Friday, July 22, 2005

Terrorism Turned Into Meme By "War On Terror"

From Disinfo.com newsletter

This morning's four blasts in London's Underground railway network show that the War on Terror has turned 'terrorism' into a meme. As the tactics of suicide bombers become more widely known, counterterrorism pundits are being replaced by the general public. Now armed with blogs and mobile phone cameras, the public has the potential to pool their disparate knowledge, to identify new targets, and to prevent bombing sites from becoming 'institutionalised disaster areas'. Two recent books augment this technological capability with indepth research on who becomes a suicide bomber, why, and what motivates them. Robert Pape's Dying To Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005) analyzes data on 315 suicide bombings that occurred between 1980 and 2003. Pape believes that the bombings are a secular strategy, that religion is used for ideological conversion, and that most bombers are protesting military threats to their homelands. Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg's The Road To Martyrs' Square: A Journey Into The World Of The Suicide Bomber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) complements Pape's statistical research with details from street media, videotapes, audio, and graffiti collected over a six year period in Gaza and the West Bank. Oliver and Steinberg belive that suicide bombing is more global than the 'Islamist' label suggests, and more complex that media soundbites. Armed with this knowledge, together with the 'smart mobs' technology to document it, hopefully brave Londoners can prevent future attacks from occurring.

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