On Suicide Bombing

Abstract

When the World Trade Center in New York was attacked, a torrent of words poured out of the Western media to explain what had motivated this terrible act and to interpret its world historic meaning. The disaster was quickly associated with the many incidents of Palestinian suicide bombings, and experts identified tendencies in Islam, in particular its concept of martyrdom, in which dying and killing were combined and sanctified. There was an Islamic culture of death?so we were told?that spawned this uniquely horrific violence. But this reference merely addressed their violence; it didn't explain why it was directed against us. Why do they hate us? seemed an obvious question. The answer, so we were told, had to be our virtue: They hate us, said our government, our journalists and our intellectuals, because they hate the freedom we love. This answer has a paranoid structure: They hate us because we are special; we are special because they hate us. Thus a particular disaster has become the great signifier of a uniquely meaningful self. On Suicide Bombing1 is not, however, concerned to explain why Muslim mili tants choose to kill by dying, and still less to excuse what they do. Its primary aim is to analyze Western public responses to Islamic terrorism. Instead of focusing on religious violence, it proposes that we confront the question of political violence that constitutes our modern world.

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