Suicide bombers likely sane, paper says



OMAR EL AKKAD

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

November 21, 2007 at 5:03 AM EST

Suicide bombers are not crazy and indeed are often driven primarily by motivators other than religious zeal, argues a University of Toronto sociology professor in a new research paper he says is likely to prove controversial.

In a paper published in the November issue of Contexts, a journal of the American Sociological Association published by University of California Press, Robert Brym argues that the most effective way of developing a workable strategy for dealing with such assaults is first understanding the assailant's point of view.

Dr. Brym's work focused primarily on the Middle East conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis, a topic he said he was at first reluctant to pursue - despite completing his bachelor's degree in Jerusalem - because it was so sensitive. However, in 2003, he was on a PhD selection committee when he came across a Palestinian student looking to do research on suicide bombers. Eventually, he began working with the student and an Israeli student on the topic. The Israeli student interviewed counterterrorism officials; the Palestinian student interviewed militants.

Dr. Brym's research suggests that empathy, rather than aggression, is the more effective tool for combatting suicide bombings.

"It is controversial," Dr. Brym said in an interview. "But ... our interviews led to the conclusion that much of decisions [regarding suicide bombing] involve retaliation. It is possible for the Israeli state to suppress the other side, but given the high motivation of both sides, they find workarounds."

Dr. Brym pointed to the decrease of suicide bombings in Israel over the past few years, adding that the number of rockets launched during the same period has shot up.

Dr. Brym was quick to point out that empathy doesn't have to entail "warm and fuzzy feelings" for the other side, but rather meaningful rewards and goals, such as releasing Palestinian tax dollars and working toward a two-state solution.

Intertwined with Dr. Brym's thesis is a parallel argument that suicide bombers are not necessarily driven by religion. In the case of the Middle East conflict, he says, notions of martyrdom and holy war began to gain popularity after secular approaches failed. He highlights another study that found fewer than half of suicide bombers between 1980 and 2003 (for whom ideological background information could be found) were identifiably religious.

Dr. Brym also points to the tendency for suicide bombings to happen in clusters as proof that there's often a political or strategic aim behind such attacks. A classic example, he said, took place in the mid-nineties, when Palestinian militants feared a settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority was imminent.

But harsh repression on the part of the Israelis often reinforces extremist beliefs or leads militants to resort to even deadlier methods, Dr. Brym argues.

"In general, severe repression can work for a while, but a sufficiently determined mass opposition will always be able to design new tactics to surmount new obstacles, especially if its existence as a group is visibly threatened and unless, of course, the mass opposition is exterminated in its entirety," Dr. Brym writes.

"One kind of 'success' usually breeds another kind of 'failure' if the motivation of insurgents is high."

www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071121.wsuicide21/BNStory/
Israel must leave the territories, and must do it soon - whether accompanied by concessions on the Palestinian side or not

Occupation breeds terror

Seth Freedman

November 19, 2007

When I first moved to this country, I was prepared to play my part by enlisting in the IDF and serving in the West Bank. While there, I saw for myself the effect my mere uniformed presence had on the Palestinians I encountered on a daily basis. Every interaction took place with me holding all the cards - it was me with the loaded gun in my hands; it was me barking instructions to "stop or I'll shoot", "lift up your shirt", "don't come another step closer"; it was me playing with my quarry as though they were puppets on the end of short, taut strings.

However, I still believed that we "did what we had to do", since it was a case of us or them, and we could never ease up in our actions for fear that the next Palestinian we encountered was the one with a bomb strapped to his chest. And so it continued, bursting into buildings to round up the residents and lock them in their own basement, so that we could take over the house and grab a few hours' sleep in the middle of a mission - and all perfectly acceptable in the context of war.

But that was when I saw the wide, silent eyes of the families' children as we screamed at their father - their hero, their protector - and wrested from him the reins of power inside his own house. And that's when it started to dawn on me just what kind of effect our actions were having on the next generation, who were guaranteed to end up hating us when all they saw was us herding them like cattle and imposing our will on them through the sights of our guns.

Once I left the army, my forays into the West Bank were on more equal terms, as I sought to meet the very people whose towns I'd previously patrolled, to hear their stories about life under military rule. From Jenin to Bethlehem to Ramallah and beyond, the extent of the suffering and the depth of the torment was exposed to me time and again. There was no doubt in my mind that our mere presence in their daily routines was twisting the knife every time they encountered a soldier - and breeding extremism and radicalism all the while.

The unspoken truth that every Israeli knows, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, is that occupation breeds terror. Every incursion, every raid, every curfew and collective punishment, drives the moderates into the welcoming arms of the militants, who promise to return their honour and their wounded pride by fighting the oppressors' fire with fire of their own. And that fact alone should be enough to shake Israelis awake and realise that the occupation has to end, as much for our own security as for the sake of the Palestinians that we're subjugating.

Even those who only care about the safety of the Israeli people, and to hell with the Palestinians, should be backing the withdrawal of troops to the Green Line. They should know that the labyrinthine network of checkpoints is not actually making them safer, but is there just to make the Palestinians' lives a misery, thus endangering Israeli lives further in the end. And they should recognise that while Israel's presence continues to fester in the Palestinian territories like an open sore, there is little to no chance that the Palestinians will seek rapprochement and dialogue with their neighbours.

