Isolating a contagion

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Newsweek columnist Christopher Dickey reviews a provocative analysis of suicide bombings that seeks to characterize and combat them as if they were a contagion:

The most useful way to understand how terrorism became so grimly commonplace may be to think of this slaughter as a pathology, like a contagious disease that began with small outbreaks here and there, and has developed into an epidemic. Suicide as such–without the bombing or the terrorism–has been studied as a pathology by social scientists at least since the 19th-century work of Émile Durkheim, which focused on the societal factors likely to increase the risk that people will kill themselves. And while suicidal terrorism may be distinctive, when you demystify it and put aside the Bush administration’s misleading obsession with a “murderous ideology” in the “Global War on Terror,” the similarities with other forms of suicide are instructive.

In the 1980s, for instance, the suicide rates among young people in several European countries rose dramatically. By the early 1990s, studies showed that in several countries more young Europeans were taking their own lives than were dying on the highways. Dutch researcher René Diekstra, then at the University of Leiden, identified the break-up of extended families and the increasing rootlessness of European life as forces behind these trends. Based on a comparative study of suicide in 20 countries over two decades, he determined in the early 1990s that divorce rates, unemployment, the rising number of working mothers, the declining importance of religion, the diminished number of children, all helped to predict the trends in suicide rates.

I am always ready to listen to people who take a shot at demystifying “evil.”  When leaders overuse words like “evil” they sometimes undermine the pursuit of a real solution to the problem.  For example, one of the best articles I have ever read broke down the motivations of the Columbine killers in a way that finally made sense to me.  Returning to the Newsweek article:

No, there’s something more: the contagion. History is full of suicide outbreaks where first a few, then many people kill themselves.

The savagely cynical leaders of Hizbullah, the Tamil Tigers, Hamas, Al Qaeda and other groups have worked to spread the plague of suicidal terror by denying the taboos against self-destruction while romanticizing the young men and women willing to blow themselves away. Hence the video testaments like Khan’s [London Underground bomber].

“Once a specific form of suicide takes place, it becomes part of the thinking and, if you will, the repertoire of people who can identify with that person who killed himself,” says the Dutch researcher René Diekstra, now at Holland’s Roosevelt Academy. “We know that what we call ‘suicide contagion’ is particularly prevalent in the late teens and early adult age. There is a search for identity, and for heroism.”

The article contains another factoid that I was not aware of.  Patient zero:

Ironically, the first major source of the suicide disease was the Iraqi Shiite Dawa Party, which now plays a vital role–terrorists turned freedom fighters–in the U.S.-backed Baghdad government. Dawa leader Ibrahim Jaafari is Iraq’s prime minister. But back in the 1980s, his fellow party members attacked anyone who supported Saddam Hussein, anywhere they could. They saw Saddam’s secular Baath Party as an alien force occupying sacred Shiite land. And on Dec.17, 1981, in the first massive suicide attack since World War II, a Dawa bomber blew up Iraq’s embassy in Beirut, killing 30 people. In 1983, at a time when Washington and Paris and Kuwait were big Saddam supporters, the Dawa blew up the American and French embassies in Kuwait City, killing six people and wounding 80. The Dawa’s close allies in Hizbullah soon started using suicide attacks against the Israelis, Americans and French in Lebanon. In October 1983 Hizbullah blew up the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen.

So how to fight the contagion in Robert Pape’s opinion at least?

To keep the contagion from spreading further, and eventually roll it back, requires some radical realism about the nature of the threat. Foreign combat troops alone can’t do the job, and often compound the problem. They are the living, breathing, shooting symbols of occupation. Over the long run, Diekstra argues, Muslim societies will have to change. Islam will have to reaffirm its traditional values to resist the romance of martyrdom that more and more young people find attractive. New role models for young Muslims will have to be found, publicized, and revered. But the first step in any such process, as Pape argues, is to end foreign occupations wherever possible…

7 thoughts on “Isolating a contagion”

  1. I’m not sure if the present terrorist “epidemic” is solely, or even predominantly, to do with suicide. I agree that it’s one motivating factor for wannabe jihadists — kill the “infidels/apostates” in the name of God and that’s a ticket straight to Paradise — but it’s the slaughter of the “enemy” in a “righteous cause” that’s the main driver for them. Suicide just seems to have become a common weapon of choice, because the bomber basically becomes an intelligent guided missile. I may well be wrong, but I’m not sure that reforming Islam in order to defuse/diminish the martyrdom-mindset is necessarily going to put a stop to jihadist tendencies; it’s the attitude towards people of other faiths which is the fundamental problem.

    The word “kaffir” is now commonly known here in the West, but I’m surprised there seems to be relatively little awareness of the term “Ghazi”.

    New role models for young Muslims will have to be found, publicized, and revered.

    This is 100% correct. Human beings, especially those of an idealistic nature and young people filled with change-the-world zeal, have a deep emotional need for heroes. The problem is that, in the absence of someone truly heroic in the real sense of the term, an individual with a sufficient level of charisma and “leadership presence” who says and does enough of the “right” things can step in and fill the vacuum. This has been the problem throughout history, whether we’re talking about “all-conquering heroes” who lead their troops in some kind of aggressive war of conquest in the name of “the glory of their nation/city-state/religion” — Alexander the Great, the Romans, Mahmud of Ghazni and the subsequent Turkic-Mughal rulers, Hitler, etc — or, of course, Osama bin Laden.

    What’s needed is a present or historical Muslim role model to act as a counterpoint to OBL, because he has hijacked the role of the “ideal Muslim” — with everything that involves. Someone regarded as equally, if not more, devout, but with a different perspective, is quite desperately needed in order for idealistic young Muslims to have an alternative hero-figure to look up to and emulate. There have been various Sufi saints in the past who were revered figures but were not fanatics like the Wahhabists — Baba Bulleh Shah is one example (he ended up joining Guru Gobind Singh’s army with several hundred of his relatives in order to fight against the escalating Mughal fanaticism).

    Where are the modern-day Sufi saints, to wrench control of Islamic leadership back from Osama bin Laden ?

  2. Where are the modern-day Sufi saints, to wrench control of Islamic leadership back from Osama bin Laden ?

    When even supposedly Westernized and “moderate” Muslim leaders like Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad makes public comments about “arrogant Jews controling the world” , I think we will be waiting for a really long time before any moderate Muslim saints come along. And more views like Mahathir’s and Adam Gadahn’s will be heard by the young Muslims and admired.

  3. I think we will be waiting for a really long time before any moderate Muslim saints come along.

    If you’re right then that bodes very badly indeed for both the global Islamic community and the outcome of any escalation of the supposed “clash of civilizations” with the West (and the rest of the world).

    I posted this link on another recent SM thread; there may possibly still be some hope, if what’s being said here is accurate:

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/battle_for_islam/4203918.stm

  7. I believe that the west is trying a little too hard to understand why suicide bombings occur. It is a classic tactic to try and characterise a particular psychology in order to classify a group of individuals in a way conducive to foreign policy objectives. Surprisingly, what the article does have right is that foreign occupations must stop.

    I would go further and say that all foreign interventions that are causing social instability caused by western interests should be stopped. But lets face it, that would be impossible. Just remember that there are 2 sides to every war.