Vol. 2 No. 4 – February 5, 2007

Download

The poor man’s smart bombs

BAGHDAD, Sunday, Feb. 4 — A mammoth truck bomb obliterated a popular central Baghdad market on Saturday, ripping through scores of shops and flattening apartment buildings, killing at least 130 people and wounding more than 300 in the worst of a series of horrific attacks against Shiites in recent weeks.

An injured man was lifted onto a bed at a Baghdad hospital Saturday. The huge bomb struck shoppers in the largely Shiite enclave of Sadriya.

The attack was the work of a suicide bomber who detonated about one ton of explosives in the bustling Sadriya market, in a largely Shiite enclave at 5 p.m., as shoppers finished buying food for dinner and men sipped coffee at cafes nearby, the police said. It was the deadliest single bomb blast since the United States invasion almost four years ago.

The New York Times, At Least 130 Die as Blast Levels Baghdad Market , February 4, 2007

The attack was the work of a suicide bomber…

The suicide bombing phenomenon is the direct result of teaching children the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end, that life somehow continues after death, that a better life awaits the just in some god.

I am fagged out by the claim of religion’s apologists that 9/11, Gujarat, Beslan, Hai al-Amaal, to mention but a few recent examples of religious atrocity, are simply about power. Religion is not to blame, the vindicators hold – religion is good and just and salutary. Religion, so the whining goes, is merely exploited by unscrupulous political charlatans seeking personal power and wealth. I, for one, am delighted to learn that the problem is so mundane and trivial. This problem should be easily remedied. Simply destroy the hold these mountebanks hold over hapless, over credulous, naïve believers – ensure that the dullards are not exposed to exploitative religion abused to subjugate them.

It is elementary, my dear wowser: Had children of Islamic parents not been exposed to religious instruction, no measure of political messianism will have succeeded, and continue to succeed, in producing a line of extremist would-be suicide bombers beating down the door for the privilege to be detonated, for that passport to paradise with its concupiscence and its spizzerinctum – It’s religion, stupid![1] Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.[2]

I know the research and the arguments… One of the worlds foremost authorities on the subject, Robert Pape[3] has created the first comprehensive database of every suicide terrorist attack in the world from 1980 until today. With striking clarity and precision, Pape uses this unprecedented research to debunk widely held misconceptions about the nature of suicide terrorism and provide a new lens that makes sense of the threat we face. (See box.)

Is suicide bombing now “debunked”? Reflects Michael Radu, a specialist in international terrorist groups and Co-chairman of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Counter- terrorism, and Homeland Security, offers this view: “But with the exception of the LTTE’s [Sri Lankan Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam-LTTE, Marxists/ Hindus/ Tamil secessionists] acts, all other [suicide] terrorist acts were committed by Muslims, and of those, all except those by the PKK/Kadek in Turkey and Arafat’s Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were committed by members of openly Islamist groups. The LTTE/PKK cases led some to dismiss the role of religion in the motivation of suicide terrorists, but on further analysis, the exception indeed proves the rule.”[4]

In July 2006, Al Qaeda released a recruitment video, encouraging Muslims to carry out new attacks similar to the July 7 bombings in London last year. Pape notes that the video is stunning in its absence of religious declamation.[5]

Also in July 2006, Robert Whalley, Former UK Home Office Director for Counter-Terrorism and Intelligence, chaired a meeting on suicide bombings where this perspicacious remark was made by Dr Samuel Grier, Dean, NATO Defense College, “Those most vulnerable for recruitment into the on-going suicide bombing epidemic were immature young people, those with psychological dysfunction, and those that had been coerced to join the fight. Islam played a role here, but only in the way it had been instrumentalised by extremist leaders to exploit the vulnerable.”[6]

Discussant Jonathan Paris, of St Antony’s College, stressed, at the same forum, that suicide bombings were not the result of socio-economic conditions or social exclusion. He believed that the root of the problem lay with the persuaders, the key leaders and often charismatic recruiters. The key to Muslim radicalisation, he said, could be found in the teachings of the Imams.

Sam Harris recalls a Palestinian suicide bomber who said that what drove him to kill Israelis was “the love of martyrdom… I didn’t want revenge for anything. I just wanted to be a martyr.”[7]

Nasra Hassan, Director, United Nations Information Service and Spokesperson United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, started her research on suicide bombings because she found it impossible, as a Muslim, to understand why people chose to blow themselves up in the name of Islam. Her work had therefore focused on suicide bombings by Muslims and she had, by July 2006, built up a database of approximately 400 Muslim suicide bomber profiles. Her research suggests that as a suicide bomber required a sponsoring group, such groups required a sponsoring community and a belief system that sustained them.[8]

Hassan eloquently describes the religious dynamic of the “Human Bomb” phenomenon when she recalls video footage of a planner kneeling with two young men and all placing their hands on a copy of the Koran. Then the planner says: “Are you ready? Tomorrow, you will be in Paradise.”[9]

In The End of Faith, Harris objects to all brands of the religious product. “Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not,” he notes. ”And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted.”[10]

Harris encourages us to think of communism and fascism as religion-like cults, making the case that intolerance is the sine qua non of every authoritarian regime. We should deplore the religious fanaticism of suicide bombers and the secular totalitarians equally.[11]

The absurd folderol that death is not the end of human life, but rather the beginning of some supreme life, especially a life supersaturated with unbridled sex and gross opulence, lies at the very base of the suicide bombing phenomenon. This… religion, this pernicious bane, this pestilent destructive force, this grotesque parody of thought, this egregious abuse of intelligence that is Islam, is at the back of the suicide bombing phenomenon.

72 virgins. A guerdon for flagitious male[12] deeds of terror.

