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I’m not convinced by University of Chicago professor Robert Pape’s arguments, but his 2005 analysis (here summarised by Business Week’s Stan Crock) of suicide bomber stats remains extremely interesting:
Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist Hindu group opposed to religion, committed the largest number of suicide attacks, 76. The Kurdish PKK, which used the tactic 14 times, is headed by a secular Marxist-Leninist, Abdulah Ocalan. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another Marxist-Leninist group, and the al-Aqsa Brigade, which has ties to the socialist Fatah movement, account for a third of the attacks against Israel. Communist and socialist groups account for 75% of the attacks in Lebanon. Islamic fundamentalists, he concludes, were associated with about only half of the attacks from 1980 to 2003.
Only half! For the rest of the time we should be going after commies.
Does this mean Mohammed is not the problem?
What if we dig up Karl and Vlad (huge grin imagining the look on my commie mates face) and then set a fire in their bones to make sure there are no more bombers?
White Phosphorus, is there anyhting it cant do? Apart from put fires out that is…
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2006 10 31 at 11:01 AM • permalinkJust remeber Cass, ‘one shot, one kill’. We need to conserve our ammo in these globular warmenising times…
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2006 10 31 at 11:08 AM • permalinkCertainly the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) turned suicide bombing into a science. The LTTE are the undisputed masters of asymmetric warfare; the suicide strike tactics they developed have been aped by groups employing suicide bombing ever since. For example, the methodology used in the bombing of the USS Cole was so similar to tactics previously employed by the “Black Tigers” - the LTTE’s suicide division - that the operation was almost certainly a copy of several successful suicide strikes against the Sri Lankan navy.
The Tigers are still far and away the masters of the grisly art of suicide warfare. “Black Tiger” operatives are trained to an elite level, and are deployed rarely. They deal a devastating blow, however. Black Tigers were responsible for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, Indian President and a Sri Lankan Prime Minister, along with several other highly successful strikes against high value targets such as sensitive military bases, judges and (IIRC) the Sri Lankan central bank(?)
Quite frankly, (and I suppose we should be grateful for this fact) the Black Tigers put the Islamofascist splodeydopes to shame. The latter really aren’t good at anything, bar unquestioning obsequious piety. I remember a particularly good quote illustrating this:
Burning in fear??!!? Ha!! Not this Brit. With my upper lip fixed stiff, I hoot and mock these jihadis. Wankers one and all. I’d like to see ‘em on Celebrity Terrorist Island, the IRA’d make mincemeat of them.
Dead right.
Regarding Pape’s conclusions, every organisation bar the LTTE might be described as nominally socialist yet clearly derive an enormous chunk of their legitimacy (as well as justification of their methods) from a more - erm - strident interpretation of the Koran. Anyone who claims these organisations should be characterised as Marxist-Leninist movements is dissimulating.
Posted by James Waterton on 2006 10 31 at 11:23 AM • permalink#5, Murph, you seem to have forgotten to Praise the Lord before Passing the Ammo…
Question for our military guys (and gals if we’ve any), if you cut a cross into the front of the brass jacket in order to:
A: Cause the round to fragment sooner (preferably after impact),
B: Bring Christ to the heathens (at supersonic speeds),
C: Make damn sure they aint vampires or zombies (it pays to be safe).
Is that aginst the Geneva conventions?
(Assuming theinsurgentmurderous bastard has no uniform?)Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2006 10 31 at 11:24 AM • permalinkthat should have said “Black Tigers were responsible for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, Indian President, as well as a Sri Lankan Prime Minister…”
Rajiv Gandhi was not an Indian President and a Sri Lankan Prime Minister. He would have been very busy if he was.
Posted by James Waterton on 2006 10 31 at 11:27 AM • permalinkI’m with casanova. Send them all to God and let Him sort them out.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 10 31 at 11:32 AM • permalinkWhy would this be any surprise to anyone that’s been paying attention?
In ‘67, it became official Soviet policy to back any and all arab/muslim and otherwise “anti-western” terror groups.
Everything that’s been done by terror groups was taught by GRU or KGB murder specialists or those taught by them.
Suicide bombers have 3 main advantages.
1. Bombs are much less likely to be discovered prior to detonation.
2. No one to grab up after the bombing to interrogate.
3. The idea of someone purposely killing themselves in order to kill others has a unique fear factor for those from cultures that have developed a “sanitized” view of death and general mortality (i.e. the west).The only reason “suicide bombing” wasn’t more popular prior to the arabs is because it is a rare culture that can produce enough of a “recruiting pool” for that kind of thing.
