Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Politically Incorrect: Most Suicide Bombers are Muslim

I'm interested in point number 4 of this article, Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature.


4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim
Suicide missions are not always religiously
motivated, but according to Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor
of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, when religion is involved, the attackers
are always Muslim. Why? The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide bombing has
nothing to do with Islam or the Quran (except for two lines). It has a lot to do
with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.
What distinguishes Islam from
other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to
monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive
opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of
men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at
all.
So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men
of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to
violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and
much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies,
polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even
after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic
inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in
the region.
However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide
bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more
polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they
do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long
history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.
The other key
ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in
Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to
anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually
guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the
bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.
It is the
combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven
that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with
this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are
significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other
(nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas
and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.

This is all very interesting. Especially the fact that for some reason it isn't politically correct to state the truth, which is MOST SUICIDE BOMBERS ARE MUSLIM. This is not racism. It's the truth. Politically incorrect as it may be.

This article isn't completely right though... We know now that there are more and more female suicide bombers, that suicide bombers are not especially poor, and we have also seen suicide bombers who were heads of families.

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