A long time back, someone insisted to me that the majority of terrorists in the world are Muslim. This didn’t strike me as a plausible statement. Couldn’t you make the argument that many of the nationalist militias in Africa are terrorist organizations? What about the organizations in South America that are classified terrorists by the U.S.? And the Jewish orgs in Palestine? I’m far from expert but it didn’t seem true. To me it seemed, if anything, this classification of terrorism = Muslim was a problem of definitions and western propaganda.
Nevertheless, until I asked Chris Clarke, he of radical activism, I had never been able to find any evidence to the contrary. He pointed me toward this rather illuminating article: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
The terrorists are often quite proud of what they do in their local communities, and they produce albums and all kinds of other information that can be very helpful to understand suicide-terrorist attacks. This wealth of information creates a new picture about what is motivating suicide terrorism. Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
Incidentally, the Tamil Tigers have a badass logo that belongs on a hooded sweatshirt. Cafepress, anyone?
The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.
In other words, terrorism is more a reaction to perceived or real occupation than it is a pointedly malicious or religiously-motivated force. To wit:
Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us…
…The evidence shows that the presence of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism.
If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people—three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia—with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran.
Sudan is a country of 21 million people. Its government is extremely Islamic fundamentalist. The ideology of Sudan was so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in the 1990s. Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan.
I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990.
Another point in this regard is Iraq itself. Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history. Never. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled.
Robert Pape, the man interviewed in this article and the author of Dying to Win : The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, believes that the persistence of suicide terrorism will continue to endure as long as the American military plunks thousands of troops on their shorelines and orders them to make the occupied bend to their will. Religion factors into the picture, Paper says, primarily when the occupying force is of a different religion than the state it occupies.
I not only study the patterns of where suicide terrorism has occurred but also where it hasn’t occurred. Not every foreign occupation has produced suicide terrorism. Why do some and not others? Here is where religion matters, but not quite in the way most people think. In virtually every instance where an occupation has produced a suicide-terrorist campaign, there has been a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied community. That is true not only in places such as Lebanon and in Iraq today but also in Sri Lanka, where it is the Sinhala Buddhists who are having a dispute with the Hindu Tamils.
When there is a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied, that enables terrorist leaders to demonize the occupier in especially vicious ways. Now, that still requires the occupier to be there. Absent the presence of foreign troops, Osama bin Laden could make his arguments but there wouldn’t be much reality behind them. The reason that it is so difficult for us to dispute those arguments is because we really do have tens of thousands of combat soldiers sitting on the Arabian Peninsula.
In any case, Chris also pointed me to a list of U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, many of which are Muslim and many of which are not. Between the numbers of FARC members, the anti-FARC group AUC, and the Tamil Tigers, among the other non-Muslim terrorist groups on that list, it is safe to say that terrorism is not a factor of Islam and said neocon who befuddled me with the original statement can stuff it.
What one can say is that the majority of active terrorist organizations in the world are considered communist in nature, but communist does not a Muslim make. No, indeed.
How wrong is this? I just read that entire thing but can’t remember any of it because omjeezus that chick is hot!
Vivas las chicas.
In the book I just finished, Unspeak, the author argues that terrorism is too poorly defined to be much use as a term. In the strictest sense, terrorism is the act of attacking civilians in order to terrorize a population and achieve a political goal. Most people would agree with this definition, right? Well, if you think about it, then, the largest single act of terrorism in history was the bombing of Hiroshima. Which worked, by the way.
It’s also worth noting that the term “shock and awe” specifically noted what a terrorist goal looks like.
suicide bombings have mainly been used by stalinist/revolutionary marxist groups historically, the viet minh used suicide bombs very effectively and far eastern stalinist groups were the primary users of suicide bombings before 9/11, muslim suicide bombings only really began occurring after the intifada started in the mid-90′s, and even then there was only a few per year. Of course after 9/11, every muslim terrorist groups is in on the act, like flared jeans or something, it’s fashionable, in no small part due to every single government in the middle east suppressing the pacifist movements, like the civil jihadists in palestine, while giving the violent types just enough leeway to grow and provide an eternal war for the governments to fight against.
One thing that fascinates me for some reason is that the first muslim suicide bomber in the middle east (syrian socialist terrorist bizarrely enough, not an islamist type) was female.
There a really really interesting PDF on the internets somewhere about islamism (which is one of the many terms for the islamic facist philosophy organisations like AQ and HAMAS use) and suicide bombings, written by some civil jihadist group, I think Veiled4Allah had it a year or so ago, but her site seems to be down or offline or something, so I’m having trouble finding it atm.
[...] Yesterday, McBoing’s post illuminated the self-defeating circular logic of the occupation-happy global war on terror. Just being there is bad enough; how many more mortal enemies do we make every time a US soldier misdirects his rage and shoots an innocent? [...]
In the strictest sense, terrorism is the act of attacking civilians in order to terrorize a population and achieve a political goal. Most people would agree with this definition, right?
Close, but no cigar. I would prefer to define it as “methods of asymmetric warfare, carried out by nonstate actors against civilian populations; often taking the form of non-Clausewitzean acts of self-expression as destructive to the attacker as they are to the target.”
Also, I can’t believe Pape really thinks that this is the case:
The reason that it is so difficult for us to dispute those arguments is because we really do have tens of thousands of combat soldiers sitting on the Arabian Peninsula.
Of course, by his logic, we are also occupying Japan, South Korea, Iceland and Germany, and should expect to see a crop of similar homegrown terrorists. The “occupying” troops in Saudi are there by invitation of Osama’s relatives, acting in their authority as the reigning govenment. That bin Laden &co. sees these troops (merely by their presence) as an occupying force says a lot about their 7th-century understanding of how Islam works. Pape is smart enough to know better.
Of course, by his logic, we are also occupying Japan, South Korea, Iceland and Germany, and should expect to see a crop of similar homegrown terrorists.
Japan, South Korea, Iceland and Germany are democracies and indisputably NOT pawns of the United States. The US troops there are (now) there as allies, and not seen by the vast majority of the population as occupiers.
he “occupying” troops in Saudi are there by invitation of Osama’s relatives, acting in their authority as the reigning govenment.
ANd the Saudi government is not a democracy, is not necessarily seen by many Saudis as legitimate, and the US troops were considered occupiers. Which is why the US shifted them.
[...] Ben also makes the common mistake of assuming that terrorism and Islam are inextricably interwined. Islam does not create, breed, promote or foster terrorism. Terrorism is a product of feelings of anger, displacement, and powerlessness. It is reactionary, and, as McBoing points out in a fantastic post, certainly not confined to Islamic communities. [...]
I’m curious as to why you limited yourself to suicide as a terror tactic, when small-scale bombings have been used for years and other terror tactics have been used for centuries.
The Sons of Liberty were considered a terrorist group in their day, though tell people that now and they get all huffy that you’re lumping in our national heroes with Al Qaeda. But the point is just that terror is a tactic, used by weaker groups against stronger groups.
And seriously. Terror as the exclusive province of Muslims? Tell that to the IRA.