In this instance, the retardation of arab culture plays into and makes possible this tactic on a much wider scale than previously experienced from other cultures.Suicide bombings aren’t unique to the arab. They are more common due to the higher population density within the arab culture of people stupid enough to be played into the role by their manipulators.
I remember reading way back in the early ‘80s about how it was expected that with the Soviet’s previous experience with suicide “soldiers” (convict battalions WW2 era, as an example) and their wide spread influence in the arab death cults that suicide type attacks would probably become the norm, eventually.
Pape’s book is a crock.
Pape claims to have closely examined all terrorist-suicide attacks between 1980 and 2003 ( 315 ). From his research he has claimed that nearly all the attacks were nationalist in motivation carried out to free land from “occupation” by democracies (that are susceptible to such attacks because of the power of public opinion). AQ and OBL are actually nationalist in motivation and at most use religion as a tool to demonise the “occupiers”. Moreover only about half the attacks were in any way remotely connected to Islam.
Pape has identified nine conflicts that have generated 13 separate campaigns by well organised groups to lift occupations, seven of which were successful. Five were ongoing at the end of the study according to Pape.
He has not included all suicide attacks despite his claim. In Nov 1997 a group of AQ trained terrorists from Al-Gama’s al Islamiya butchered 58 mainly Swiss and Japanese tourists and four Egyptians mainly using knives. They made no attempt to escape and were quickly killed when the Egyptian military arrived. He omits this. Why? Could it be that it defeats his proposition that only democracies were the targets of these attacks? He omits another 14 attacks claiming they were isolated bringing his study down to 301. But nearly all of these were carried out by Islamist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. He omits even the Bali attack by JI from the Islamist list. He also excludes all attacks in Iraq claiming the groups behind the attacks are “unknown”.
Pape categorises as Islam/Secular and therefore not associated with Islamist terrorism 92 attacks on Israel and counts 38 as Islamist But only a small minority of these attacks were carried out by Fatah group Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the only non-Islamist group and that was in competition with the Islamist groups.. Pape also does not count as Islamist 14 PKK attacks on Turkey and 19 Chechen attacks on Russia.
Excluded from Pape’s data are hundreds of foiled or intercepted attacks. Why? This is after all a study intended to throw light on motivation.
But perhaps the biggest distortion flows from Pape’s self imposed limitation of analysing only terrorist-suicide attacks. Again why? If Islamic Jihad sends gunmen to murder in cold blood a 34 year old eight months pregnant woman in front of her four daughters and then murder the four young girls and a week earlier sends a bomber to explode in a restaurant full of kids, why would you look at the latter and disregard the former when considering the motives of Islamic Jihad?
There have been thousands of such attacks.
And of course his study excludes everything that has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003.
No wonder his conclusions are spurious. Pape is yet to come up with anything worth listening to.
There are other cases which do not fit Pape’s finding that ALL suicide terrorist attacks in his timeframe were targetted at democracies as part of a discrete campaign aimed at ‘recovering’ territory perceived to be occupied by those democracies and that there is nothing especially “Islamist” about these attacks.
For example the same group responsible for the Luxor murders launched a suicide bomb attack on a police station in Croatia in October 1995. In November 1995 a suicide bomber from this group attacked the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan.
According to Jane’s Intelligence Review there have been 48 suicide attacks in Lebanon in the 20 years to 2001 carried out by Hizbollah and other pro-Syrian groups.
In Algeria there have been numerous suicide attacks carried out by the Islamists during the civil war. In January 1994 a suicide bomb attack carried out by Group Islamique Arm near the central police station in Algiers killed 42 people and injured 300.
Why on earth he excluded these from his count is something best asked of him. Also he plays a pretty silly statistical game. He counts “attacks” without allowing for the magnitude of the attack. Hence an AQ attack on New York City that kills three thousand people counts as “one”. A Tamil Tiger attack that kills only the killer counts as “one”. And from this he draws a conclusion that the Tigers use suicide-murder as a tactic as much as AQ.
Bunk.
Wait just a minute here. He’s talking about a “secular” group called the Al Aqsa Martyrs?
This is a group whose name includes the word “martyr”, and the name of a mosque.
Now, thinking hard here, do you suppose there might be any hint of religion in that? Just a hint? Take all the time you need!
The group has “ties” to a nominally socialist group whose leaders can’t say a word without mentioning religion, and that makes their members secular? Their mass murderers make pre-murder videotapes full of gibberish about Allah, martyrdom, the Koran, and heavenly virgins, and he sees no religion there?
This guy is wilfully lying to himself.
