mick silver
11th September 2011, 07:46 PM
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/in-the-mind-of-a-suicide-killer/story-e6frgcjx-1226134719909 ... SUICIDE bombers do it out of altruism, not because they're religious fanatics or plain unhinged, according to academic Riaz Hassan.
Professor Hassan has marked the 10th anniversary of the New York terror attacks with an article (http://theconversation.edu.au/9-11-why-suicide-bombers-blow-themselves-up-3256) saying altruism is the surprise factor in suicide bombing and its causes.
"Altruistic suicides involve believing one's life is less worthy than the group's honour, religion, or some other collective interest,'' he writes on The Conversation website.
An emeritus professor (http://www.riazhassan.com/) at Flinders University, he argues that in hot spots such as Iraq and Sri Lanka, suicide bombers sacrificed themselves for group aims that were essentially political.
In economic terms, these attacks also can be seen "as an extreme form of saving in which the agent gives up current consumption for the sake of enhancing the probability of their descendants enjoying the benefit of the future public good''.
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9/11 remembered (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/remembered/story-e6frgcjx-1226132132632)
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He says his study of 1597 suicide attacks "undermines this common perception that the psychopathology of suicide bombers and their religious beliefs are the principal causes''.
Australia's anti-terror laws had stopped him from talking to failed suicide bombers and his research drew on sources such as published material, including media reports, as well as intelligence and videos from counter-terrorism agencies.
Counter-terror expert Clive Williams, from the Australian National University, acknowledged that some Muslims did see martyrdom as a way to provide for their families, who were looked after.
But Professor Williams believed most Muslim suicide bombers had been "brainwashed over many years to see a personal benefit for themselves in a fast track to heaven and privileged treatment there.
"Few thinking persons would give up their lives for a cause if they had no belief in an afterlife.''
Professor Hassan said the story of the 72 virgins supposedly awaiting Muslim martyrs was the first reaction from the audience last year after he had explained his research at a federal parliamentary briefing.
The lure of paradise might be used to recruit and motivate suicide bombers but these groups were fighting for political ends, such as freedom for their homeland, he told the HES.
He pointed out that the group Hezbollah, modern pioneers of suicide bombing, included several Syrian socialists.
"Suicide bombing is a strategy followed by a weaker party in an asymmetrical conflict,'' he said.
"It invariably follows state-sanctioned violence against the weaker party.''
He likened suicide bombings to the altruism shown by a solder who risks his life for his comrades. Death in those circumstances was celebrated as heroism but other kinds of death, including suicide bombing and euthansaia, were "stigmatised''.
Professor Hassan said the common feature of a stigmatised way of death was that the individual, not the state, had control over the timing and manner of death.
Professor Williams doubted the parallel between suicide-bombing and battlefield heroism.
"Time is also an important factor. It seems to me that a delayed [pre-meditated] suicide bombing engages a different mindset to a spontaneous life-threatening act to save a comrade or loved one,'' he said.
Professor Hassan acknowledged that his argument -- elaborated in a 2010 book Life as a Weapon and its popularised 2011 version Suicide Bombings -- trod on contentious territory.
"I would hope that it confronts people to examine their own thoughts and ideas,'' he said.
In a review of Life as a Weapon, a Yale University academic, Ivan Szelenyi, professor of sociology and political science, said: "This is a marvelous book by an extraordinary and courageous scholar. Throughout Life as a Weapon Professor Hassan challenges a number of taboos and if his data lead him that way he is ready to take politically incorrect positions.''
The writer Christopher Hitchens has dismissed the attempt to find a spurious complexity in the terror attacks of 2011 in an article for Slate magazine headed "Simply Evil''.
"The proper task of the `public intellectual' might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem,'' he writes.
"But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either.
"To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and `unbelievers,' and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.''
Two comments on Professor Hassan's web article suggest anyone looking for the cause of Muslim suicide bombing should consider the unhealthy segregation of the sexes.
"They are literally exploding with sexual frustration,'' one says.
