Bogosity

I noticed this article on the ABC website today. I was thinking about suicide bombers the other day and asking the question: what would drive someone to the point where they become a suicide bomber. How much hope needs to be taken away before that happens or how much anger do you need?. I guess I always thought that attacks of suicide bombers have been motivated by a mix of hopelessness and rage. However, this article made me realise that I had also wrongly linked fundamentalism as the motivator as well.

Suicide attacks ‘about strategy, not religion’. 12/07/2005. ABC News Online

“The data shows that they come overwhelmingly from Sunni Muslim countries where the United States has stationed combat forces since 1990, on the territory that the terrorists prize as their homeland.

“We have even more information with this regard. If it really was Islamic fundamentalism that was driving it, we’d expect that the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world would produce Al Qaeda suicide terrorists. In fact, we find that that’s not true.

“Of those 67 that I just told you about, none have come from Iran. Iran is certainly every bit as Islamic fundamentalist as Saudi Arabia yet has never produced an Al Qaeda suicide terrorist.

“Sudan, a population of 21 million, almost the same as Saudi Arabia, whose philosophy of Islamic fundamentalism is so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he chose to live there for three years in the 1990s [but] Sudan has never produced an Al Qaeda suicide terrorist.

“This is really quite strong evidence that what’s really the main mobilisation appeal of those Al Qaeda terrorists who are most lethal, who are most willing to kill us, is really coming from the presence of foreign troops on the Arabian peninsula.”

“Once you have the physical presence of foreign combat forces plus a religious difference, that allows the terrorist leaders to demonise the occupier in an especially stark way.”

More reasons why we should just get the hell out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Edit: But I want to make it clear that I am a pacifist. I am saddened by violence and the effects it has on both the perpetrators and the victims.