Monday, September 26, 2005

Shadowland Flashback: The Suicide Solution

"Here and Now," produced by Boston's WBUR Radio and broadcast on more than 40 stations nationwide in the United States, called today to talk about this Shadowland column from earlier in the month:

The Suicide Solution
What if suicide bombing were a disease? Could we find a cure? Some researchers think so.

By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 6:50 p.m. ET Sept. 7, 2005
Sept. 6, 2005 - Mohammad Sidique Khan’s voice-from-the-grave video got me thinking the other day. Most Americans were focused on the disaster in New Orleans, that city betrayed by the cupidity of shortsighted politicians, flooded with pestilence, plagued by chaos. Al-Jazeera’s broadcast on Thursday of the Yorkshire-accented musings of this Muslim fanatic who blew himself up in the London Underground two months ago in the attack that killed 52 innocents, seemed weirdly irrelevant given the scope of the national tragedy that now faces the United States.
Yet the next such cataclysm could easily be the work of men like Khan, who are willing to kill themselves to slaughter the maximum number of their enemies—meaning all of us in the American and British democracies. “I and thousands like me are forsaking everything for what we believe,” said Khan.
“Thousands.” Suicide attacks of one sort or another have been with us for a long time. But never, apart from Japan’s kamikazes during World War II, in such industrial quantities. What changed? And how can we reverse the trend?...

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