72 virgins. Wide-eyed and bushy-tailed. Chaste as hidden pearls. Each sufficiently uninitiated in sexual enjoyment to accept her master’s every effort in subservient worship, “O, most honorable, most profound, most proficient, most practiced, most skilful, most virtuous stud.”[13]

The Prophet Muhammad, beguiled by the indefatigable Gabriel’s intermittent revelations, was apparently heard saying: “The smallest reward for the people of paradise is an abode where there are 80,000 servants and 72 wives, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine, and ruby, as wide as the distance from Al-Jabiyyah (a Damascus suburb) to Sana'a (Yemen).”[14]

Islam knows full well, as do automobile manufacturers and makers of yogurt, that you’ve got ‘em for life if you promise ‘em sex – lots of it, and varied. Promise testosterone enriched teenagers an eternity in the embrace of 72 subservient wenches and they will, as a sea of blood and a mountain of body parts grimly bear witness, gladly blow themselves and unsuspecting passersby to smithereens, hard-on at the ready.

The specific Islam mutation of the nefarious religion virus is peculiarly annihilative in its own uniquely destructive way. Islam represents sui generis turpitude and indeed escapes exoteric aspersion only by being none more ridiculous and ruinous than analogous anserine beliefs – Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism or whatever ism it is whomever happens to believe is provoked of some ideogenous deity at any given point in time. Attrocities committed under the aegis of religion are well documented and no less abhorrent than Hai al-Amaal. Yet among the emphatically purblind idiotologies (sic) masquerading as belief systems, Islam, by reason of its particular martyrdom mandate, is a decidedly obtuse variant. Insufficient words and phrases exist to define this hubristic disgrace, this ridiculous nonsense impertinently presumptive of creed.

This damning charge against Islam is exacerbated by recent scholarly opinion that the sexual debauchery awaiting cathected martyrs in the Muslim hereafter, the unconditional copulation promised to the faithful, may be a false claim after all! Syriac words substituted for the Arabic, indicate that the amative maidens may mean nothing more than "white raisins" of "crystal clarity". It may well be that the context dictates that food and drink is being promised, and not unsullied maidens! It may well be that millions of people have been killed over the centuries so that the martyrs can enjoy “chilled raisins” (or drinks) in Paradise while the unfaithful and damned infidels have boiling drinks elsewhere.[15]

I can hear it already – the voices of the apologetics wailing in unison, “This is not what Islam is about; suicide is forbidden in Islam!”

Yeah. Right. This is not what Islam is about… but this is what happens in Islam’s milieu. Just about exclusively.

Now, before Christians recline on the soft platitude “we are certainly not like that”, let me hasten to add that shipping Billy-Ray from the shores of the Mississippi to the back streets of Baghdad on a wing and a prayer ain’t much different to strapping some dynamite to the lad’s torso and handing him a detonator.

Any religion, meme, totemism, philosophy or je ne sais quois that propagates the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end should be rejected with contempt. Said Albert Camus, “If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”

To tolerate religion because it is not the exclusive vehicle of evil, identifies religion as a vessel of evil and denies us the opportunity to eliminate at least one known crucible of evil.[16]

The solution is an obvious one: Although we can hardly hope for a society in which formal organized religion is rejected, we can at least stop behaving as if religion is worthy of our collective respect.[17]

---

[1] See Nathan Bond, It’s religion, stupid, LitNet Religious Literature, January 22, 2004.

[2] Attributed to Blaise Pascal (1623-1662).

[3] Robert Pape. 2005. Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Random House.

[4] FRONTPAGEMAGAZINE.COM. October 9, 2003. Radical Islam and Suicide Bombers.

[5] Robert Pape. September 11, 2006. Chicago Tribune. 5 YEARS AFTER 9/11: The growth of suicide terrorism.

[6] Samuel Grier. July, 6, 2006. An IISS Forum in cooperation with the Wyndham Place Charlemagne Trust. (A discussion on suicide bombings held one day before the first anniversary of the July 7, 2005 terrorist attack in London that killed 56 people.)

[7] Richard Dawkins. 2006.The God Delusion. Bantam. London. 304-305.

[8] Nasra Hassan. July, 6, 2006. An IISS Forum in cooperation with the Wyndham Place Charlemagne Trust.

[9] Nasra Hassan. November 19, 2001. An Arsenal Of Believers: Talking to the "Human Bombs". The New Yorker.

[10] Susan Jacoby. September 12, 2004. A Review of The End of Faith. The Los Angeles Times.

[11] James McManus. October 31, 2004. A review of The End of Faith. The Chicago Tribune.

[12] Until Wafa Idris, then a 28-year-old Palestinian medical assistant, detonated herself on one of Jerusalem’s busiest streets, the privilege of exploding for Allah was a strictly male honour. But Islam is making grand strides towards gender equality – several Islamic Sheiks have confirmed that women are suitable candidates for explosive martyrdom… if, should the operation take longer than a day and a night, she is accompanied by a male relative.

[13] The eternal paradisial reward for female blow-ups remain uncertain at this time. Perpetual falling asleep in strong arms after long talks by candlelight suggests itself, but the sexuality of the “new Islamic woman” may be compromised by such timidity… a program of alternate gang-bangs and cunnilingus perhaps?

[14] From Hadith 2687, collected by Al-Tirmidhi (9^th century CE) and quoted in the Koranic commentary of Ibn Kathir (14^th century CE). Hadith is Arabic for Tradition and contain records of the Prophet’s attributed adages and actions.

[15] This interpretation is argued by Christoph Luxenberg in his 2001 book, Die Syro-Aramaische Lesart des Koran. (Cf. Ibn Warraq, Virgins? What virgins?, Special report: religion in the UK, The Guardian, January 12, 2002.)

[16] Nathan Bond. Ibid.

[17] With acknowledgement to A.N. Wilson, Against Religion.