Posted by Don't Bogart that Midget, Comrade! on 2006 10 31 at 12:16 PM • permalink...or else he’s an idiot. That’s not an exclusive “or”, obviously.
Posted by Don't Bogart that Midget, Comrade! on 2006 10 31 at 12:17 PM • permalinkThank you, Geoff, for facts and reason.
Posted by Harry Bergeron on 2006 10 31 at 12:18 PM • permalink#12,James your a twit, pay more attention in your english classes at school my boy.
If it meant what you choose to interpret it as, it would have been written:
“Black Tigers were responsible for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, Indian President and Sri Lankan Prime Minister.”
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2006 10 31 at 12:34 PM • permalinkThe Tamil Tigers are not a Marxist-Leninist Hindu group, they are Tamil Nationalists with a Marxist-Leninist bent.
The Tigers enjoy as much support from Tamil Christians and Atheists as they do from Hindus.
While the majority of Tamils are Hindu and the majority of Singhalese are Buddhist, the war in Sri Lanka is primarily an ethnic/cultural struggle, not a religious one.
Marxism/Leninism is important only in that the Tigers see their struggle as one against what they view as Singhalese imperialism.
Pape has no idea.
#22, 23 - I’ve no idea what you’re on about.
#24 - A sensible decision.
Posted by James Waterton on 2006 10 31 at 01:17 PM • permalinkI think both Pape and Crock are wrong to conclude that radical Islamism plays no part in terrorist acts carried out by Muslims. It would be interesting, however, to pop into an alternate universe where the Middle East had been left to its own devices (no history of western control or interference, no foreign troops on Muslim soil, no state of Israel) to test their assumptions. And I’d be most interested to see how our alternate selves dealt over the years with the whole oil thing.
Crock, who finds Pape’s argument “wholly convincing” says: He’s the first to collect these data, so it’s no surprise that Washington was operating on the blithe assumption that the suicide terrorists were all poor, young Islamic radicals. I don’t believe that Washington has ever operated on the assumption, blithe or otherwise, that all suicide terrorists are young and poor. Quite the contrary. They are, however, Islamic and radical. There’s no denying that even if there is an argument to be made about “root causes”. Oh, and why is Pape the first to collect these data? Seems to me analyses like these are what we pay the CIA (et al) to do.
And I love this:
Pape isn’t an isolationist. He suggests that long-term, America should revert to the strategy of the 1970s and 1980s, when the U.S. relied on local regimes but had forces ready to jump when needed—but not constantly on the ground, poisoning the atmosphere with their presence on land.
Oh yes, the left and the Democrats just loved our policy of propping up local fascist regimes in order to halt (or slow) the advance of Communism. They were wild about CIA assassination teams and “death squads” and the injection of American troops and fully supported those actions. Yeah right. (Truth be told, I didn’t like all that stuff either, but what was the alternative?) Perhaps he doesn’t recall presidents like Jimmy Carter who was all about accommodation and demanded that the “local regime” (the Shah) abdicate its power as a matter of “human rights”. And, how, I wonder, would Pape have handled Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait? That required a good deal more than just some “some forces ready to jump when needed”.
Somehow I fee that people like Pape (and Crock) just don’t live in the real world.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 10 31 at 01:21 PM • permalinkI think both Pape and Crock are wrong to conclude that radical Islamism plays no part in terrorist acts carried out by Muslims. It would be interesting, however, to pop into an alternate universe where the Middle East had been left to its own devices (no history of western control or interference, no foreign troops on Muslim soil, no state of Israel) to test their assumptions. And I’d be most interested to see how our alternate selves dealt over the years with the whole oil thing.
Crock, who finds Pape’s argument “wholly convincing” says: He’s the first to collect these data, so it’s no surprise that Washington was operating on the blithe assumption that the suicide terrorists were all poor, young Islamic radicals. I don’t believe that Washington has ever operated on the assumption, blithe or otherwise, that all suicide terrorists are young and poor. Quite the contrary. They are, however, Islamic and radical. There’s no denying that even if there is an argument to be made about “root causes”. Oh, and why is Pape the first to collect these data? Seems to me analyses like these are what we pay the CIA (et al) to do.
And I love this:
Pape isn’t an isolationist. He suggests that long-term, America should revert to the strategy of the 1970s and 1980s, when the U.S. relied on local regimes but had forces ready to jump when needed—but not constantly on the ground, poisoning the atmosphere with their presence on land.
