Suicide bombers, Authoritarian minds, and the Denial of others

Judaism, Fall, 2001 by Adrian Mirvish

DEATH AND DESTRUCTION ON A GIGANTIC SCALE IN NEW York and Washington; not only adults but children too were deliberately targeted by suicide bombers in Israel. More Americans died in the attacks on New York and Washington than on any single day during World War Two. Had it not been for the heroic actions of passengers whose flight crashed in Pennsylvania, a good part of the White House itself could have been destroyed. On a smaller scale, Muslim suicide bombers had already exacted a toll in Israel. The August 9 attack by a Palestinian on a downtown, Jerusalem pizza parlor, in which fourteen Israelis and one American were killed, was clearly intended to target children and their families since it was lunch time, during summer. Hamas claimed responsibility for the deed, and a picture of the suicide bomber surfaced. He was holding an automatic rifle in one hand and the Koran in the other. Two days later, another bomber struck in the Northern town of Kiryat Motzkin. He was the only one to die, although fifteen Is raelis were injured in the blast. This time Islamic Jihad took credit for what occurred. Unlike the Israeli cases, no one took responsibility for the suicide attacks in New York and Washington, but it is now clear that, again, Muslim terrorists-this time from bin Laden's al Qaeda network--were at work.

How is one to explain the motivation of someone like Mohamed Atta, from this network, who exhorted his fellow terrorists with the idea that"... only those, the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, would be the ones who will be seeking death"? (1) How is one to understand acts deliberately designed to kill children? What can one really say about representatives of Islamic Jihad such as Abdullah Shami who replies, "Of course I do,'" to the question of whether he would like his own, eighteen-year-old son to become a suicide bomber? (2) In the Second World War what was so initially shocking about the Kamikaze pilots was their demonstration that there could be loathing so profound as to promote officially organized and sanctioned self-destruction. However, whereas the Kamikaze pilots went out to strike hostile, military targets, Islamic terrorism has taken this profound, undiluted hatred even further by avenging itself on civilians, including children.

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre talks in great detail about how pervasive self-deception can be, (3) stressing how--in the face of disquieting or disturbing circumstances--one manages to hold onto a construct, a world of belief, in spite of clear evidence to the contrary. (4) In this light it's worth noting that I read about the Jerusalem bombing in a front-page article of the San Francisco Chronicle. There was a second article that described, in detail, the chaos and pain that followed in the wake of the blast, but this was printed on p. 19 of the paper. The attack in Kiryat Motzkin was also carried on the front page of the Chronicle, but this time there was an italicized comment printed alongside the report from a Palestinian, claiming that the increasing cycle of violence was "an inevitable outcome of the ongoing [Israeli] occupation." Why was the article dealing with the agonizing details of the Jerusalem attack relegated to page 19 of the newspaper? And why in the report about the attack on August 12 wa s there a comment by a Palestinian and not also one from an Israeli? And was this an isolated case of biased reporting? The point has often been made that the Chronicle is sloppy, biased, and superficial in its coverage. Some people may recall how in All the President's Men the chief editor of the Washington Postlaughs and shrugs off a fake story offered him about drunks and weather reports: "send it out to the San Francisco Chronicle!" So it could be said that both these editorial choices were the product of an uncritical, liberal bias where the apparent underdog always has to be correct, no matter what. In addition, it could be argued that a covert and perverse racism is at work: Israelis--part of the Western World--are held culpable even under inordinate pressure, while the third-world Palestinians are not held to the same standards for actions that would generally be deemed barbaric. Both these factors might explain the reaction of this and other similar newspapers, but it seems clear that the issue is also one of bad faith or self-deception: anything rather than confront the truth, the sheer horror and inhumanity of the suicide bomber.

The savagery of the attacks on New York and Washington were impossible to deny. Initially even the Chronicle offered no mitigating explanations, although there is by now a new theme of good-guy versus bad-guy-Muslim emerging. Such a dichotomy can all too easily function as a placebo, creating in bad faith an at least somewhat secure psychological world where appalling callousness does not dominate and where one does not have directly to face organized, politically sanctioned activity that sets out to break the bounds of humane standards of behavior. But then is there any way of getting beyond a conceptual and descriptive stalemate when it comes to understanding organizations like al Qaeda, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad? I think that what Sartre has to say about the need to control or dominate others can provide a valuable, first step.