Professor Hassan has marked the 10th anniversary of the New York terror attacks with an article (http://theconversation.edu.au/9-11-why-suicide-bombers-blow-themselves-up-3256) saying altruism is the surprise factor in suicide bombing and its causes.
"Altruistic suicides involve believing one's life is less worthy than the group's honour, religion, or some other collective interest,'' he writes on The Conversation website.
An emeritus professor (http://www.riazhassan.com/) at Flinders University, he argues that in hot spots such as Iraq and Sri Lanka, suicide bombers sacrificed themselves for group aims that were essentially political.
In economic terms, these attacks also can be seen "as an extreme form of saving in which the agent gives up current consumption for the sake of enhancing the probability of their descendants enjoying the benefit of the future public good''.
Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar. (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/in-the-mind-of-a-suicide-killer/story-e6frgcjx-1226134719909#sidebar-end)
Related Coverage
9/11 remembered (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/remembered/story-e6frgcjx-1226132132632)
End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar. (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/in-the-mind-of-a-suicide-killer/story-e6frgcjx-1226134719909#sidebar-start)
He says his study of 1597 suicide attacks "undermines this common perception that the psychopathology of suicide bombers and their religious beliefs are the principal causes''.
Australia's anti-terror laws had stopped him from talking to failed suicide bombers and his research drew on sources such as published material, including media reports, as well as intelligence and videos from counter-terrorism agencies.
Counter-terror expert Clive Williams, from the Australian National University, acknowledged that some Muslims did see martyrdom as a way to provide for their families, who were looked after.
But Professor Williams believed most Muslim suicide bombers had been "brainwashed over many years to see a personal benefit for themselves in a fast track to heaven and privileged treatment there.
"Few thinking persons would give up their lives for a cause if they had no belief in an afterlife.''
Professor Hassan said the story of the 72 virgins supposedly awaiting Muslim martyrs was the first reaction from the audience last year after he had explained his research at a federal parliamentary briefing.
The lure of paradise might be used to recruit and motivate suicide bombers but these groups were fighting for political ends, such as freedom for their homeland, he told the HES.
He pointed out that the group Hezbollah, modern pioneers of suicide bombing, included several Syrian socialists.
"Suicide bombing is a strategy followed by a weaker party in an asymmetrical conflict,'' he said.
"It invariably follows state-sanctioned violence against the weaker party.''
He likened suicide bombings to the altruism shown by a solder who risks his life for his comrades. Death in those circumstances was celebrated as heroism but other kinds of death, including suicide bombing and euthansaia, were "stigmatised''.
Professor Hassan said the common feature of a stigmatised way of death was that the individual, not the state, had control over the timing and manner of death.
Professor Williams doubted the parallel between suicide-bombing and battlefield heroism.
"Time is also an important factor. It seems to me that a delayed [pre-meditated] suicide bombing engages a different mindset to a spontaneous life-threatening act to save a comrade or loved one,'' he said.
Professor Hassan acknowledged that his argument -- elaborated in a 2010 book Life as a Weapon and its popularised 2011 version Suicide Bombings -- trod on contentious territory.
"I would hope that it confronts people to examine their own thoughts and ideas,'' he said.
In a review of Life as a Weapon, a Yale University academic, Ivan Szelenyi, professor of sociology and political science, said: "This is a marvelous book by an extraordinary and courageous scholar. Throughout Life as a Weapon Professor Hassan challenges a number of taboos and if his data lead him that way he is ready to take politically incorrect positions.''
The writer Christopher Hitchens has dismissed the attempt to find a spurious complexity in the terror attacks of 2011 in an article for Slate magazine headed "Simply Evil''.
"The proper task of the `public intellectual' might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem,'' he writes.
"But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either.
"To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and `unbelievers,' and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.''
Two comments on Professor Hassan's web article suggest anyone looking for the cause of Muslim suicide bombing should consider the unhealthy segregation of the sexes.
"They are literally exploding with sexual frustration,'' one says.