He was a clean-cut kid, and they made a killer out of him, that’s what they did

I forget who it was who first pointed out the obvious: Very often when some young Muslim turns into a suicide bomber, his friends and family express their shock that the “simple,” “peaceful,” “friendly,” “unassuming” fellow, blessed with a “good sense of humor,” and with “no visible ties to any radical movement,” could have done this. Here’s the latest such story, concerning 21-year-old Sami Antar, who blew himself up in Tel Aviv, fortunately killing no one but himself but injuring many people, one seriously. Now, if the people, all Muslims, who were closest to the suicide jihadist didn’t know that he was a suicide jihadist, how can we non-Muslims know who in the Muslim populace is a suicide jihadist? And therefore, how can we credit any statement from any of our experts and politicians about the “moderate” or non-dangerous nature of any Muslims?

The only way the non-Muslim world can be safe from Muslim terrorism is to exclude Muslims from within its borders. There is no other way.

A different angle on this comes from Ken Hechtman, a leftist journalist and political activist in Quebec, who writes to an e-mail group in which we both participate:

The terrorist organizations put a lot of time and effort into recruiting the “right” people as suicide bombers and they do it with the goal of producing exactly this reaction. They want “role models,” not losers and no-hopers, the terminally angry or terminally depressed. Anyone genuinely suicidal is screened out right away as a security risk.

The personality and background of the bomber sends a message to their own community: “The best among us, the ones with everything going for them are ready to give their lives for the cause—why not you?”

FrontPage has probably written about the “shaheed posters” visible in every Palestinian city honoring that neighborhood’s recent suicide bombers and drawn some inference about how sick and twisted Palestinian/Arab/Muslim values must be to do such a thing. What they’re not mentioning is how well-liked and well-respected the bombers were when they were alive.

One of the reporters I met in Pakistan had spent July and August of 2001 living in a Hamas “school for suicide bombers” and told me a bit about how it works. People don’t volunteer for Hamas. They are recruited. Hamas is very suspicious of volunteers. Anyone who approaches them will be given a job sweeping out the mosque. If they’re still there in two years they might be trusted with a mission. Hamas will put just as much thought into planning the recruiter’s approach to the prospect than into the suicide bomber’s approach to the target.

She was the one who predicted, six months before it happened, that the Central Asian jihadis were going to start using suicide bombing as a tactic. Before 2002 it wasn’t something they did. But she’s very much an exception that does not invalidate the general rule. Even if you had her encyclopedic knowledge of the terrorists’ organizational culture and you knew what to look for, you wouldn’t have been able to see, say, the London bombings coming unless you also had her kind of insider access.

If you saw “Syriana,” the one accurate part was the scenes between the teenage Pakistani recruits and the 20-something blue-eyed Arab. The hero-worship on one side, the stroking and flattery and manipulation on the other. I saw a bit of that watching how the teenage Lashkar-i-Taiba recruits and the mid-20s combat vets acted around each other. I couldn’t follow the conversation but I could read a lot just out of the body language.

My reply:

Very interesting, that it’s not just a matter of “clean-cut kids” being potential terrorists and actually becoming terrorists, to everyone’s supposed shock, but of the terrorist organizations actually seeking out and recruiting such clean-cut kids to be terrorists (which is implied in the Bob Dylan line that I used as the title of the blog entry, but I myself didn’t understand that it was literally true). This is the kind of insight that makes Ken Hechtman so valuable.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 20, 2006 06:30 PM | Send