And that means that any coexistence projects - such as those promoted by OneVoice, the Clubhouse network, and so on - are doomed to fail while the occupiers refuse to acknowledge the plight of the occupied. Israel has the upper hand whichever way you look at it, and to treat the situation as somehow balanced is to overlook totally the sheer injustice of it all.

Of course, the Israelis have suffered decades of terrorism at the hands of extremist Palestinian groups, and as such have every right to demand their government protects them from similar atrocities in the future. But, for all that Israelis have had it bad, they haven't seen every facet of their lives systematically destroyed at the hands of an uncaring occupying force. They haven't seen their economy run into the ground by crippling border closures and sanctions, they haven't been denied freedom of movement between their homes and farmlands, and they haven't had to beg soldiers to let their wives through checkpoints in order to give birth in hospital.

At the same time, the settlements are as much of a problem to a viable Palestinian state as anything, thanks to the watertight security their presence demands from the army, restricting Palestinian movement and cutting the West Bank into tiny ribbon-like strips. As one Palestinian said, in Emma Williams' essential book on the region, "thanks to the settlers and their infrastructure, we're locked so tight into the State of Israel we're like a bug in concrete."

But still the expansion continues, and still the stranglehold on the Palestinians persists. While the Israeli public stays silent, while their taxes swell the government's coffers, they are tacitly aiding and abetting slow torture on a national scale. On top of the sporadic killing that the occupation inevitably causes, the killing of an entire people's hopes and dreams takes place 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

And it has to stop. Even though it's no doubt too late to pull many of the current generation back from the brink of hate and enmity, there's still time to ensure that today's resentment doesn't have to be instilled into the children of tomorrow. Playing the "fighting terror" card might win Knesset votes, but it doesn't push things forward nor work out how to pave the way towards long-lasting future peace.

Israel must leave the territories, and they must do it soon - whether accompanied by concessions on the Palestinian side or not. The occupation is illegal, it is abhorrent, and it is utterly counterproductive if its aim is to bring security to Israelis. Anyone who ventures into the Palestinian towns and cities, who witnesses the devastation for themselves and hears the tragic tales from the horse's mouth, knows this. And anyone who prefers to cover their ears or avert their eyes is only doing damage to both sides in the long run. Israel will never have peace whilst it crushes Palestinian aspirations - and both sides deserve far better lives than those they are being forced to endure at present.

www.commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/seth_freedman/2007/11/occupation_breeds

The UN calls Israel, under the rule of Zionism's most violent Extremists, the worst colonial regime in history. No wonder the Plant has to keep censoring this!

The Plant's been busy Censoring this site, demonstrating what the Olmert Extremists really don't want you to read or think about.

The Editors should disable the "rate down" function which is being abused by these Trolls.
Wow, the Plant rated this down (hid it) in record time. Somebody doesn't want this getting out. It's been a bad week for Zionism. No wonder they're desperately attacking the independent media ... Smell the desperation.
Israeli Extremists love this condemnation (just not the publicity), because like all sociopathic Fascists, they measure their power in how much they can get away with.

Ziegler: Israel is the worst colonial regime

NEW YORK, (PIC)-- Jean Ziegler, the UN special rapporteur on right to food, castigated the Israeli occupation and described it as the only "colonial regime" which refuses to abide by any international law, calling on the UN to adopt an effective policy forcing Israel to respect human rights and the Geneva Convention.

"The Israeli occupation is a colonial regime and an illegal military occupation from the UN's point of view, it continues to annex more Palestinian lands; and thus the Israeli occupation is the worst in the history of colonialism," Ziegler stated in a TV interview.

The UN official underlined that the Israeli occupation is causing starvation, physical and psychological oppression to the Palestinian people, but he noted that there is Palestinian resistance, questioning the reason behind the EU's complicity with the Israeli occupation and why US funds are protecting this occupation.

The rapporteur described the EU countries as completely "hypocritical" because they refused the results of democratic elections supervised by them after they saw that the winner is Hamas, pointing out that the Europeans should have the bare minimum of principles.

Ziegler pointed out that the human situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is deteriorated, because the UN statistics revealed that 65 percent of the population of the West Bank are suffering from malnutrition; besides, the Gaza Strip, which is inhabited by more than 1.5 million people has turned into a big prison as a result of the Israeli siege imposed on it.

He also described the Quartet on the Middle East as a mere shop front, calling on the UN and the EU to withdraw from it as long as their presence in this Quartet is meaningless and useless.

As a validation for what the UN special rapporteur had stated about the suppressive policies of the Israeli occupation, the IOA started on Sunday to reduce the allocations of fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip under the Israeli government's resolution which considers the Gaza Strip as a "hostile entity".

The spokesman for Israeli war minister Ehud Barak told AFP that the reduction in the fuel supplies to Gaza will begin as of Sunday and that there will be frequent power outages in the next few days.

www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k cOd87MDI46m9rUxJEpMO=