Justin:
“Do you have anything at all to back that up with dave472?” -Justin
I guess I could go sentence by sentence:
“This is obvious when you realize that most suicide bombers are secular.” -dave742
Back up:
Robert Pape of the University of Chicago ran a study that analyzed every suicide bombing from 1980 to 2003. The study was conducted by the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, funded in part by the Pentagon Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The initial results were published in the journal “American Political Science Review,” the top Political Science journal in the world, and the final results published in a book called “Dying to Win”. Pape studied 461 suicide attacks overall. He ascertained the religious or ideological affiliation of 384 of them:
“Of the 384 attackers for whom we have data, 166, or 43%, were religious, while 218, or 57%, were secular.”
These results were mirrored by work published in a book called “Making Sense of Suicide Missions”, edited by Deigo Gambetta, who found that “contrary to a widespread belief, the majority of [suicide missions] have been carried out by secular rather than religious organizations.”
The most prolific suicide bombers are the LTTE. They are not Muslim.
Let’s look at suicide bombing in Lebanon. Pape’s database contains data on 41 attackers. From the book:
“…at least 30 of the 41 attackers do not fit the description of Islamic fundamentalism. 27 were communists or socialists with no commitment to religious extremism; three were Christians. Only 8 suicide attackers were affiliated with Islamic fundamentalism; the ideological affiliation of 3 cannot be identified.”
Here is a picture of one og the non-religious Christian suicide bombers from Lebanon:
http://ssnp.com/new/gallery/shohadaa/Sana_01.jpg
Of course, your first reaction is probably that Pape is a lying anti-Semite. Ariel Merari is head of the Center for Political Science at Tel Aviv University. He has a chapter in the book “Origins of Terrorism:Psychology, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind”, edited by Walter Reich and Walter Lacquer. He counts suicide bombing in Lebanon by incidents, and not individuals. Going by incidents, he finds that 7 out of 31 suicide bombings in Lebanon were committed by religious fundamentalists. The book is searchable on Amazon. The info is on page 204. Simply search “204”, and go to that page.
