This post is the third in a series I have written about Free Speech and the Danish "Muhammad cartoons". Parts one and two are here and here, but part three can be read independently, without reading them first.
The reason I compiled the "72 virgins quiz" that I posted yesterday and the day before is that I recently had a discussion with someone who insisted that suicide bombings were an inherently Muslim phenomenon. His (or her, for all I know - it was an online discussion) clinching argument - proving that it really is all about Islam - was that oft-repeated argument, "If it's not a Muslim thing, how come 50% of Palestinians are Christian, but all their suicide bombers are Muslim?".
I don't know where that talking point arose. I think the first people I ever heard saying it were the talk radio personalities Don Imus and Michael Savage, so maybe it originated with them. But it's not very factually based. Somebody should tell Don Imus and Michael Savage that just because a society contains two religious groups, that doesn't mean the two communities are of equal size. In fact, the proportion of Palestinians who are Christians is nowhere near 50%, unless you're limiting your search to some areas of suburban Michigan. In the Occupied Territories, the proportion of Christians is closer to 2%. Good luck making statistically sound pronouncements about a minority as small as 2% when your sample size of suicide bombers for the entire al Aqsa intifada is just over one hundred.
But to leave it there is really to dodge the bigger issue, which is the implication that suicide bombing is a Muslim phenomenon, and it is something within Islam itself that incites Muslims to carry them out. I meant to write about that subject earlier this year in my postings (here and here) on the Danish cartoons controversy, but I never quite got round to it, so I'll do it now. The particular cartoon that deals with suicide bombing is the one shown left (click to enlarge), which reflects the popular wisdom that Muslims blow themselves up because the Quran promises them 72 virgins in Paradise.... That seems like a harmless enough joke and, compared to most of the other Muhammad cartoons, you can actually see how that is meant to be amusing. But there are three things I don't find funny about the repetition of the 72 virgins theme.
Firstly, as I pointed out in my first post on the subject, some of the Danish cartoons seem to derive their "humour" from caricaturing Muslims in the same way that, 60 years earlier, other European cartoonists used to caricature and demonize Jews. I wrote then that there is surely a Ph.D. thesis waiting to be written on Islamophobia as the latest manifestation of Antisemitism. When Western philologists and anthropologists first systematically studied the southwest Asian civilizations in the late 18th century, the line they drew between us and them was not between Europeans and Oriental Jews, but between the superior “Aryan” peoples that produced the great ancient writings in Greek, Persian and Sanskrit and lived on in Western Europe, and the inferior, primitive peoples – Arab and Jew alike - with their supposedly ugly, gutteral semitic languages. Arabs were “merely Jews on horseback”, and they were both basically just orientals, as Benjamin Disraeli (Tancred, 1847) put it most succinctly. By mid-century, Aryan cultural superiority began to morph into Aryan racial superiority, e.g. “All civilizations derive from the White race... When the Aryan blood is exhausted stagnation supervenes." (Artur Comte de Gobineau, Sur l’inegalite des races humaines, 1854). And once you’ve started seeing the world in terms of racial purity, the very presence in your midst of the lesser, non-aryan parasite/plague/virus becomes an intolerable threat to you. In the 20th century, Europe’s Jews were the despised semitic religious minority that took the brunt of this world view. Now the Muslims are the oriental minority du jour, and the same images once used to dehumanize Jews as the depraved swarthy barbarian out to defile our European whiteness are resurfacing. Either that’s a remarkable coincidence, or we are once again tapping into an ugly, unresolved hostility to the semitic “other” that we thought had been discredited in 1945, but apparently never was.
One of the distinctions that European Orientalists made between "us" and "them" was in their presentation of Europeans as rational, disciplined beings and Orientals as irrational slaves to their passions. For T.E. Lawrence in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Chapter 3), it came down to this:
The Jew in the Metropole at Brighton, the miser, the worshipper of Adonis, the lecher in the stews of Damascus were alike signs of the Semitic capacity for enjoyment, and expressions of the same nerve which gave us at the other pole the self-denial of the Essenes, or the early Christians, or the first Khalifas, finding the way to heaven fairest for the poor in spirit. The Semite hovered between lust and self-denial.
So it's not surprising that by the Nazi era, one of the recurring images of "the Semite" in cartoons of the period was that of the Jewish predator preying upon our Aryan women:
"The Spider". Many victims are trapped in the web, caught by flattering words. Rip the web of deceit! Der Sturmer, 1934.
via the Wiesenthal Center.
