Adapted from The
Does
oppression cause suicide bombing?
By ALAN
M. DERSHOWITZ
Some overprivileged Muslims support a culture of death, while
impoverished
Tibetans celebrate life
As suicide bombings increase in
But the underlying premise is demonstrably false: There is no such link as a matter of fact or history. Suicide bombing is a tactic that is selected by privileged, educated, and wealthy elitists because it has proven successful.
Moreover, even some of the suicide bombers
themselves defy the
stereotype of the impoverished victims of occupation driven to
desperate
measures by American or Israeli oppression. Remember the 9/11 bombers,
several
of whom were university students and none of whom were oppressed by the
…
WHY HAVE other oppressed people throughout history not resorted to suicide bombings and terrorism? The answer lies in differences among the elite leadership of various groups and causes. The leaders of Islamic radical causes, especially the Wahhabis, advocate and incite suicide terrorism, while the leaders of other causes advocate different means.
Recall Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose people were truly oppressed but who advocated non-violent means of resistance. It is the leaders who send suicide bombers to blow themselves up. No suicide bomber ever sent himself to be blown up.
…
Indeed, were Israel to end its occupation
of Gaza and
most of the West Bank (as I have long believed it should), it is likely
that
terrorism would actually increase as terrorist commanders secure more
freedom
to plan and implement terrorist actions. The same might well be true in
The time has come to address the real root cause of suicide bombing: elitist incitement by certain religious and political leaders who are creating a culture of death and exploiting the ambiguous teachings of an important religion.