From MEQ 2003: Must Innocents Die? The Islamic Debate over Suicide Attacks

The Following by Haim Malka is reposted here with permission of Middle East Forum:

Must Innocents Die?
The Islamic Debate over Suicide Attacks

by Haim Malka
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2003, pp. 19-28

Over the last two years, the issue of suicide attacks or "martyrdom operations" against Israel has dominated public discussion throughout the Arab world. Since the outbreak of the current Palestinianintifada, in September 2000, the Palestinian resort to suicide attacks has won widespread Arab public acceptance as a legitimate form of resistance against Israeli occupation. Some Muslim clerics and other commentators justify them on political, moral, and religious grounds. Even those attackers who bomb and kill women and children are hailed as martyrs for their heroism in confronting the enemy.

It is often said that the "martyrdom operations" are acts of religious extremism. The operatives who recruit young men and women to detonate themselves in crowds of Israelis manipulate religious fervor by wedding the ideas of heavenly reward to martyrdom. A young believer who detonates himself in the midst of the enemy will ascend straight to heaven and enter paradise—so he or she is indoctrinated. This is presented as the ultimate sacrifice and reward for a devout young Muslim.

But the operations themselves are very carefully calculated maneuvers.

Review Of "The Smarter Bomb: Women and Children as Suicide Bombers" By Anat Berko

The following by Daniel Pipes is reposted here with permission:

Foreword: Understanding Female Suicide Bombers

by Daniel Pipes
The Smarter Bomb, Women and Children as Suicide Bombers
October 2012

By Anat Berko
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012. 212 pp., $42
ISBN: 978-1-4422-1952-6
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442219540
[N.B.: This is the author's original, unexpurgated text, different from the one edited down by the publisher]

Anat Berko has spent the past fifteen years in jails interviewing terrorists, giving her peerless authority on this subject among academic researchers; and no one has shown so great an ability as she to get interviewees to express themselves. The results, published in a series of studies on personalities, circumstances, and motives, has opened a hitherto mysterious topic to public scrutiny.