"Legion of Shame":
Ignorant, lured by gold, They stand disgraced in Judah's fold.
Souls poisoned, blood infected, Disaster broods in their wombs. Der Sturmer, 1935.
via the Calvin College German Propaganda Archive.
A man was waiting for me at the station. He raised his hat and he was very kind to me. But I knew that I should stay away from him, because he was a Jew. Der Giftpilz, 1936.
via bibliolab's la propaganda nazista.
Today Europe has a new oriental bogeyman defiling its whiteness, and how do we see that caricatured in cartoons? The Muslim as a murderous fanatic willing to destroy himself at the mere promise of possessing 72 virgins. A new generation of Semites hovering between lust and self-denial. The problem with this is that demonization of the "bestial" foreign minority isn't an intellectual exercise that takes place in a vacuum. It doesn't begin and end with cartoons. It tends to have real-life consequences for real people:
SA and SS members display Jewish businessman Oskar Danker and his alleged Christian girlfriend, Adele, as 'discouraging examples' to the public; Cuxhaven, July 1933. Danker's placard reads 'As a Jew, I only take German girls to my room'. (Photo: Keystone/Getty Images)
And if we know where this sort of thing leads, why would we even want to start going down that path again?
The second problem I have with Jyllensposten's reinforcement of the message that suicide bombing is a Muslim thing, and is motivated by the "72 virgins", is that neither part of that assertion is actually true. Suicide attacks are not necessarily a Muslim thing, and those that are don't seem to be motivated primarily by virgins, but by political aims. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, Robert Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, spent two years establishing a database containing details of every known suicide bombing or attack - 315 in all - since 1980. (His findings were summarized in a paper for the American Political Science Review in August 2003 [link is to PDF file], and published in his book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, in May 2005). The importance of Pape's database was that it was a comprehensive record of suicide attacks worldwide. Usually, the only suicide attacks that we in the western countries care about are the ones that target us, and that allows us to make the association between Islam and suicide bombings, because it is generally Muslim countries that we are in conflict with right now. But by documenting the phenomenon from a global perspective, and taking into account the suicide attacks in far-flung countries that don't usually make it onto our radar, Pape found that it wasn't a "Muslim thing" arising from their "culture of death", as the more hateful among us like to call it. His conclusion was that:
The data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any religion for that matter. In fact, the leading instigator of suicide attacks is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion...-- Dying to Kill Us; NYT, 22 Sept 2003.
Pape found that there was an indirect connection between religion and suicide bombings, inasmuch as suicide attacks often occurred in conflicts in which an occupying power of one religion was in control of a land where the occupied population was of a different religion. But once again, Islamic fundamentalism did not account for that connection, because the connection existed regardless of whether or not one of the warring parties was Muslim. For example, in the period Pape studied, suicide attacks occurred in conflicts pitting Hindu versus Buddhist, Muslim v. Christian, Sikh v. Hindu, Muslim/Christian v. Jewish, as well as in conflicts where there was no religious divide and both protagonists were avowedly secular (as in the campaign by the Marxist Kurdish Workers Party against the secular state of Turkey).
Pape's conclusion was that the most common motivation behind organisations that used suicide attacks was not - contrary to popular belief - religious fundamentalism, but nationalism:
There is not the close connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism that many people think. Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective. Most often, it is a response to foreign occupation.
-- What we still don't understand about Hizbollah ; The Observer, 6 August 2006.
Since Pape first published his conclusions, we have seen a new theatre of suicide attacks open up in the form of Iraq. And although conventional wisdom might want to see the situation in Iraq as confirmation of suicide bombings as "a Muslim thing", Iraq actually suggests Pape was right. Iraq might be the centre of the suicide bombing phenomenon right now, but it has only received that dubious distinction very recently, hasn't it? In fact, the first suicide attack in Iraq didn't take place until the fourth week of March 2003. Bearing in mind that Baghdad has been Muslim since 762 CE, and that 20th century Iraq had its share of dictatorship, coup and internal terrorism, it would be odd that Iraq had to wait so long for its first suicide bombing if it really was some Islamic weakness for 72 waiting virgins that lay behind such attacks. If, on the other hand you think of suicide bombings as a cheap and effective (they account for only 4 per cent of terror attacks, but inflict 48 per cent of the casualties) nationalist response to foreign invasion and occupation, it makes perfect sense that Iraq should see the first of its ongoing suicide attacks just one week after the U.S./U.K. invasion of that country.
