice, even in circumstances where a
    terrorist could have planted a bomb and then escaped without
       injury. Martyrdom became not just a means but an end.
                                  
  Suicide bombing is a highly communitarian enterprise. According
  to Ariel Merari, the director of the Political Violence Research
    Center, at Tel Aviv University, and a leading expert on the
   phenomenon, in not one instance has a lone, crazed Palestinian
    gotten hold of a bomb and gone off to kill Israelis. Suicide
 bombings are initiated by tightly run organizations that recruit,
  indoctrinate, train, and reward the bombers. Those organizations
    do not seek depressed or mentally unstable people for their
     missions. From 1996 to 1999 the Pakistani journalist Nasra
  Hassan interviewed almost 250 people who were either recruiting
    and training bombers or preparing to go on a suicide mission
    themselves. "None of the suicide bombers”they ranged in age
 from eighteen to thirty-eight”conformed to the typical profile of
  the suicidal personality," Hassan wrote in The New Yorker. "None
    of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or
     depressed." The Palestinian bombers tend to be devout, but
  religious fanaticism does not explain their motivation. Nor does
 lack of opportunity, because they also tend to be well educated.
                                  
   Often a bomber believes that a close friend or a member of his
 family has been killed by Israeli troops, and this is part of his
 motivation. According to most experts, though, the crucial factor
 informing the behavior of suicide bombers is loyalty to the group.
   Suicide bombers go through indoctrination processes similar to
 the ones that were used by the leaders of the Jim Jones and Solar
    Temple cults. The bombers are organized into small cells and
 given countless hours of intense and intimate spiritual training.
 They are instructed in the details of jihad, reminded of the need
  for revenge, and reassured about the rewards they can expect in
the afterlife. They are told that their families will be guaranteed a
  place with God, and that there are also considerable rewards for
   their families in this life, including cash bonuses of several
      thousand dollars donated by the government of Iraq, some
  individual Saudis, and various groups sympathetic to the cause.
 Finally, the bombers are told that paradise lies just on the other
side of the detonator, that death will feel like nothing more than a
                              pinch.
                                  
   Members of such groups re-enact past operations. Recruits are
  sometimes made to lie in empty graves, so that they can see how
   peaceful death will be; they are reminded that life will bring
  sickness, old age, and betrayal. "We were in a constant state of
    worship," one suicide bomber (who somehow managed to survive
 his mission) told Hassan. "We told each other that if the Israelis
     only knew how joyful we were they would whip us to death!
             Those were the happiest days of my life!"
                                  
 The bombers are instructed to write or videotape final testimony.
  (A typical note, from 1995: "I am going to take revenge upon the
   sons of the monkeys and the pigs, the Zionist infidels and the
   enemies of humanity. I am going to meet my holy brother Hisham
  Hamed and all the other martyrs and saints in paradise.") Once a
 bomber has completed his declaration, it would be humiliating for
    him to back out of the mission. He undergoes a last round of
     cleansing and prayer and is sent off with his bomb to the
          appointed pizzeria, coffee shop, disco, or bus.
                                  
   For many Israelis and Westerners, the strangest aspect of the
   phenomenon is the televised interview with a bomber's parents
after a massacre. These people have just been told that their child
   has killed himself and others, and yet they seem happy, proud,
  and”should the opportunity present itself”ready to send another
child off to the afterlife. There are two ways to look at this: One,
  the parents feel so wronged and humiliated by the Israelis that
 they would rather sacrifice their children than continue passively
    to endure. Two, the cult of suicide bombing has infected the
broader culture to the point where large parts of society, including
    the bombers' parents, are addicted to the adrenaline rush of
        vengeance and murder. Both explanations may be true.
                                  
 It is certainly the case that vast segments of Palestinian culture
   have been given over to the creation and nurturing of suicide
    bombers. Martyrdom has replaced Palestinian independence as
  the main focus of the Arab media. Suicide bombing is, after all,
   perfectly suited to the television age. The bombers' farewell
    videos provide compelling footage, as do the interviews with
    families. The bombings themselves produce graphic images of
      body parts and devastated buildings. Then there are the
  "weddings" between the martyrs and dark-eyed virgins in paradise
  (announcements that read like wedding invitations are printed in
   local newspapers so that friends and neighbors can join in the
festivities), the marches and celebrations after each attack, and the
  displays of things bought with the cash rewards to the families.
  Woven together, these images make gripping packages that can be
                       aired again and again.
                                  
