Sacred Rage (Page 2)

Barbara Victor, who has covered the Middle East for CBS and US News & World Report, regards the rise of female suicide bombers, many of them quite young, as one of the most extraordinary aspects of modern terrorism. The conventional wisdom is that they are troubled women who see suicide bombing, the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for the glory of their religion and suffering nation, as the only way to "purify" their honor and that of their family--an issue of supreme importance, especially in traditional Muslim society. However, one of the very first suicide bombers operating against Israeli military forces exploded all the stereotypes connected to this dreadful phenomenon: Loula Abboud, a 19-year-old secular Christian Lebanese girl, commanded a small leftist resistance cell in southern Lebanon against the Israeli invaders. Loula was a beautiful, popular and well-educated middle-class girl, apparently without any social or emotional difficulties. When she blew herself up in front of a group of Israeli soldiers in 1985, she became a Palestinian and Lebanese heroine and a model for Palestinian, Tamil, Kurdish and Chechen suicide bombers of the future, including the first female operating inside Israel, Wafa Idris, who blew herself up in January 2002. In the Tamil and Kurdish movements, women are responsible for more than a third of suicide attacks.

Victor recounts the story of the Palestinian revolution and resistance since the first intifada, through the narratives of several Palestinian women who became, or attempted to become, suicide bombers. She interviewed family members of the bombers, women in Israeli prisons who were caught by the Israelis on the way to commit the action, Israeli and Palestinian politicians and Muslim religious leaders (including Hamas leaders Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, whom Israel recently attempted to assassinate) as well as various "experts" on terrorism. She began her book during an ecstatic mass meeting of Palestinian women with Yasir Arafat in January 2002. At that meeting, Arafat promised full equality between men and women in Palestine and called for women to take part in the armed struggle. Women are not just the "womb of the nation." He told them, "You are my army of roses that will crush Israeli tanks."

It's doubtful that this particular speech inspired the growing number of young Palestinian female suicide bombers, as Victor suggests, but it's a good literary introduction to a subject that has elicited both horror and fascination in the Western media. In fact, years before Arafat's speech, women were active in the Palestinian armed struggle. Is the active participation of women in all roles of this struggle a sign of the development of gender equality in a traditionalist society? Probably not: In most cases, the major role demanded of these women remains reproductive. Women are thus asked to give birth to as many children as possible in order to win the demographic race between Jews and Arabs within Palestine. Because of the highly vulnerable position of girls and young women in traditional society, carrying out "patriotic" acts may indeed, at times, be a way of running away from personal troubles. The Algerian revolution too provides a grim prognosis on the issue of women's liberation. There, women were full partners with men in the revolution. After independence was achieved, they were expected to return to their traditional roles in a deeply patriarchal society.

Unlike Victor and Davis, who focus exclusively on the Middle East, Jessica Stern takes her readers into the long cross-cultural and winding journey through the dark or glorious (depending on the point of view) business of terror. And a business it is, quite literally. As Stern shows, terror has evolved sometimes in recent years into a highly organized affair, with its own byzantine infrastructure. Exploring the organizational and structural aspects of terrorism, she makes some useful analogies to other types of organizations, notably the virtual communities on the Internet. As she points out, the ideology, the definition of the enemy, the recruitment and modes of operation are frequently disseminated over the Internet, as well as by satellite television and videotaped broadcasts. For example, Al Qaeda--literally "the base"--is said to have originated as a web list of jihadists scattered around the globe, bound largely by shared enthusiasm for holy warfare. Every terrorist can thus become a lone wolf or operate within a very small group in which one person is recruited by another. Other organizations are formed by small, unconnected cells, which makes surveillance and infiltration by intelligence agencies or other rivals or enemies very difficult. What is more, the capture of one cell does not endanger the whole organization. The most highly structured terrorist organizations function like states within states, as in Pakistan, whose intelligence service, the ISI, has offered crucial support for the Taliban and the Kashmiri jihadists. Groups like Hezbollah and Hamas have hierarchically organized leadership, operations and intelligence branches, training camps, independent school systems, industrial and commercial enterprises, charity and welfare systems (to reward supporters, including the families of the "martyrs"), and public relations bureaus. Several groups pay salaries to their operatives and officers or make welfare payments to bereaved families. Stern also believes in the existence of transnational terrorist networks that support each other through the acquisition of weapons and other materials, training and exchange of information. As such, organizations with completely different ideologies and aims form relationships of cooperation. IfIslamist terrorism has a "global reach," as the State Department insists, America's belligerent effort to "remake the Middle East" by force is an important reason why.

The social origins of terrorists cut across class divisions, contrary to the notion that terrorism springs mainly from material deprivation, a misperception that has lingered despite the fact that most of the September 11 perpetrators were of middle-class origin. While researching her book, Stern spoke with dozens of alleged terrorists across the world--some of them murderers, others leaders of violent organizations, still others "spiritual" leaders. A number were highly educated, articulate and sophisticated. Some were wealthy or from wealthy families, while others had become rich through organizing terrorist activities and fundraising for them. Others seem indeed clearly poor, materially and socially deprived or schizophrenic and sociopathic. However, most of them offered "rational" explanations for becoming killers, for seducing others to kill or to be killed and for becoming martyrs. Some true believers--Muslim, Christian and Jewish--even tried to convert Stern or at least to convince her of the absolute truth of their vision.

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