http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=0006A854-E67F-13A1-A67F83414B7F0104&pageNumber=2&catID=2
SKEPTIC
January 2006 issue
Murdercide
Science unravels the myth of suicide bombers
By Michael Shermer
"You should be very proud of me. It's an honor, and you will see the
results, and everybody will be happy.... whatever you do, head high,
with a goal, never be without [a] goal, always have a goal in front
of you and always think, 'what for.'" --Final letter to his wife by
Ziad Jarrah, September 11 terrorist who crashed Flight 93 into a
Pennsylvania field
Police have an expression for people who put themselves into
circumstances that force officers to shoot them: "suicide by cop."
Following this lingo, suicide bombers commit "suicide by murder," so
I propose we call such acts "murdercide": the killing of a human or
humans with malice aforethought by means of self-murder.
The reason we need semantic precision is that suicide has drawn the
attention of scientists, who understand it to be the product of two
conditions quite unrelated to murdercide: ineffectiveness and
disconnectedness. According to Florida State University psychologist
Thomas Joiner, in his remarkably revealing scientific treatise Why
People Die by Suicide (Harvard University Press, 2006): "People
desire death when two fundamental needs are frustrated to the point
of extinction; namely, the need to belong with or connect to others,
and the need to feel effective with or to influence others."
By this theory, the people who chose to jump from the World Trade
Center rather than burning to death were not suicidal; neither were
the passengers on Flight 93 who courageously fought the hijackers for
control of the plane that ultimately crashed into a Pennsylvania
field; and neither were the hijackers who flew the planes into the buildings.
The belief that suicide bombers are poor, uneducated, disaffected or
disturbed is contradicted by science. Marc Sageman, a forensic
psychiatrist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, found in a
study of 400 Al Qaeda members that three quarters of his sample came
from the upper or middle class. Moreover, he noted, "the vast
majority--90 percent--came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three
percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that's
usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their
societies in many ways." Nor were they sans employment and familial
duties. "Far from having no family or job responsibilities, 73
percent were married and the vast majority had children.... Three
quarters were professionals or semiprofessionals. They are engineers,
architects and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few
humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any
background in religion."
Murderciders appear in posters like star athletes.
Joiner postulates that a necessary condition for suicide is
habituation to the fear about the pain involved in the act. How do
terrorist organizations infuse this condition in their recruits? One
way is through psychological reinforcement. University of Haifa
political scientist Ami Pedahzur writes in Suicide Terrorism (Polity
Press, 2005) that the celebration and commemoration of suicide
bombings that began in the 1980s changed a culture into one that
idolizes martyrdom and its hero. Today murderciders appear in posters
like star athletes.
Another method of control is "group dynamics." Says Sageman: "The
prospective terrorists joined the jihad through preexisting social
bonds with people who were already terrorists or had decided to join
as a group. In 65 percent of the cases, preexisting friendship bonds
played an important role in this process." Those personal connections
help to override the natural inclination to avoid self-immolation.
"The suicide bombers in Spain are another perfect example. Seven
terrorists sharing an apartment and one saying, 'Tonight we're all
going to go, guys.' You can't betray your friends, and so you go
along. Individually, they probably would not have done it."
One method to attenuate murdercide, then, is to target dangerous
groups that influence individuals, such as Al ?Qaeda. Another method,
says Princeton University economist Alan B. Krueger, is to increase
the civil liberties of the countries that breed terrorist groups. In
an analysis of State Department data on terrorism, Krueger discovered
that "countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned
relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking in
civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil
liberties are unlikely to spawn suicide terrorists. Evidently, the
freedom to assemble and protest peacefully without interference from
the government goes a long way to providing an alternative to
terrorism." Let freedom ring.
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
