Does anyone know of a People, other than the Palestinians and Kamakazi’s, that have been suicidal killers?
Sure…Saudi Arabians. They were the majority of the attackers in the World Trade Center attacks.
This seems like a silly question that begs to find an excuse to slander a whole ‘People’.
Suicide bombings have little to do with a given race or religion and more to do with economic and political realities.
If we’re talking modern suicide bombers, off the top of my head I can think of at least one Sikh separtist group in India, the ( leftist and secular ) Kurdish PKK in Turkey, several Lebanese groups ( both religious and secular ), probably ( I’d have to double-check ) Algeria’s GIA, and the most prolific of them all, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka.
Older examples are a little more equivocal, like the medieval Nizaris ( the so-called “Assassins”.
Here’s a couple of short older threads related to the topic:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=179814
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=167785
- Tamerlane
Samson in the Bible.
Don’t forget the Kamakazis during WWII.
He didn’t, it was in the first post. 
This is what I get for not reading the OP throughly. :smack: :smack: :smack:
GIA is not known to use suicide bombings per se, at least not up to the point I was fully current on them, say late 1990s.
Further, Kamakazis are not a people, if one is using “a people” it would be the Japanese.
Absent a cite, I’m not sure. This isn’t a GD, and I don’t want to go that way, but factually, I think it’s fair to cite patterns of use, or non-use, of suicide tactics that do fall along “group” or, yes, “people” lines.
E.g., Germans and Japanese at the end of the war were in equally desperate military, political, economic straits. Both fought bitterly, but only one airforce deliberately used its planes as bombs.
E.g., various extremely poor, oppressed, all-odds-against-them, groups/nations/peoples have adopted armed or unarmed resistance. Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto did not choose (deliberately) self-destructive resistance tactics; Mohammad Atta (from a relatively wealthy Egyptian family, and not facing imminent death from his political opponents, unlike those Warsaw Jews), did.
Even among admittedly-violent extra-legal ‘terrorist’ groups, I think there are legitimate factual distinctions to be drawn between the pattern of Seamus O’Semtex trying to blow up a building (or kill a bunch of Brit soldiers) and escape, and the young inept Hamas guy who’s reasonably happy, and whose family cherishes his last videotape, even though he manages only to blow himself up and slightly injure one bystander.
To answer the OP directly, Chechens have also recently gotten into the act.
Thanks to those who sent replies.
Whack-a-Mole, I’m don’t know what you meant by, “This seems like a silly question that begs to find an excuse to slander a whole ‘People’.”
What excuse? to slander what People?
Palestinians are not suicidal killers. Some people who happen to be Palestinians do engage in suicide attacks but it is an unfair characterization to say Palestinians (suggesting all of them) are suicide bombers.
Actually, no. Towards the end at least one group of germans did try suicide attacks with their planes. They weren’t terribly successful (unlike the kamakaze’s) and as far as I’m aware never tried it again. From what I recall they carried out their suicide attacks against american bombers, unlike the kamakaze’s who attached ships.
Someone more familiar with world war ii can probably give a lot more details than I can.
Welcome to the boards alshml. As you can see we can get a bit anal in here about expressing exactly what one means. I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean to assert that all Palestinians are suicidal killers, or think that the Kamakazes were a race of people.
I don’t think so. Though I could be mistaken, I don’t remember having ever heard about a suicide bombing in Algeria.
Ok…As usual, I should read the whole thread before responding, since someone else already posted essentially the same thing. Sorry.
The Jews: Sicairis
Tamils: Tamil Tigers.
British: Light Brigade, Crimean War.
I suspect that all nations and peoples have knowingly odered their soldiers into suicidal assaults at some stage of their history. It’s something that occcasionally needs to be done in wartime.
I would like to ask the suplemental quiestion: has any US officer ever at any stage ordered any soldiers or orperatives to engage in a suicide mission? I imagine they have done, but I’d like to have a named example.
Blake, do you have a good cite that the Sicarii (Latin name, known in English as Sicairis and in Hebrew as Sikarikin, romanized spelling obviously variable) were suicide terrorists in the sense the OP was asking? While they were suicidal (they killed themselves at the top of the Masada so the Romans would not take them alive), and they were killers (assassins specifically) I don’t believe they ever combined the two as, e.g., the Palestinian groups and the LTTE have. The only cite I can find is this which only mentions it in passing:
It would be nice to have something more substantial.
Oh and a note on Collounsbury’s and clairobscur’s comments re the GIA. The GIA has staged two suicide operations, one successful, one unsuccessful:
On April 7, 1945, the Luftwaffe set out to ram U.S. bombers. Two bombers from the 490th Bomb Group were downed over the continent. One was apparently shot down, the other (commanded by Lt. Carrol Cagle) was rammed by a German plane and forced to make an emergency landing. As far as I know, the crew of Cagle’s plane survived. I’m not sure if the German pilot died, but I suspect so. There is a book about the incident, which I have not read yet: The Last Flight of the Luftwaffe by Adrian Weir