Oh yes, the left and the Democrats just loved our policy of propping up local fascist regimes in order to halt (or slow) the advance of Communism. They were wild about CIA assassination teams and “death squads” and the injection of American troops and fully supported those actions. Yeah right. (Truth be told, I didn’t like all that stuff either, but what was the alternative?) Perhaps he doesn’t recall presidents like Jimmy Carter who was all about accommodation and demanded that a “local regime” (the Shah) abdicate its power to religious fundamentalists as a matter of “human rights”. And, how, I wonder, would Pape have handled Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait? That required a good deal more than just some “some forces ready to jump when needed”.
Somehow I fee that people like Pape (and Crock) just don’t live in the real world.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 10 31 at 01:25 PM • permalinkSorry about the double post—computer’s acting hinky this am.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 10 31 at 01:27 PM • permalink‘if you cut a cross into the front of the brass jacket…’
You end of degrading terminal ballistics and giving your intended target a chance at freedom. Much better to use large calibre rounds fitted with a depleted uranium (for penetration ability) and white phosphorous projectile. With a mix of silver if you are of the superstitious bent. Minimum size calibre I would recommend would be the .50, but am happy to see the flock thinned with 25mm cannon fire.
‘Dum-dum’ rounds are against the laws of war, however using Javelin missiles for building entry is perfectly acceptable.With a mix of silver if you are of the superstitious bent.
Only if you’re only against werewolves. Better throw in some lignum vitae for vampires—might even be able to get away with just a piece of wood crammed into a hollow point—and some steel-jacketed rounds for fay.
Posted by Rob Crawford on 2006 10 31 at 03:39 PM • permalinkRe #30, CB is right, but you could mark a cross on the bullet with a Sharpie pen. If the pen has been blessed by a priest, it’ll be more effective.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 10 31 at 03:54 PM • permalinkThe biggest red herring possible in all of this is any sort of expectation of purism or purity of idea, purpose, identification and/or alignment.
The Soviets spent 3 full decades reaching out to, supporting, motivating, training, supplying, providing for, organizing and assisting the development of a broad spectrum of “anti-western” terrorist organizations. Every one of them got touched to some degree.
IRA hard corp trained in the same camps that produced cadre for Shining Path, PLO, Tamil Tigers, and, if you go back far enough, Red Brigade, Bider Mienholf, SLA, etc etc.
Some made claim to being Maoist, some Socialist, some anarchist, some religious, some nationalist but they all worked from the same playbook and learned at the same school.
Kyda and Geoff, thanks. You are what I read these columns for.
Looks like one is a Crock and the other writes Pap. I guess he submitted his findings to Lancet for ‘peer approval’.Did you see how Peter Manning [of ABC News and Cuurent Affairs notoriety], slyly blames the ‘CIA’ in The OZ for thwarting ‘secular’ nationalist movements in the Middle East for decades.
What a blind noong. They were either fascist [Ba’ath Party] or communist- inspired, but Manning PREFERRED them to the USA, and now doesn’t want to see how they morph into each other in the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc etc.By the way, ‘suicide’ is far too sympathetic and soft a word for ideological martyr bombers of any religion or stripe.
I wonder what Iraqi Sunni and Shi’ite martyr bombers say to each other when they meet in Hell?
#11 ’if you cut a cross into the front of the brass jacket…’
Yes it is forbidden under the geneva convention.
The conclusion to be drawn from this article is simple - according to the author, if a fundamental religous group has some generic political view their suicide bombers become secular.
The conclusion to be drawn from this conclusion is that this is bodgy analysis to prove the point of an islamofascist apologist.
This from the “cut and paste” in todays Austarlian.
“Award-winning writer Richard Flanagan in his new novel, The Unknown Terrorist, dedicated to David Hicks:
JESUS ... had no choice when confronted with the failure of love but to seek his own death. In his understanding that love was not enough, in his acceptance of the necessity of the sacrifice of his own life to enable the future of those around him, Jesus is history’s first, but not last, example of a suicide bomber.”
Anyone want to bet theres an award winning head tilt pic on the inside of the dust jacket of that tripe.
Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2006 10 31 at 07:30 PM • permalinkSo we have to watch out for an exploding Phat Phil, do we?
Posted by Apparatchik on 2006 10 31 at 08:13 PM • permalink#‘s 30, 32, 33 and 37. Yeah I’m familiar with the bit about brass jackets only.
My point however is that as these pricks have no uniform, the laws of war, i.e. Geneva conventions dont apply…
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2006 11 01 at 10:29 AM • permalink
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Totalitarian ideologies of a feather flock together. Whether you’re talking about the crescent, or the “crescent” and hammer, you’re talking about political pathologies that continue to pose a threat to liberal democracy.