I’ve been thinking a bit lately about suicide bombings, especially when the death toll over this past month has been more than the death toll in pretty much any other month ever.
I don’t understand how the people living in places with suicide bombers tolerate it. I mean, it’s just such a, well…foreign concept to me. your neighbor straps a bomb to him or herself and blows up the playground down the block and…then what? Nothing? What’s the reaction from the population?
The only thing I can do is figure out what the hell would happen if this took place with any regularity here in America. I’ll tell you what would happen. Looting, chaos and anarchy in the short term with protests and demands that this shit stop and stop now.
I mean, yes, it’s really really difficult to stop any terrorist attack if the attacker is willing to die for the cause. Who do you go after? What do you do to prevent it?
But it just seems like bombs are going off weekly or daily and people get killed and then life goes back to normal until the next bomb goes off.
Is it that everyone’s living with PTSD? I mean, I’m serious here. I don’t even know how to express my level of confusion over this situation because this whole concept is so completely alien to me. What’s being done by either the governments or the people themselves to change this?
This doesn’t really answer the question, but there was an outstanding series of articles in the New York Times recently by a journalist who was captured by the Taliban. There is one paragraph that I found insightful:
That’s not what happened after the Oklahoma City bombing, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, or 9/11. What did in fact happen is that things went back to pretty much normal after a while, with some added security involved in some aspects of life. And that’s pretty much what the Israelis, Brits, and Spanish did after terrorist attacks in their countries, too, at least from what I’ve heard. Some people were afraid to fly for a while after 9/11, but they mostly got over it. Some people were probably afraid to take the Tube in London for a while after that attack, but they got over it. Why should a suicide bomber be so different than those other terrorist attacks?
The people doing suicide bombings operate in secret. The suicide bomber of course will never face censure from the locals or anyone else obviously (heck, many hail them as heores…IIRC there are suicide bomber trading cards, akin to baseball trading cards, that are popular among kids in some places).
The bad guys do not care much who gets caught in the crossfire in this case. I am also pretty sure the suicide bombers and their camps are in rural areas where the populace is sympathetic to them. The bombers go to the city to blow people up and not their “neighbors”.
If the locals are not sympathetic it is possible they are outright cowed by the terrorists and fighting back just really is not an option so they keep their mouths shut.
Do you think it would make sense in areas ravaged by suicide bombings for those who would like to see them stop to hold public protests against them? Why assume that these people “tolerate” anything simply because their dissent isn’t something you (presumably not living in such a place) can readily measure?
I don’t even understand the question. Tolerate it? There is not a Suicide Bombers R Us store down the block that authorities can shut down.
Looting chaos and anarchy would NOT happen if suicide bombings were happening routinely in the US, IMO. Out on the streets is where the bombs are. People would stay locked up in their homes and the economy might collapse.
If people did riot and loot after a suicide bombing, what would that accomplish? It would make it harder for the authorities to catch other would-be suicide bombers, because they’d have to spend time and resources quelling the riot. The stores that would be looted- what do you expect them to do? The riots aren’t likely to deter other suicide bombers. Large crowds of people are just what you’d want, if you were a prospective suicide bomber wanting to cause as much death and destruction as possible.
I don’t think you guys understanding what the OP is asking. Look at the world-wide protests after the Danish newspaper cartoons. But meanwhile, there are thousands of Muslims being killed by fellow Muslims in suicide bombings. Where are the marches in Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim countries protesting that?
There was outrage after the OK bombings, and very, very few people in the US spoke out in support of them. Those that did were marginalized.
I think it has to do with honor-based societies where death is more desirable than loss of face. When you don’t have much beyond your own honor, then you fight tooth and nail to protect it.
I think that is why we are failing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The more battles we “win” the more humiliation the residents feel. In Germany, at some point the population said fuck this, lets surrender before our entire country is destroyed. The Afghans can’t surrender, because then they will have lost the only thing they have - their dignity. They may as well be dead.
What you have to realize about suicide bombers is that the actual man or woman with the bomb strapped to their chest is basically a munition… a delivery system. He or she don’t initiate the attack, or prepare the bomb, or select the target. And while the bomber may or may not be motivated by despair, the “launcher” is motivated by hope - hope his strategy will succeed.
So how do you fight suicide bombers? You hunt down the leaders, and convince the survivors that they can’t win. It isn’t easy.
Well that’s three bombings over a 16 year period with a land mass three times that of the Middle East. Which isn’t to say nothing happened despite this. But we demanded answers and we demanded retribution. In OK City, we got it. We’re a trillion dollars in debt over a war catalyzed by the last terrorist attack.
But what happens when you condense 16 years into one month and a full country into one city? What happens when that occurs again and again and again? The situations aren’t that analogous. I can’t imagine the population of the US tolerating suicide bombers to the extent that it appears the people of the Middle East do.
And yes, I realize it’s pretty friggin difficult to find the suicide bombers because they don’t just hang a shingle outside their house and say they’re now in the business of blowing shit up. And yes, I realize I’m not getting the full story as to what the reaction is from the people over there. So that’s why I came here. Enlighten me. What the hell is the reaction from the average citizen who could die from a bus explosion tomorrow and probably knows a friend or family member who has already suffered a similar fate?
But in the newspaper case, there’s someone to picket- the newspaper. Suicide bombers don’t tell the public where they meet or who works for them the way newspapers do.
The people doing the suicide bombing are generally living under incredibly traumatic/inhuman conditions to start with. That’s why they’re doing the suicide bombing. It’s a symptom, not a cause of inhumanity.
Yeah, I think people are misinterpretting my OP a bit. So here’s some clarification.
I’m not asking about the suicide bombers. I’m not asking about the rationality of the people who strap bombs to their chest and go out into public streets to blow themselves up.
What I’m asking about is the mentality of the population who are on the receiving end of of the terrorist attacks day after day after day and (to my mind) seem to ignore the issue altogether rather than confronting it.
It’s strange, but i can better understand the mentality of the former than I can the latter. Hence, my OP.
What makes you think they ignore the issue? Why do you think Iraq degenerated into ethically cleansed walled ghetto’s controlled/protected by militias?
So - short answer. Your question is a strawman built of your own lack of knowledge.
Which group of people are ignoring suicide bombers?
I think you are confusing cause and effect.
Well you could protest the Taliban, the madrases that teach this crap, the Middle East govts that give money to the families of suicide bombers, Osama bin Laden, Iran for providing support to terrorists, and the Imams that supply Koranical justification. Then the families of suicide bombers could be shunned rather than celebrated, thereby removing an incentive.
Not at all. suicide bombings happened, People responded by driving out the ‘aliens’, building walls to keep them out and turning to unofficial security when the govt could not protect them.
That is hardly either ‘ignoring’ the problem or some arcane current affairs fact the OP has any justification being unaware of.
The whole OP is a strawman.
‘This crap’ happens to be a version of Islam that has wide support. In Pakistan it’s one ethnic group blowing up another. You all seem to think it’s somehow akin to white american suburbanites blowing each other up.
It’s not. It’s enemies blowing up other enemies and no different in principle to any other method of bombing of enemy civilians.
You might as well ask why the Londoners weren’t out protesting the Blitz.
What gives you the impression that people tolerate it? Say you are an illiterate peasant living in the ghetto of some thirdworld shithole and there are some violent gangsters willing to kill anyone who gets in their way and they don’t care if they go out while doing it as long as they take enough infidels with them as possible. Are you going to stop them?