Interesting article, thanks! A couple of months ago I watched a documentary that was on either "Frontline--World" or the "National Geographic Channel," I can't recall which (sorry) about the suicide bombings of the Tamil Tigers. The Tigers aren't Muslim, they're primarily Hindu with a Christian minority, and nothing was mentioned about their families getting paid. Yet the Tigers have commited over 200 suicide bombings as compared to the 50-55 for Hamas and The Islamic Jihad combined (www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=373). Interestingly, the same article notes that the terrorist suicide attack is quite old: "The phenomenon appeared among the Jewish Sicaris in the 1st century...."
According to O.N. Mehrotra at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi, the violence seems to be the result of the minority Tamils not being able to get their language accepted as an official language through non-violent means when the Sinhalese majority adopted "Sinhala only" as an official national language in place of English. "As the situation became more grim, the frustrated youth came to believe that they could not achieve any tangible solution to the problem without adopting violent means to achieve their cherished goal of independence" (www.idsa-india.org/an-jan-9.html). Frustration seems to be a powerful motivator. Sometimes it's justified, more often it's not, but that's not the point. Nor is the point that terrorism cannot be fruitfully viewed from an economic vantage point (the first article I referenced also notes that "in the 1990’s, the Hizballah drastically reduced the number of suicide attacks due to “rational” cost-benefit considerations"). Rather I just want to undermine, to some small extent, the idea that suicide bombers can be understood in terms of religion or monetary payoffs. I suspect that in the case of the article Mr. Skinner (Crazy Al?) sent along, frustration at political intransigence (www.gush-shalom.org/archives/oslo.html, for example) is a more powerful economic variable than 72 dark-eyed virgins or mom's new apartment. Thanks for the soapbox, -jsh ===== "...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong." -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos http://launch.yahoo.com/u2
