Blowing One's Self Up: Less Jihad, More Git Off My Lawn

As Harry Shearer says, the cure for the rhetorical is the empirical.

A University of Chicago professor actually researches, looking for facts about things, and writing about the facts that he found out when he researched his subject, and then he checked them and asked what other people thought, and then he changed what he originally thought based on the facts he discovered.

Strange, I know. Alert the media.

The subject was: suicide bombers. He looked at their videos, their backgrounds, their history.

Researching my book, which covered all 462 suicide bombings around the globe, I had colleagues scour Lebanese sources to collect martyr videos, pictures and testimonials and biographies of the Hizbollah bombers. Of the 41, we identified the names, birth places and other personal data for 38. We were shocked to find that only eight were Islamic fundamentalists; 27 were from leftist political groups such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union; three were Christians, including a female secondary school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon.

The shocking conclusion: not all suicide bombers in the Levant* were Muslims, or even religious.
Jihad was less important than opposition to invasion of what was perceived as home territory: in other words, more political than religious.*

*I just like that old term for the general area: Sinai, Israel, Lebanon, Syria. As a friend pointed out when she spent a few months on a kibbutz, the big difference you notice between Israeli and Arabs is that the Israeli fallafel stands are a little more professional and clean, but the food is better at the Arabic fallafel stands. Is the whole bloody history caused by disagreements over fallafel presentation? I'd like to think so, because that sounds like a solvable problem, and the illusion of a solvable problem is beloved among us Americans.

*An important distinction, particularly in sorting out what exactly is the motivation, but to an agnostic like myself, religion essentially is politics.