[2nd EDITION] IS “ISLAMIST” SUICIDE BOMBING IN THE MIDDLE EAST REALLY MOTIVATED BY RELIGION?

[2nd EDITION] IS “ISLAMIST” SUICIDE BOMBING IN THE MIDDLE EAST REALLY MOTIVATED BY RELIGION?

BY:  DAN PETERSON

He continues: “Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.”

Even in the Middle East, at least half of the suicide attacks between 1980 and 2003 had little, if any, link to Islamic fundamentalism; indeed, many such attacks were undertaken by Communists, secular nationalists and even Christians. The motivations were this-worldly, tied to national liberation. Those who carried them out weren’t impelled by poverty, alienation, psychological dysfunction, hopelessness or a pathological desire for death. On the contrary, by a very wide margin, suicide attackers turn out to have been relatively prosperous, exceptionally well-integrated within their communities, healthy and in no conventional way suicidal. Their acts were oddly altruistic and idealistic, however depraved others outside their community might judge them to be.

Why have we so misunderstood what’s going on? For one thing, we’ve paid disproportionate attention, in a sense, to suicide attacks in the Middle East; after all, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka target that nation’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority, not us. The West has no vital interests there, and little representation, and we seldom hear reports about Sri Lanka on the nightly news. So our sample is skewed. Moreover, although they’ve spoken openly, we’ve paid curiously little attention to what suicide attackers have actually said about their motives and goals.

The fundamental point of Robert Pape’s argument is strikingly congruent with the entirely distinct case made by Graham Fuller in his brilliant 2010 book “A World Without Islam.” We’ve summarized that 2010 book in a previous column: Fuller observes that today’s divisions between the (Islamic) East and the (Christian) West regularly trace the same geographical and other lines that divided East from West long before the rise of Islam in the seventh century (see “Is Islam a primary cause of international violence?” published Sept. 6, 2014).

In other words, what we typically understand to be a fundamentally religious conflict in the Middle East may, at its root, have relatively little to do with religion. And that, if true, has major ramifications for — among many other things — the way in which the United States and the West should conduct their foreign policy in and about the region. “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble,” Will Rogers once quipped, “it’s what we know that ain’t so.”