Suicide Terrorism, part two: why the left-wing theories are wrong
Novermber 9, 2003
 
I once received a letter from a Santa Barbara activist who reacted angrily to my assertion that she was excusing Palestinian violence: “I am not ‘excusing’ violence,” she protested, “but I am saying occupation produces desperation and desperation breeds hopelessness and a sense of impotence and impotence produces violence.”  Her thinking runs like this: “How could terrorists be willing to commit such acts things if they weren't first compelled by some kind of oppressive injustice?” To her, terrorism is understood as an effect that must have its cause, a response that must be responding to something – all as if in proper observance of Newton's Third Law. In this way, Palestinian violence becomes natural, inevitable, expected, and perhaps, proper. This is the radical pc perception of terrorism, often blending into Third World liberation theology and French post-modernism that derive from the works of Fanon, Sartre, Foucault and Chomsky.
 
Robert A. Pape’s article from Friday challenges all this. Au contraire, he argues: suicide terrorism is a calculated strategic decision, taken precisely because it works. This flies squarely in the face of left-wing and pc-radical theorizing about terrorism being the normal and reflexive reaction to oppression. The Santa Barbara activist’s explanation is incomplete because it doesn't account for the fact the Palestinian behavior is directed on a daily basis by leaders who, just like Israeli leaders, make calculated tactical decisions. Yasir Arafat believed that he could bludgeon Israel into making concessions following his 2000 Camp David walkout and that is why he pays for suicide bombings.
 
Suicide terrorism is not anger management: if all it took to create a suicide bomber were rage and resentment, what need would there be for religious incentives like olive-eyed virgins and paradise, societal incentives like honor and fame, and millions for apartments and pay-off checks for the bombers’ families? If all Palestinians are oppressed, and oppression produces terrorism, should terrorism be expected from all Palestinians? Does every Palestinian have a suicide bomb under their bed, ready for that one checkpoint too many before they strap it on? 
 
Of course not – the creation of a suicide bomber is a complex process, beginning with recruitment and fundraising, nurtured by cultural indoctrination, and necessitating surveillance, planning, operational support, bomb manufacture and post-operation publicity. It receives active direction from terrorists, that is, those people who spend their days making terrorism a reality, who are unbound by the moral norms that govern a good deal of humanity. 
 
The left-wing explanation of terrorism as response to oppression is why, the intellectual Paul Berman observed his book Terror and Liberalism, outcries of support for Palestinian violence have risen, not fallen, with the frequency of suicide bombings since the Second Intifada began in September 2000. More suicide bombings must mean the existence of more oppression top have triggered it. There are real problems to this: surely oppression is not exclusive to the Palestinians, yet no group has really responded like this. Doesn't its very uniqueness suggest that there is something about the Palestinian campaign of suicide terrorism that is abnormal?  Well yes, if you believe that it is abnormal to strap razor blades and rusty nails and send them ripping through crowds of the blameless in malls, restaurants, discos, buses, parks and ice cream parlors. Or that it is inhuman that a killer's last thought is a satisfying anticipation of hero-status and sumptuous paradisiacal rewards. Or that it is perverse that the murdering Israelis is how competing Palestinian factions pander for popular support.
 
The pathological nature of suicide bombing is precisely what Pape ignores.  Far from being just an issue of cold-blooded calculation, poisoned minds are at work here. Barbarous suicide culture is surely abhorrent, yet it is not without parallel. Doesn’t the last century provides ample evidence that dangerous mass pathological movements do exist, shot through with manipulated religious traditions, wellsprings of deep grudge, resentment and perceived humiliation, and romanticized cults of blood and suicide-murder that glorify death and martyrdom?  They have seized populations in the way it now does parts of Palestinian society, where they name soccer stadiums after mass-murderers and teach kids songs about the joy of spilling Jewish blood.   
 
Robert Pape’s explanation – like the activist’s – is inadequate, for when faith in violence becomes internalized, it more than strategy. People do terrible things to each other outside the realm of reasoned or strategic behavior.  Human behavior is not explained by action-reaction Newtonian mechanics. In presuming that in order to do horrible things, horrible things must first be done to you, the Santa Barbara activists imposes a logic of rational response to actions that aren’t necessarily rational. She is right that she does not excuse violence. Instead, she struggles to find the reason or justice in willed slaughter, which she thinks must lie at the bottom of Palestinian behavior. 
 
An alternative theory, informed by not a few historical exempla, holds that hatred produces violence.  The chain reaction of emotions that activist described – desperation, hopelessness, impotence – ending in terror, is awkward, because explanation is a rational act that always encounters difficulty in finding the reasonableness in hatred, which is irrational. In the words of NYU professor Susan Linfield, the attempt at rationalizing sadistic terrorism, “conflates victims and perpetrators. It confuses just war and terror, politics and mass murder, states and civilians. It insists that crime in a punishment.” Both Israelis and moderate Palestinian have by now concluded that Palestinian “resistance” is an indisputably destructive force for the hopes of Israelis and Palestinians alike – negotiations would surely be better.
 
On August 19, 2003, a Palestinian terrorist detonated a ball-bearing-packed explosive on a crowded bus, cutting short the lives of eighteen and wounding one hundred. In a prerecorded statement, the bomber said, “We are proud to offer ourselves and our lives and our houses as a present to this religion.” That night, more explosions, as fireworks illuminated the Hebron sky whilst Palestinians celebrated the evening's slaughter in its streets below. Expressing pride in atrocity is one hint of deep hatred, the kind that can only be taught. 
 
We must believe that ill treatment cannot be allowed to permit a complete abandonment of all civilized norms. In the end, the bizarre theory of terror as just retribution for oppression is deceitful because it is self-justifying. And it is self-justifying because is it always true: terrorism, by its very existence, serves as proof that horrible oppression first existed to provoke it. It is also repugnant, because it blames the victims, locating terrorism's origins in the victim’s behavior, not in that of the terrorists. The end result of rationalizing terrorism as a response to oppression is justification. And justification leads to toleration, which leads to acceptance, and ultimately, even if unwittingly or unintended, encouragement.

Read Bruce's Hoffman's piece, "The Logic of Suicide Terrorism," in The Atlantic Monthly.