If you want to understand what motivates suicide bombers, watch the recent movie “Downfall.” Based on eyewitness accounts, it chronicles the final days inside Hitler’s bunker. In a particularly harrowing scene, Joseph Goebbels and his wife are given the opportunity to have their six young children flee to safety. But Magda Goebbels refuses and instead drugs the kids to sleep. Then she inserts a cyanide capsule into each child’s mouth and presses the jaws until the capsule breaks. When explaining why she won’t allow her kids to escape, Mrs. Goebbels explains, “I can’t bear to think of them growing up in a world without national socialism.”
This is the power of ideology. Magda Goebbels had embraced a horrific world view that made her believe that murdering her children was a noble act.
Suicide bombing cannot be explained by poverty and disadvantage. The London bombers were not the wretched of the earth. They came from working-class but comfortable backgrounds, living in one of the world’s most prosperous countries. For all the talk of their being marginalized, none were living in hellish ghettos.
The rest is here
I’m sorry, but as much as we all like to talk about suicide bombers and some horribly misguided ideology, this article here:
http://amconmag.com/2005_07_18/article.html
… is still an eye-opener about what really motivates these nutballs. Worth reading.
that’s a very interesting article, that’s for sure. But I’m deferring judgment until I read what critics have to say about Prof. Pape’s work. I mean, aren’t most of the suicide bombers in Iraq from Saudi Arabia, where we no longer have troops?