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# Suicide Bombers
- URL: https://thedailyeudemon.com/2090/
- Published: 2005-08-20T14:30:38.000Z
- Updated: 2005-08-20T14:30:38.000Z
- Author: Eric Scheske
- Tags: Current Affairs, Religion, #wpChunk

The always-insightful Theodore Dalrymple talks about the makings of an Islamic suicide bomber:

> Clearly, although the fundamental socio-psychological conditions I have described apply to millions - hundreds of millions - of people, only a vanishingly small proportion of them actually want to be suicide bombers, even if rather more admire and approve of suicide bombers.

> So what pushes someone over the edge, as it were? In my experience, which admittedly is limited, and of a selected sample, I would say the following:

> The suicide bomber is of above average intelligence. He, or she, is therefore searching for an explanation of his or her existential plight. (You need a certain level of intellection for this to be so.) This involves the identification of an enemy.

> The person who becomes a bomber often has a special, personal sense of grievance. This can derive from an intrinsic sensitivity to perceived insult, consequent upon the normal variation of human personality, or can come from outside, eg a person is humiliatingly accused of something of which he is guilty, but regards the accusation itself as *lese majeste*. For example, a Muslim rapist I know wanted to become a suicide bomber, having become convinced that the West was rotten to the core, deficient in moral worth, because it took the word of a mere woman against his.

> So to refine it further, we need all the general cultural and economic conditions, plus the personal particularities I have suggested.

> The act of killing oneself for a cause, in the process taking a few 'enemies' with one, is an apologia *pro vita sua*. Let us not forget that we in the West have a long and inglorious, irrational tradition of supposing that the lengths to which people are prepared to go in the furtherance of a cause is itself evidence of the moral worth of that cause.

> The kind of would-be suicide bomber I have known thinks to himself:

> *They have accused me of what I have done.*

> What I have done is no crime.

> Therefore those who accuse me are the corrupt of the earth.

> Those who accuse me are truly representative of the society from which they come.

> The destruction of the corrupt of the earth will be rewarded appropriately. Therefore it matters not which individuals I destroy.

> The belief is therefore not in representative government, but in representative guilt.

[Link](http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19110&ref=thedailyeudemon.com).

Dalrymple, by the way, published a new book this year, [On Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1566636434/thedailyeudem-20?ref=thedailyeudemon.com). Highly recommended, and we haven't even read it yet (such is our faith in the prose and ideas of TD).