The connection between suicide bombings and resistance to foreign occupation also explains why people in the Western world see them as an exclusively, and therefore inherently, Muslim phenomenon. If you look at the current balance of power between the Muslim and Western worlds (inasmuch as those two things are discrete entities), you can't help but notice which side is militarily dominant. There is no Egyptian Army invading London, no Syrian Army building the world's largest embassy in a Washington DC "Green Zone", and no Wahhabi religious zealots actively colonising Tel Aviv under the military protection of the Royal Saudi Army. There are, however, British, American and Israeli armies conducting military occupations in Iraq and Palestine. As it is overwhelmingly Muslim countries that are currently occupied by predominantly Christian and Jewish states, of course it is Muslims rather than Christians who are going to carry out the suicide bombing campaigns that are intended to end those occupations.
If you wanted to test whether it really is an Islamic issue, or whether "we" would be capable of doing what "they" do if our circumstances were reversed, you would need to find a predominantly Christian country living under foreign military occupation during the years that Pape studied, and examine if suicide bombings happened there too. Perhaps the closest thing to a test case that we have would be Lebanon: it's a bit of a stretch to call it a Christian country, but it does have a sizeable Christian minority, and south Lebanon at least was under military occupation in the period Pape studied by a foreign army from a country of a different religion, following the Israeli invasion of 1982. So, judging by the criteria that Pape identifies as prerequisites for suicide bombings, you would expect to see suicide attacks on foreign forces in Lebanon, and to see involvement in such attacks by Lebanese from across the confessional divide.
And you do. From 1982 to 1986, the leading Lebanese resistance group, Hizbullah, orchestrated a series of attacks by 41 suicide terrorists, initially against the multinational military forces in Beirut, but predominantly against the IDF and its local ally, the South Lebanon Army. As Hizbullah's popular base is the Shia population of south Lebanon, we might assume that the attackers were Islamic militants. But Pape points out:
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Hezbollah is principally neither a political party nor an Islamist militia. It is a broad movement that evolved in reaction to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. At first it consisted of a small number of Shiites supported by Iran. But as more and more Lebanese came to resent Israel’s occupation, Hezbollah — never tight-knit — expanded into an umbrella organization that tacitly coordinated the resistance operations of a loose collection of groups with a variety of religious and secular aims.-- Ground to a Halt; NY Times, 3 August 2006.
When he researched the personal details and political affiliations of the 41 Lebanese suicide bombers, Pape discovered they reflected the wide variety of groups that fought under the "Hizbullah" umbrella. He managed to identify 38 of the 41 attackers, and was surprised to find that only eight were Islamic fundamentalists. A large majority, 27 of the 38, came from the secular left. They were members of movements like the Lebanese Communist Party, the National Resistance Front, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the Arab Socialist Union and the PFLP, that were affiliated with no religion, or were explicitly a-religious. One was associated with a faction that self-identified as Christian. Above all, the "Hizbullah" suicide bombers were a heterogenous group: male and female, religious and secular, Muslim and Christian (like the ones in the "72 virgins" quiz). There was one thing they all had in common, and it was not Islamic fundamentalism, it was Lebanese nationality. (There were none of the amorphous "foreign fighters" whose influence we exaggerate today in trying to explain away our failure in Iraq). As one of Hizbullah's Christian suicide bombers, Elias Harb, put it in the will he prepared before blowing himself up in an attack on the SLA's Voice of Hope radio station, "[I]nternal conflicts will not make us lose sight of our main enemy, which is Israel and its American protectors". His motivation was not the hope that there would be virgins waiting for him in Paradise, but that an attack on those who cooperated with the Israeli occupation would contribute to the larger mission of the resistance, i.e. "the complete liberation of our country from the Zionist aggressor". [Footnote 1].
Pape's conclusion, in Dying to Win, was that: "[W]hat Lebanon's suicide attackers share is not ideology or organizational indoctrination, but simply a common commitment to resist a foreign occupation. Alliances among such disparate groups and individuals are common in nationalist rebellions".
