The Nationalist Tool of Suicide

by Nathaniel Wolfson

Last summer a group known as “Terrorism Has No Religion” made up of an “anonymous independent, non-governmental group of scholars” released a series of American-made Iraqi Public Service Announcements that were frequently aired on Al Arabiya, one of the largest news channels in the Middle East. According to its website, Terrorism Has No Religion’s mission is to “expose the fallacy of the distorted and politicized Islamic teachings used by ungodly extremists to sanctify and justify terrorism.”1 For one of the campaign’s ads, with a budget of 1 million dollars, Los Angeles based production company 900 Frames and Lebanon's EFXFilms transformed an industrial block in downtown LA into a typical Baghdad square. The set included a market scene with about 200 extras - the majority of whom spoke Spanish, Punjabi, and Italian - dressed in hijabs and kaffiyehs.2 The 60-second ad opens with a young boy sitting on a curb. A man walks by the boy and exposes yellow explosives strapped to his body. The camera focuses on the boy who notices the home-made bombs just before they go off, sending cars and people flying through the air and crashing through the windows of a cafe. The ad then shows the aftermath: fire, debris, and injured men and women. It ends with the words "Terrorism has no religion” and verse 5:32 from the Qur’an, which states “…if any one slew a person - unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land - it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.”
            The purpose of the ad was both to demonstrate to viewers the horror of suicide bombing and to propagate the idea that Islam is against acts of terror. This idea presupposes the concept that terrorism is fueled by Islamic doctrine. In fact, many policy-makers believe terrorism is fundamentally related to the dissemination of Islamic teaching. For the Bush administration, the war against terror is simultaneously a war against extreme Islam. President Bush has frequently made references to the “murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals," "Islamofascism,” “militant jihadism," or the “Islamic Caliphate." In Bush’s address to the nation on January 10, 2006, he stated that Al Qaeda’s goals included taking down Iraq's democracy, building a radical Islamic empire or caliphate, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.
            For Bush and his supporters, suicide terrorism is the quintessential product of the union between Islam and terrorism. Suicide terrorism is not a modern phenomenon; rather, it has existed for thousands of years. For example, in the first century A.D., the Zealots and Sicarii, two Jewish sects, attacked the Roman occupiers of Judea and their allies in public places, resulting in imminent death. The Assassins, a cult active in what is now Iran and Syria from the 11th to the 13th centuries, killed their targets (mainly Sunni rulers and leaders of Christian Crusader states) at close range with daggers and with no escape routes, also resulting in immediate death.3 Towards the end of World War II, Japanese kamikaze pilots flew explosive-laden aircrafts into allied ships. The concept of modern suicide terrorism became widespread in 1983, as a result of Hezbollah’s suicide attack of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 US soldiers.4 The significant historical use of suicide attacks suggests that suicide terrorism is not a completely irrational or fundamentally religious act, but instead a political tool for the militaristically less powerful.
Societal preconditions have placed suicide terrorism in its current position within popular discourse. Western culture considers suicide taboo; an act of desperation that is performed as a result of extreme and abnormal pressure. Most people find suicide illogical and a product of illness. Suicide terrorism is similarly considered unreasonable, irrational and fanatical. To understand suicide terrorism many have looked towards extreme religious doctrine and specifically, fundamentalist Islamic teaching and indoctrination.
There are two divergent common schools of thought regarding the relationship between Islam and suicide terrorism. The first school of thought argues that suicide bombers are coerced by leaders who distort Islamic texts to convince vulnerable people that the Qur’an supports suicide attacks. Proponents of this model believe that Islam is a peaceful religion that has been manipulated by terrorists for their own purposes. They claim that clerics distort salient passages in the Qur’an to imply that martyrdom paves the way to paradise. According to his public statements, President Bush follows this model. Bush’s statements regarding suicide terrorism usually contain ‘disclaimers’ in which he claims that he is not attacking true Islam but the Islam used by terrorists to control innocent people. Following this claim, Bush has compared the tactics of terrorist leaders to the leaders of America’s former Red enemy. On October 5, 2005, in a speech at a National Endowment for Democracy event, Bush stated, “like the ideology of communism, our new enemy teaches that innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision. And this explains their cold-blooded contempt for human life.”5 According to Bush, like in Communist states, the citizens of fundamentalist Islamic states pay for their leader’s twisted ideologies.
The second school of thought argues that suicide bombers simply follow passages of the Qur’an. Proponents of this school believe that Islam is a violent religion that leaves no room for moderation. They believe that the Qur’an explicitly promises virgins in paradise to Muslim men who die while fighting infidels in jihad. Proponents of this model also believe that the large number of Imams who encourage suicide bombing demonstrates Islam’s inherent violence. After the July 7, 2005, suicide attacks in London, Prime Minister Tony Blair, announced a new “plans to crack down on extremist Islamic clerics who preach hate.” Specifically, Blair announced that he would “deport foreign nationals who glorify acts of terror, bar radicals from entering Britain, close mosques linked with extremism, ban certain Islamic groups and, if necessary, amend human rights laws.”6
