On Fri, 2002-10-04 at 10:14, Jimmy Wales wrote:
On the other hand, stepping a bit more into the controversy than I like, I would say that most Americans are puzzled about the differences between Palestinians and other people with grievances around the world. Why didn't we see suicide bombings and terror campaigns by the victims of South African apartheid? Why didn't we see suicide bombing campaigns by Jews in WWII Germany? Why didn't we see suicide bombings against British rule in India?
(To jump into an off-topic debate, sorry...)
Just like to say - at first this seems an interesting point, but I think it's a bit misleading. The answer to the question Jimmy asks, in my opinion, is Islam ideology, which makes suicide bombing a good deal more attractive than most others I can think of right now.
However...the implications of the question he asks are nasty, and to do with the incorrect demonisation of suicide bombing. Sure, it's a thoroughly nasty thing to do, but in effect it's just one way of murdering people, often innocent people, and there's a hell of a lot more than one way to do that. And many of the other ways were used in all the conflicts Jimmy mentions above. The anti-apartheid campaign was frequently murderous and brutal on both sides; South African blacks may not have strapped bombs to themselves and blown people up, but they sure killed people. As, of course, did South African whites. Jews in WWII Germany were so absolutely and utterly powerless that they literally had *no possible way* to instigate any kind of significant retaliation, violent or otherwise, against their oppressors; had it been possible, i'm sure they would have done. And again there were no suicide bombings (as far as i'm aware, anyway) in the Indian struggle for independence, but there was certainly a hell of a lot of murder. Hindis killed Muslims, Muslims killed Hindis, Hindis and Muslims both killed English, and the English killed everyone else. A hell of a lot more people died during Partition than have died (or probably ever will) during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Suicide bombing is undeniably nasty, and has a strong impact on the Western psyche because it's completely foreign to it, but in the final analysis, someone who's been murdered is just as dead no matter how it happened. So I don't think focussing on the method is particularly profitable. Suicide bombing is one of very few effective strategies of murder available to Palestinians inclined to it, and one that their particular ideology supports, therefore it gets used; I don't see anything intrinsically *more* evil about it than, say, just getting a bunch of explosive and blowing the hell out of somewhere, a time-honoured tactic of all sides in all armed conflicts since the invention of explosives...in the end, it's just a different method of transport.
My $0.02. I hope this isn't too inflammatory, if you consider it so and want to respond, please do so off-list to keep the temperature down...I also hope it maybe has something of use to these particular articles, but I'm probably wrong. :)