The third reason why it's objectionable to laugh off suicide bombing as motivated by a quest for 72 virgins is that this explanation is not just inaccurate, but self-serving. So long as we can convince ourselves that suicide campaigns are just a manifestation of some essential failing in Islam, and not blowback from our invasion and occupation of other people's countries, then we don't have to look honestly at our own foreign policies and the effects they have on the rights, lives and sovereignty of other peoples.
You can see how this works in the story of Yusuf Sweitat, a Palestinian who died carrying out a suicide mission in Hadera, Israel.
Yusuf Sweitat used to be a police detective in Jenin. On 18 October 2001, he was one of the first people on the scene when an IDF tank shell hit a classroom at the Ibrahimiya Elementary School, critically wounding a young girl called Riham el-Wared. Sweitat tried to carry her to hospital, but she died before they got there. After the incident, Yusuf talked obsessively to his friends about Riham's death. One recalled that the incident with the dead girl changed his [Sweitat's] life, because it brought home to him the fact that he lived in a place where a foreign army could randomly kill a child, and no-one be held accountable.
Days after Riham's death, Sweitat approached Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and said that if they would arm him he would carry out a suicide attack for them. He taped a final testimony to be shown after his death (image below), telling his family not to be sad at his sacrifice and expressing his confidence in the Palestinian people's victory over the occupation. The child pictured in the poster on the wall behind his right shoulder is Riham el-Wared, whose life he had been unable to save.
On 28 October 2001, ten days after the IDF killed Riham el-Wared in Jenin, Yusuf Sweitat and his neighbour Nidal al-Jibali drove a red Mitsubishi into the centre of the Israeli town of Hadera, and opened fire randomly on Israelis waiting at a bus stop. They murdered four people and wounded 44 others before they were themselves shot dead by Israeli police.
The interesting thing is that Yusuf Sweitat was a friend of the Israeli actor and director Juliano Mer-Khamis. And after Sweitat's death, Mer-Khamis recalled that he had once had to explain to Sweitat what Israelis were referring to when they talked about suicide bombers being motivated by 72 virgins, because he didn't know what it meant:
He once asked me for the meaning of the 72 virgins so widely spoken of among Israelis. "It is easier for the Israelis to kill you while you look for virgins in heaven" I answered him. "What do you mean?" he asked. "You are a genetic phenomenon" I answered. "A terrorist, a religious devil, has no past or future, were born to kill and are thirsty for blood; your father is an inciter and your mother will joyfully praise your death at your grave; you are faceless, a number, an enemy "do you understand?"-- A Short Story of Suicide; Juliano Mer-Khamis
Mer-Khamis' answer sums up perfectly why the 72 virgins cartoon isn't just a harmless joke. We have to convince ourselves that the actions of people like Yusuf Sweitat take place in a vacuum, stripped of all context, because otherwise we might have to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions about that context. We might have to ask ourselves why there are still Israeli tanks in Jenin; why they can fire a shell at an elementary school, killing a child, before driving away with impunity; why after forty years there is still Israeli military occupation and colonization in the Palestinian Territories, subsidized and provided with diplomatic cover by, well, us. Worst of all, we might find ourselves asking, what would we do if the roles were reversed, and we lived in the circumstances that the Palestinians do. We really would prefer not to have to think dispassionately about any of that. Far better that we deny any link between the suicide attack that Yusuf Sweitat carried out and the events that immediately preceded it [2], and find the cause instead in some irrational religious defect that Muslims carry: even if the defect consists of a promise of 72 virgins that Yusuf Sweitat himself had never heard of till an Israeli friend explained it to him.
Israeli journalist Amira Hass noticed a similar dynamic at work - this time on a national, rather than an individual level - in "Operation Defensive Shield", the IDF's devastating attack on the West Bank cities in the spring of 2002. Although its stated aim was the "destruction of the terrorist infrastructure", the operation was actually notable for its massive and systematic vandalism against Palestinian national and local government, and civil institutions. (The photos below show the offices of Ramallah Municipality, after Israeli soldiers visited to "destroy the infrastructure of terror"):
You're not really confronting terrorism by doing things like wrecking the Mayor of Ramallah's office, or by trashing the PA Ministry of Education and destroying the academic records of all the Palestinian students who have just sat their high school graduations and need those records to proceed to college, or by destroying the databases that allow the PA to operate and manage a drivers' licensing system for the car drivers of the Occupied Territories. Nor by trashing the Palestinian Ministry of Culture and smearing faeces on the artwork there, nor by destroying with battery acid the entire collection of expensive high-resolution maps and photos that the Ministry of Local Government relied on for town planning and engineering projects. What you're really doing - under the "security" pretext that Israel abuses so much - is destroying the civilian infrastructure. Hass considered at the time why it was so important for the Israeli authorities to wipe out anything that allowed Palestinians to operate successfully and visibly as a normal, functioning society.
