Where Have All The Suicide Bombers Gone?

In a post from a year ago, Christopher Hitchens wonders out loud What Happened to the Suicide Bombers of Jerusalem?.

After all, back then--and in fact always--the claim is that the motivation for suicide bombers, if not all Palestinian terrorists who target civilian targets, is despair. But if so, what happened to that despair?

Hitchens rejects the idea that the security fence, Israel's targeted assassinations or occasional truces with Hamas can explain the apparent disappearance of the much talked about despair:

For one thing, almost all the suicide attacks were directed at civilians in pre-1967 Israel "proper"—in other words, in the Jewish part of Jerusalem or in towns along the Israeli coastline (in one case,a hotel in Netanya on Passover). It can probably be said with some degree of confidence that nobody blows themselves up for a half-a-loaf compromise solution. These cold-blooded attacks did not just avoid well-defended West Bank settlements or Israeli army bases; they also vividly expressed the demand that all Jews leave Palestine or risk being killed. Despair cannot so easily be channeled so as to underline a strictly political/ideological objective.

Instead, part of the issue is that despair at some point was not longer serving as an efficient business model:

Another possible reason for the slump in suicide is that those who were orchestrating it came to find that the tactic was becoming subject to diminishing returns. Despair must have meant a roughly constant stream of potential volunteers, but the immediate needs of Hamas and Islamic Jihad may not have always required the tap of despair to be left turned on. Indeed, there must have been some quite intense private discussions about how to turn it off. Not every despairing person can make, at home, the necessary belts, fuses, and lethal charges. These things require a godfather. And this, in turn, prompts the question: What will be said if or when the tap is ever turned back on? Surely it won't quite do to say that despair must have broken out all over again, though I can easily think of some fools who will be ready to say it.

Which leads to the actual reason for the suicide bombings:

Nasty, vicious, fanatical old men, not human emotions, were making the decisions and deciding the days and the hours of death. And the hysterical ululating street celebrations when such a mission was successful did not signify despair at all but a creepy form of religious exaltation in which relatives were encouraged to make a feast out of the death of their own children as well as those of other people. To have added the promise of paradise to this pogrom is to have made spiritual and mental sickness complete; to have made it a sexual paradise is obscene into the bargain. (Women martyrs are obviously not offered the same level of bliss and promiscuity by the Quran.)

Putting aside Hitchens's well-known feelings about religion, there is an element of Islamism that thrives on an worldview that is Medieval in outlook, both in how it seeks to continue Islam's long history of conquest and occupation and in its attitude towards other religions and peoples. But a Medieval outlook does not preclude using modern tools--and when dynamite does not work, there is Facebook, Twitter and blogs--as well as other subtle means of delegitimizing an enemy in the modern world.

Technorati Tag: Suicide Bombings and Islamists.