 Activities in support of the bombings are increasingly widespread.
     Last year the BBC shot a segment about so-called Paradise
     Camps”summer camps in which children as young as eight are
trained in military drills and taught about suicide bombers. Rallies
    commonly feature children wearing bombers' belts. Fifth- and
  sixth-graders have studied poems that celebrate the bombers. At
  Al Najah University, in the West Bank, a student exhibition last
  September included a re-created scene of the Sbarro pizzeria in
   Jerusalem after the suicide bombing there last August: "blood"
    was splattered everywhere, and mock body parts hung from the
               ceiling as if blown through the air.
                                  
       Thus suicide bombing has become phenomenally popular.
  According to polls, 70 to 80 percent of Palestinians now support
     it”making the act more popular than Hamas, the Palestinian
 Islamic Jihad, Fatah, or any of the other groups that sponsor it,
 and far more popular than the peace process ever was. In addition
   to satisfying visceral emotions, suicide bombing gives average
Palestinians, not just PLO elites, a chance to play a glorified role
                    in the fight against Israel.
                                  
   Opponents of suicide bombings sometimes do raise their heads.
  Over the last couple of years educators have moderated the tone
 of textbooks to reduce and in many cases eliminate the rhetoric of
 holy war. After the BBC report aired, Palestinian officials vowed
   to close the Paradise Camps. Nonetheless, Palestinian children
   grow up in a culture in which suicide bombers are rock stars,
 sports heroes, and religious idols rolled into one. Reporters who
   speak with Palestinians about the bombers notice the fire and
                       pride in their eyes.
                                  
 "I'd be very happy if my daughter killed Sharon," one mother told
     a reporter from The San Diego Union-Tribune last November.
 "Even if she killed two or three Israelis, I would be happy." Last
        year I attended a dinner party in Amman at which six
   distinguished Jordanians”former cabinet ministers and supreme-
  court justices and a journalist”talked about the Tel Aviv disco
     bombing, which had occurred a few months earlier. They had
  some religious qualms about the suicide, but the moral aspect of
   killing teenage girls”future breeders of Israelis”was not even
  worth discussing. They spoke of the attack with a quiet sense of
                           satisfaction.
                                  
 It's hard to know how Israel, and the world, should respond to the
  rash of suicide bombings and to their embrace by the Palestinian
  people. To take any action that could be viewed as a concession
    would be to provoke further attacks, as the U.S. and Israeli
     withdrawals from Lebanon in the 1980s demonstrated. On the
other hand, the Israeli raids on the refugee camps give the suicide
   bombers a propaganda victory. After Yasir Arafat walked out of
        the Camp David meetings, he became a pariah to most
   governments, for killing the peace process. Now, amid Israeli
    retaliation for the bombings, the global community rises to
                     condemn Israel's actions.
                                  
    Somehow conditions must be established that would allow the
 frenzy of suicide bombings to burn itself out. To begin with, the
  Palestinian and Israeli populations would have to be separated;
 contact between them inflames the passions that feed the attacks.
     That would mean shutting down the vast majority of Israeli
  settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and creating a buffer zone
    between the two populations. Palestinian life would then no
       longer be dominated by checkpoints and celebrations of
    martyrdom; it would be dominated by quotidian issues such as
         commerce, administration, and garbage collection.
                                  
 The idea of a buffer zone, which is gaining momentum in Israel, is
     not without problems. Where, exactly, would the buffer be?
Terrorist groups could shoot missiles over it. But it's time to face
the reality that the best resource the terrorists have is the culture
    of martyrdom. This culture is presently powerful, but it is
potentially fragile. If it can be interrupted, if the passions can be
  made to recede, then the Palestinians and the Israelis might go
 back to hating each other in the normal way, and at a distance. As
     with many addictions, the solution is to go cold turkey.



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