It's a scene that is repeating itself in hundreds of Palestinian offices taken over by IDF troops for a few hours or days in the West Bank: smashed, burned and broken computer terminals heaped in piles and thrown into yards; server cabling cut, hard disks missing, disks and diskettes scattered and broken, printers and scanners broken or missing, laptops gone, telephone exchanges that disappeared or were vandalized, and paper files burned, torn, scattered, or defaced - if not taken. And it's all in rooms full of smashed furniture, torn curtains, broken windows, smashed-in doors, walls full of holes, filthy floors and soiled bathrooms....It's not merely the expense of the hardware that has to be replaced. The loss is immeasurable in shekels or dollars. Years of information built into knowledge, time spent thinking by thousands of people working to build their civil society and their future or trying to build a private sector that would bring a sense of economic stability to their country. These are the data banks developed in Palestinian Authority institutions like the Education Ministry, the Higher Education Ministry and the Health Ministry. These are the data banks of the non-governmental organizations and research institutes devoted to developing a modern health system, modern agricultural, environmental protection and water conservation. These are the data banks of human rights organizations, banks and private commercial enterprises, infirmaries, and supermarkets. They all were clearly the targets for destruction in the military operation called Defensive Shield...
Let's not deceive ourselves; this was not a mission to search and destroy the terrorist infrastructure. If the forces breaking into every hard disk of every bank and clinic, commercial consultant's office or PA ministry, thought that a list of weapons or wanted men was inside the disk, all they had to do was copy the information and pass it on to the Shin Bet. If they thought incriminating evidence was hidden in the Education Ministry and the International Bank of Palestine and in a shop that rents prosthetics, the soldiers would have examined document after document, and not thrown the files on the floor without opening them.
This was not a whim, or crazed vengeance, by this or that unit, nor a personal vandalistic urge of a soldier whose buddies didn't dare stop him. There was a decision made to vandalize the civic, administrative, cultural infrastructure developed by Palestinian society... [T]he IDF translated into the field the instructions inherent in the political echelon's policies: Israel must destroy Palestinian civil institutions, sabotaging for years to come the Palestinian goal for independence, sending all of Palestinian society backward. It's so easy and comforting to think of the entire Palestinian society as primitive, bloodthirsty terrorists, after the raw material and product of their intellectual, cultural, social and economic activity has been destroyed. That way, the Israeli public can continue to be deceived into believing that terror is a genetic problem and not a sociological and political mutation, horrific as it may be, derived from the horrors of the occupation...
-- Operation 'Destroy the Data'; Ha'aretz, 24 April 2002.
Of course the direct responsibility for suicide terrorist campaigns lies with the people who carry them out. But they don't take place in a vacuum, and we do find ourselves in a bit of a quandary because collectively we - Americans and Israelis alike - like the benefits that we get from the military occupations that apparently spawn suicide bombings as their collateral damage. We really like the fact that we can take what is not ours - whether it is West Bank land or Iraqi oil - simply by virtue of our overwhelming military superiority. It would be a real wrench for us if Pape were right, and we had to come to terms with the fact that only by giving up the things we have taken by force will we defuse the main motivation for the suicide campaigns that dog us. Far better to hang on to the land and the oil, deny any link between what we do to them and what they do to us, and lay it all at the feet of those wacky Muslims and their deadly quest for their 72 virgins.
Footnotes:
[1] Hizbullah and Israel have on two occasions carried out prisoner exchanges, which have included returning to their homelands both living prisoners and the remains of each side's respective war dead. Hizbullah carried out its abduction of two Israeli soldiers in July 2006 with the explicit intention of forcing a prisoner swap to free the last Lebanese prisoners still held by Israel. As Elias Harb is one of the Hizbullah dead whose remains have never been returned, he is still considered a prisoner by the movement. We may hear of him in coming months, in the context of a prisoner exchange involving Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.[2] About half of all Palestinian suicide attackers had a very close friend, family member or lover killed by Israel shortly before carrying out their attack, according to a study (Suicide Terrorism), by Ami Pedahzur, senior research fellow at the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa.
