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Thought and Opinion|Reading Time: 2 minutes

Several Uncomfortable Realities

Something to ponder.

A sobering excerpt from Vaclav Smil‘s Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years:

The first is that even the most assiduous deployment of the best available preventive measures (smart policing, clever informants, globe-spanning, electronic intelligence, willingness to undertake necessary military action) will not be able to thwart all planned attacks.

The second reality is that the most dangerous form of terrorist attacks cannot be deterred because the political and ideological motivations for terrorist attacks that characterized Rapoport’s (2001) first three waves of terror have blended with religious zealotry and become one with the Muslim concept of martyrdom, providing the perpetrators with an irresistible reward: instant access to paradise. Murder by suicide has deep roots in Muslim history …

The third sobering consideration is that neither personal instability nor an individuals hopelessness or overt personal defects, factors that come immediately to mind as the most likely drivers, are dependable predictors of candidates for suicidal martyrdom. Nor are such indicators as poverty, level of eduction, or religious devotion. Institutional manipulation of emotional commitment seems to be a key factor, and one not easily eliminated. Other obvious contributions are rapidly rising youth populations in countries governed by dictatorial regimes with limited economic opportunities, and the disenchantment of second-generation Muslim immigrants with their host societies. But none of these factors can offer any selective guidance to identify the most susceptible individuals and to prevent their murderous suicides.

The forth consideration is that out understandable fixation on suicidal missions may be misplaced. A dirty bomb containing enough radioactive waste to contaminate several downtown blocks of a major city and cause mass panic (as anything invisible and nuclear is bound to do) can be positioned in a place calculated to have a maximum impact and then remotely detonated. And while Hizbullah’s more than 30 days of rocket attacks on Israel in the summer of 2006 were not particularly deadly, they paralyzed a large part of the country and demonstrated how more conventional weapons could be used in the service of terrorism.

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