University of Chicago professor and military historian Robert Pape heads a new argument that claims that religion is rarely the route cause of suicide terrorism. For his book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Pape compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe between 1980 and 2003 - 315 in total. He concluded that "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."7 Pape argues that every suicide campaign from 1980 to 2003 has had as its central objective to coerce a foreign government to make concessions that ultimately result in complete withdrawal. These objectives are generally mainstream and reflect common nationalist claims of their community. In addition, by conducting extensive research on the individuals who committed acts of suicide terrorism, Pape concludes that fundamental religiosity is rarely the primary incentive of suicide terrorism from the point of the individual. He argues that most individuals who commit suicide terrorism are walk-in volunteers, highly political, more educated and wealthy then the average citizen of his or her nationality.
According to Pape, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas in the Palestinian Territories to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the most active suicide terrorist group), suicide campaigns are strategic initiatives with nationalistic goals. Suicide attacks are used exclusively by groups whose resources and military capabilities are inferior to that of the target occupying force. Suicide terrorism is often a ‘last-chance’ or ‘only-option’ activity which surprisingly results in success approximately half the time. Of the thirteen organized campaigns (a series of suicide attacks with specific political objectives) that were completed during 1980-2003, seven resulted with significant policy changes by the target state toward the terrorists’ political goals.8 The U.S. decision to withdraw from Lebanon in 1984 may be considered the model example of political success for terrorist organizations as a result of suicide attacks. Referring to the October 23, 1983, suicide car bombing attack by Hezbollah of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, President Reagan explained, “the price we had to pay in Beirut was so great, the tragedy of the barracks so enormous….We had to pull out…We couldn’t stay there and run the risk of another suicide attack on the Marines.” The successful result of the suicide campaign against U.S. barracks in Lebanon is considered by many modern historians to be the model through which many terrorist organizations base their strategies.
Al-Qaeda’s strategic use of suicide attacks further advances the argument that suicide bombing is far more a nationalistic strategy then a religious act. Al-Qaeda’s infamous fatwa against the United States, signed by Osama bin Laden and others, reads: “The ruling to kill Americans and their allies-civilians and military-is an individual duty for every Muslim…in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”9 The fatwa refers to U.S. presence in the gulf region, described by bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders as “veiled colonialism.” In fact, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda did not turn toward attacking the United States until after 1990, when the United States sent troops to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain. Furthermore, Western Europe and its citizens was not traditionally a target of al-Qaeda until the arrival of European troops in Afghanistan in 2000 and in Iraq in 2001. On April 15, 2004, shortly after Spain’s decision to withdraw from Iraq, bin Laden released a statement in which he offered to cease suicide terrorist attacks on European countries that withdraw their forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. He declared, “The Russians were only killed after invading Iraq and Afghanistan in the 1980s and Chechnya, Europeans after invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Americans in New York after supporting the Jews in Palestine and their invasion of the Arabian Peninsula. Stop spilling our blood so we can stop spilling yours.” This statement further demonstrated al-Qaeda’s strategic focus on ending foreign occupation of Arabic territory.
US presence in the Middle East has not subsided despite marked increases in suicide attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq. Without taking into account recent plans for a troop increase, since 9/11, US presence in the Arabian Peninsula has grown from 12,000 combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula, 5000 in Saudi Arabia and 7000 in Iraq, to over 140,000 combat forces in Iraq and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula.10 The association between foreign military occupations and the growth of suicide terrorist movements made clear by Pape’s thorough data and analysis suggests that military action against countries that sponsor terrorism will not reduce or eradicate terrorist activities. In fact, foreign occupation significantly increases public support of suicide campaigns. For example, Palestinian support for suicide attacks rose from 29% in 1995 to 61% in 2003. Between those years, Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories increased by 50%, from 146,000 to 226,000.11 The effects of military invasion - mass killings of civilians, infrastructural damage, humanitarian crises- have proven to incite groups to orchestrate terrorist campaigns and encourage civilians to participate in the effort. From a strategic perspective, the understanding that suicide terrorism results more from foreign occupation than Islamic fundamentalism can prove valuable to reducing the risks of global terrorism. This realization however clashes fiercely with the pentagon and policy-makers’ transparent aim for US military and economic control of the Middle East.

Footnotes:

1. Terrorism Has No Religion, 25 Jan. 2007, http://www.noterror.info/.
2. Lorraine Ali, This is Your Street Mid-Bombing, Newsweek, 20 June 2006.
3. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, New York: Random House, 2005. 11-12.
4. Ibid., 14
5. George W. Bush Speech, Event for National Endowment for Democracy, 6 Oct. 2005.
6. Blair Government Defends New Deportation Measures USA Today 5 Aug. 2005.
7. Pape, Dying to Win: the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, New York: Random House, 2005. 4.
9. Ibid., 54
10. Robert A. Pape, Interview with Harry Kreisler, University of California - Berkeley. 16 Feb. 2006, http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people6/Pape/.
11. Pape, Dying to Win: the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, New York: Random House, 2005. 140.